ITS OK TO DRIVE TO KILL DEMOCRATS
Republicans in 15 states look to 'Hit and Kill' laws to defend those who drive into protestsShari Kulha
Over the past few years, with the Trump presidency and the increase in disruptive protests, a small movement that began in 2017 has been gaining strength in Republican states. They either have passed or are looking to pass laws that give drivers who hit someone in a crowd a certain amount of immunity, on the premise that a driver is but one person in a sea of people whose emotions may be heightened enough to make them unpredictable — putting the driver, not the crowd, at risk.
© Provided by National Post A man tries to drive through the crowd during a June protest in Seattle against racial inequality after the death of George Floyd.
After a summer of nationwide racial injustice protests, Republicans in 11 states moved to introduce a flurry of “hit and kill” bills in hopes of cracking down on protesters in the leadup to and in the immediate aftermath of the contentious 2020 presidential election.
Iowa, Oklahoma and Florida so far have passed laws this year that say if a driver unintentionally hits protesters with their vehicle, they may not be prosecuted, the Boston Globe outlines in a special report on the issue.
Most of those proposals followed the many demonstrations following George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis last year. But it was a personal incident that prompted the governor of Iowa — the next state south — to act.
Kim Reynolds had just passed the More Perfect Union Act, aimed at protecting citizens from most chokeholds and from police misconduct.
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But then, about three weeks after the Floyd death, and leaving an engagement north of Des Moines, Reynolds was being driven out through a crowd of Des Moines Black Liberation Movement protesters, who had followed her there. They had waited on the main road on to which her SUV would emerge. One protester stood right in her lane.
“I’m going to stand here and the car’s going to stop and we’re all going to yell and make Kim Reynolds hear us and maybe she’ll roll down her window,” Jaylen Cavil, then 23, told the Boston Globe that he had thought at the time.
Reynolds’ driver inched along, and struck Cavil as he apparently walked in front of the SUV. Cavil turned at the last second and the vehicle just bumped his hip, stopping only when state police stepped in. Cavil was uninjured but his sense of right and wrong was damaged.
“He could have stopped. He could have turned,” Cavil said of the driver. “He just kept going straight.”
After a summer of nationwide racial injustice protests, Republicans in 11 states moved to introduce a flurry of “hit and kill” bills in hopes of cracking down on protesters in the leadup to and in the immediate aftermath of the contentious 2020 presidential election.
Iowa, Oklahoma and Florida so far have passed laws this year that say if a driver unintentionally hits protesters with their vehicle, they may not be prosecuted, the Boston Globe outlines in a special report on the issue.
Most of those proposals followed the many demonstrations following George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis last year. But it was a personal incident that prompted the governor of Iowa — the next state south — to act.
Kim Reynolds had just passed the More Perfect Union Act, aimed at protecting citizens from most chokeholds and from police misconduct.
Former police officer Derek Chauvin sentenced to 22-1/2 years for George Floyd murder
St. Louis couple who aimed guns at anti-racism protesters pardoned by Missouri governor
But then, about three weeks after the Floyd death, and leaving an engagement north of Des Moines, Reynolds was being driven out through a crowd of Des Moines Black Liberation Movement protesters, who had followed her there. They had waited on the main road on to which her SUV would emerge. One protester stood right in her lane.
“I’m going to stand here and the car’s going to stop and we’re all going to yell and make Kim Reynolds hear us and maybe she’ll roll down her window,” Jaylen Cavil, then 23, told the Boston Globe that he had thought at the time.
Reynolds’ driver inched along, and struck Cavil as he apparently walked in front of the SUV. Cavil turned at the last second and the vehicle just bumped his hip, stopping only when state police stepped in. Cavil was uninjured but his sense of right and wrong was damaged.
“He could have stopped. He could have turned,” Cavil said of the driver. “He just kept going straight.”
© MANDEL NGAN / AFP via Getty Images Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds: As long as they were not acting with reckless or wilful misconduct, drivers were granted immunity from lawsuits. SHE IS GIVING THE ALT RIGHT WHITE POWER HAND SIGN AKA THE CHEF BOYARDEE
This was the fifth such protest incident in Iowa since the George Floyd killing. It prompted a twist in Governor Reynolds’s stance. The Republican-controlled state legislature wrote up, in 24 hours, and unanimously pushed out, a new police-supportive bill called the Back the Blue Act.
