This is my question. If a driver hits a jaywalker doesn't stop because they are fearful that they might be harmed by bystanders then what does this law do?
Here is the language. Fl has something similar recently . “A motor vehicle operator who unintentionally causes injury or death to an individual shall not be criminally or civilly liable for the injury or death, if: 1. The injury or death of the individual occurred while the motor vehicle operator was fleeing from a riot, as defined in a reasonable belief that fleeing was necessary to protect the motor vehicle operator from serious injury or death; and 2. The motor vehicle operator exercised due care at the time of the death or injury.
Much of this language is probably from Rightwing groups that have been complaining about BLM protests blocking traffic for years now.
Yes, just like it is entirely possible and frankly smart for drivers to take a route that does not get them stuck in protest traffic in that scary scary danger. That in fact is what people do, and it addresses 99.9 percent of the theoretical concerns caused by people protesting in the street. This legislation addresses a fictional concern, just like Jim Crow 2. don’t kid yourself. This is entirely about giving cover to the maniac who drives into crowds of black protesters.
You have to know in advance where the protest is in order to route around it. People should also not need to change their route for the convenience of those who are illegally blocking traffic. Your solution favors those that are breaking the law to the detriment of law abiding citizens. The bill provides no cover to people who intentionally drive into crowds of protesters and there is no racial element to it. I think it is about preventing things like this: Portland man beaten during downtown protest: What a new 32-minute video reveals - oregonlive.com
there is no racial element to it. That’s hilarious. Just like there is no racial animus in the voter suppression laws, right? Going around a protest. How hard is that? I have spent time in OKC, Tulsa, and also in Duncan and other small towns. There is zero difficulty in going around some protest. We’re not talking about Houston, not even austin. Again, purely fictional problem. no cover? Hmm let’s see. White person in OK kills protesters and claims, I was afraid of the angry black people. Oklahoma jury of 12 going to convict that person? Yeah, no.
These new Republicans are so clueless it's sad. The party seems to elect anybody now, regardless of qualifications or desire to do anything truly beneficial to the people of the states they represent. Their new standards seem to be to make a lot of noise, get a social media following, spurt out nonsense and lies to defend voting against everything that doesn't make them personally richer, stir up racial unrest, point fingers of blame on people of color suffering in poverty or police brutality as all being drug dealers and gang bangers, looters, and people too lazy to work. The Republicans care more about toting and packing guns than affordable healthcare. That's sad. They act like God Loving Christians but call helping the poor socialism as an excuse not to spend a dime on anything that doesn't make them wealthier. They spew out Bible verses but defend white supremacy in their own subtle and not so subtle ways, like hanging out with and inciting radical militia hate groups. Republicans call people who speak out about unequal treatment, or protest for change for anyone different as crazy radical leftists. What's crazy is that anyone with an ounce of compassion for other human beings would support a party like this.
The Right to Crash Cars Into People How Republicans across the country came to endorse a terrorist tactic against protesters By Alex Perene, The New Republic Earlier this week, Florida Republicans enacted a law they claimed would prevent riots in the state. Its real purpose, of course, was to discourage protesting and punish demonstrators. One of the bill’s provisions has received a fair amount of national attention, as it seems to give Floridians permission to attack protesters with their cars. The bill doesn’t exactly make it legal to run someone over, but it does shield drivers from civil liability if they injure or kill protesters on Florida roads. In isolation, it’s hard to understand the purpose of such a curious provision. What problem does it solve? As the Florida American Civil Liberties Union pointed out, very few recent protests in the state involved violence or even vandalism, and police and prosecutors were already well equipped (some would say, more than well equipped) to handle whatever rioting might occur. If demonstrators blocking roads and snarling up traffic were a serious problem in Florida in need of a legislative remedy, surely thoughtful legislators could come up with a more effective or ethical response than making it less personally risky for people to injure or kill those demonstrators with cars. But efficacy and ethics don’t really seem to be guiding the decisions of Republican-run state legislatures lately. To understand what’s really behind the bill, recall that it comes less than four years after a 20-year-old neo-Nazi named James Alex Fields Jr. deliberately drove a Dodge Challenger into a crowd of people counterprotesting the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Fields injured scores of people and killed a woman named Heather Heyer. The obvious and immediate response to this intentional attack was nearly universal shock and horror. Fields was charged with murder and convicted. But since just before that attack, and even more so after it, Republican elected officials across the country have been trying to make it easier for certain people to run over certain other people. Ari Weil, a researcher at the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, counted six states that considered laws shielding drivers who attack protesters in 2017, but most of those “hit and kill” bills (as the ACLU refers to them) went nowhere. It took a few more years for the right-wing propaganda apparatus to fully numb conservative consciences, and prepare them to openly endorse an idea as plainly depraved as this one. In the meantime, the car attacks kept coming: In 2020, Weil tracked “72 incidents of cars driving into protesters across 52 different cities,” over the span of just over a month. The online far right memed about running over demonstrators regularly, and cops openly encouraged it in social media comments. Cops also, in cities such as New York and Detroit, participated in the practice themselves. In Boston last year, Police Sergeant Clifton McHale was recorded on a police body camera bragging about hitting demonstrators with a police cruiser. He was placed on administrative leave when that footage was surfaced by reporter Eoin Higgins. He is now, Higgins reports, back on desk duty.