Reynolds told a crowd assembled for the official announcement of the new legislation that for “the thousands of Iowans who have taken to the streets calling for reforms to address inequities faced by people of colour in our state, I want you to know this is not the end of our work. It is just the beginning.” Few of the protesters in the crowd would have guessed that that “work” would in fact work against them.
As long as they exercised “due care” and were not acting with “reckless or wilful misconduct,” drivers were now granted immunity from lawsuits in Iowa if they injured anyone with their vehicle “who is participating in a protest, demonstration, riot, or unlawful assembly or who is engaging in disorderly conduct and is blocking traffic in a public street or highway,” the newspaper reported. That is, if the protest did not have a permit. If it did have a permit, they were not considered rioters. But few such impassioned protests come together far enough in advance to allow organizers time to go through government bureaucracy for approval — and, in any event, are generally intended to be disruptive. Participating now puts these people at risk of being bowled over if a driver knows he or she has immunity.
This was the fifth such protest incident in Iowa since the George Floyd killing. It prompted a twist in Governor Reynolds’s stance. The Republican-controlled state legislature wrote up, in 24 hours, and unanimously pushed out, a new police-supportive bill called the Back the Blue Act.
Reynolds told a crowd assembled for the official announcement of the new legislation that for “the thousands of Iowans who have taken to the streets calling for reforms to address inequities faced by people of colour in our state, I want you to know this is not the end of our work. It is just the beginning.” Few of the protesters in the crowd would have guessed that that “work” would in fact work against them.
As long as they exercised “due care” and were not acting with “reckless or wilful misconduct,” drivers were now granted immunity from lawsuits in Iowa if they injured anyone with their vehicle “who is participating in a protest, demonstration, riot, or unlawful assembly or who is engaging in disorderly conduct and is blocking traffic in a public street or highway,” the newspaper reported. That is, if the protest did not have a permit. If it did have a permit, they were not considered rioters. But few such impassioned protests come together far enough in advance to allow organizers time to go through government bureaucracy for approval — and, in any event, are generally intended to be disruptive. Participating now puts these people at risk of being bowled over if a driver knows he or she has immunity.
© Getty Images file Protesters march in New York City last year after the fatal shooting of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Ky. If New York state had a so-called “hit and kill” law, a nervous driver could head straight into this crowd while trying to leave the area, injure people, and not be charged.
The increasingly unstable mix of protesters and vehicles has provoked more legislative reaction that some say is indicative of disdain for liberal protesters and their perspectives — Black Lives Matter or otherwise.
A Boston Globe analysis found 139 U.S. instances of what researchers call vehicle rammings between Floyd’s death on May 25, 2020 and Sept. 30, 2021 that caused 100 injuries and killed at least three. Drivers had a range of motivations — racial hatred of protesters, anger about traffic backups, or fears of being stuck in a crowd. The paper found that less than half the driver incidents resulted in charges, and many of those were simply misdemeanours or traffic citations.
“There’s this kind of vigilantism that’s returning,” Nick Robinson, a senior legal adviser at the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, told the newspaper. The centre has tracked a sharp increase in legislative proposals in the U.S. to restrict the right to peacefully protest. “If we deem these protesters to be rioters,” Robinson is quoted as saying, “we’re going to take the law into our own hands. And if that means injuring them with our vehicle or killing them with our vehicle, we have an expectation that the state will protect us. That’s just a recipe for disaster.”
Though Republicans have also brought driver immunity bills in Tennessee, Florida, North Carolina, Texas and Rhode Island, observers believe it hasn’t been a result of nationwide co-ordination; the language in the bills has varied and many, as in Iowa, were triggered by local events. And it isn’t to say Democratic states always approve of the demonstrators but have as yet not passed such bills.
Tennessee state Representative Matthew Hill, one of the bill’s sponsors, seemingly underplaying the reasons behind such incidents, said “We don’t want anyone to be hurt, but people should not knowingly put themselves in harm’s way when you’ve got moms and dads trying to get their kids to school.”
Some judges have been blocking these laws. A federal judge in September stopped Florida from using the driver immunity provision, saying Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’s “anti-riot” law — the Combating Violence, Disorder, and Looting and Law Enforcement Protection Act — as a way to stop violent protests was unconstitutional. He found the law “vague and overbroad” and amounted to an assault on First Amendment rights as well as the Constitution’s due process protections.
DeSantis vowed to fight. “I guarantee you we’ll win that one on appeal,” he said.
Such earnestness over the issue scares activist Francesca Menes, chair of the Black Collective, a Miami group working to increase political consciousness and economic power of Black communities.
“It’s going to encourage people to want to hit people” with their vehicles, Menes told the Boston Globe. “People are going to be in their big trucks with their big Confederate flags to make it very visible to us … that they are willing to run us over and we cannot sue them for damages.”
In Oklahoma as well, Republican lawmakers pushed through a bill despite contrary voices. And back in Iowa, Republican state Senator Julian Garrett of Indianola, a suburb of Des Moines, liked his state’s mandate.
“We’ve got to stop this law-violating,” the Boston Globe quoted Garrett as telling his colleagues as they debated the Back the Blue Act in May. “We’ve got to stop this criminal activity if we possibly can.”
Garrett said he didn’t think a driver should be liable if they “accidentally run into somebody … who was out violating the law.”
But that young man who was knicked by Governor Reynolds’s car says the new law lends courage to already-stressed and frustrated citizens.
He saw repeated posts on social media of “the same Grand Theft Auto gif of someone getting flattened by a car, with the words, ‘I can’t wait for your next protest,’” the Boston newspaper quoted Jaylen Cavil. “I think it emboldens people.”
The increasingly unstable mix of protesters and vehicles has provoked more legislative reaction that some say is indicative of disdain for liberal protesters and their perspectives — Black Lives Matter or otherwise.
A Boston Globe analysis found 139 U.S. instances of what researchers call vehicle rammings between Floyd’s death on May 25, 2020 and Sept. 30, 2021 that caused 100 injuries and killed at least three. Drivers had a range of motivations — racial hatred of protesters, anger about traffic backups, or fears of being stuck in a crowd. The paper found that less than half the driver incidents resulted in charges, and many of those were simply misdemeanours or traffic citations.
“There’s this kind of vigilantism that’s returning,” Nick Robinson, a senior legal adviser at the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, told the newspaper. The centre has tracked a sharp increase in legislative proposals in the U.S. to restrict the right to peacefully protest. “If we deem these protesters to be rioters,” Robinson is quoted as saying, “we’re going to take the law into our own hands. And if that means injuring them with our vehicle or killing them with our vehicle, we have an expectation that the state will protect us. That’s just a recipe for disaster.”
Though Republicans have also brought driver immunity bills in Tennessee, Florida, North Carolina, Texas and Rhode Island, observers believe it hasn’t been a result of nationwide co-ordination; the language in the bills has varied and many, as in Iowa, were triggered by local events. And it isn’t to say Democratic states always approve of the demonstrators but have as yet not passed such bills.
Tennessee state Representative Matthew Hill, one of the bill’s sponsors, seemingly underplaying the reasons behind such incidents, said “We don’t want anyone to be hurt, but people should not knowingly put themselves in harm’s way when you’ve got moms and dads trying to get their kids to school.”
Some judges have been blocking these laws. A federal judge in September stopped Florida from using the driver immunity provision, saying Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’s “anti-riot” law — the Combating Violence, Disorder, and Looting and Law Enforcement Protection Act — as a way to stop violent protests was unconstitutional. He found the law “vague and overbroad” and amounted to an assault on First Amendment rights as well as the Constitution’s due process protections.
DeSantis vowed to fight. “I guarantee you we’ll win that one on appeal,” he said.
Such earnestness over the issue scares activist Francesca Menes, chair of the Black Collective, a Miami group working to increase political consciousness and economic power of Black communities.
“It’s going to encourage people to want to hit people” with their vehicles, Menes told the Boston Globe. “People are going to be in their big trucks with their big Confederate flags to make it very visible to us … that they are willing to run us over and we cannot sue them for damages.”
In Oklahoma as well, Republican lawmakers pushed through a bill despite contrary voices. And back in Iowa, Republican state Senator Julian Garrett of Indianola, a suburb of Des Moines, liked his state’s mandate.
“We’ve got to stop this law-violating,” the Boston Globe quoted Garrett as telling his colleagues as they debated the Back the Blue Act in May. “We’ve got to stop this criminal activity if we possibly can.”
Garrett said he didn’t think a driver should be liable if they “accidentally run into somebody … who was out violating the law.”
But that young man who was knicked by Governor Reynolds’s car says the new law lends courage to already-stressed and frustrated citizens.
He saw repeated posts on social media of “the same Grand Theft Auto gif of someone getting flattened by a car, with the words, ‘I can’t wait for your next protest,’” the Boston newspaper quoted Jaylen Cavil. “I think it emboldens people.”
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