* Now lawmakers seem to have overcome whatever reticence they may once have felt about formally endorsing automobile attacks. Five states besides Florida introduced similar bills this year, granting some form of immunity to people running into demonstrators. The Iowa measure passed the state House and awaits Senate approval. Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt just signed another version into law in his state. This one shields attacking drivers from criminal liability. The impetus for the Oklahoma bill, according to the Republican lawmaker who authored it, was an incident in which a pickup truck driver drove into a Black Lives Matter demonstration in Tulsa, paralyzing one person. The driver claimed to be scared and, notably, was not charged with a crime. That is to say that it was apparently already legal to drive into protesters in Oklahoma; these politicians merely helped clarify that fact. A few years ago, most people would have seen “politically motivated vehicle attacks” as a terrorist tactic pioneered by ISIS. Now American police regularly carry out these kinds of attacks, and Republican policymakers have officially endorsed the practice. There’s something very telling about how the car (or police cruiser, or truck, or SUV) has been enshrined into law as an instrument of state-sanctioned violence. American conservatives are creating, really, a sort of Second Amendment for cars. Not the Second Amendment in terms of the literal text in the Constitution, but the Second Amendment as existing doctrine. The legal framework conservative politicians and jurists spent years crafting and refining to facilitate politicized and racialized gun violence in this country is now expanding to another of America’s omnipresent and deadly institutions. Just as the heavily armed patriot is encouraged to consider himself deputized to carry out violence on behalf of the police (the only legitimate arm of the state in his eyes anyway), now certain drivers are permitted to harm certain people in defense of the social order. These drivers might have to claim afterward that they were ramming their multi-ton vehicles into pedestrians because they feared for their own safety, but it increasingly seems like they will be able to get away with simply saying, “They were in the way.” It is a natural progression. The state has always used the automobile as a vital tool to manage and punish poor and Black Americans, whether that meant demolishing Black neighborhoods for highway projects or using traffic stop revenue to fund municipal governments. As Sarah A. Seo argues, the automobile is practically responsible for modern policing itself, as the need to regulate the use of cars without punishing certain “law-abiding” citizens “led directly to the problem of discriminatory policing against minorities.” A large majority of American interactions with police come in the form of traffic stops and crashes. The car was already a “symbol of freedom” only for certain Americans, and a means of oppressing and policing others. It is now just openly also a literal weapon used by the state to prevent people from protest and dissent. It’s as if the right absorbed a left-wing critique of American automobile culture and decided the problem with the whole idea was that the violence wasn’t literal enough. Even if this progression follows a certain twisted logic, it was far from inevitable. Americans should be horrified at the speed with which this practice spread and then was normalized. While these laws may claim to protect only those responsible for “unintentional” crashes, they are effectively legalizing the attempted murder of people demonstrating for racial justice. As an Oregon cop put it in 2016, under a photo of Black Lives Matter demonstrators: “When encountering such mobs remember, there are 3 pedals on your floor. Push the right one all the way down.” In a few states, with maybe more to come, that’s simply policy now. * A previous version of this article misstated that Clifton McHale was suspended without pay for bragging about hitting demonstrators with a police cruiser. He was put on administrative leave. https://newrepublic.com/article/162163/republicans-anti-riot-laws-cars
This incident happened in Minneapolis this past summer. What I'm trying to understand is given that this driver was actually pulled out of the truck and attacked by protesters, he also was protected by other protesters, would this law just have said that they driver could've just kept on driving through the crowd? The driver initially wasn't charged as it was first felt that he had inadvertently driven onto the freeway even though the freeway was closed. It was later determined that he had intended to scare protesters. How would this law handle that? An FYI MN doesn't have a law like FL or OK's but similar bills have been proposed in the State Legislature.
Just goes to show how dangerous the GOP really is. They have mastered the art of brainwashing, and just like with a deadly pandemic, don't care who dies or suffers from their lies and propaganda. As long as it gets them millions of dollars in fundraising, and votes to keep them in power, they get a good night sleep.
My understanding of the law, and I have only seen the coverage not the text itself, is that he would be required to stop, but when people started trying to pull him out of the truck, he would be allowed to drive on. Does it limit the protection to white drivers? Black protests? Is any law that has a racially disproportionate effect a racist law? Sometimes protesters surround cars and prevent them from moving. That can make it quite difficult to go around the protest. How hard would it be to allow the cars to go on their merry way? I don't think you have seen the videos of protesters intentionally surrounding peoples' cars and sometimes doing worse. That would be an issue with the jury, not the law. When a man kills his wife and her boyfriend and the jury acquits him, is that a problem with the law against murder?
The vast majority of encounters I've seen with cars coming towards protests that block a path is the driver trying to make a statement. Common sense tells you that you can see the blockade from multiple blocks away and can easily divert on to an alternate route. And in a city like Houston where it's flat and simple grid layout, a diverted path barely is a inconvenience. If you want to think the blockading protestors are assholes, by all means that is a reasonable take as it can be annoying but to actually keep on approaching them to the point where you can't turnaround means that most likely you succumbed to some machismo hubris and wanted to make a statement.
From what I know of MN law and I'm guessing it's the same with other states that if you are in an accident and the situation isn't considered safe you don't have to stop. Also as noted in the case of the truck driving into the protests on the I-35W bridge the driver wasn't initially charged as it was considered a mistake. So again how is this law different than what is currently on the books?
