Calling 911 to harass somebody because of their race in New Jersey can now put you in prison for years.
Gov. Phil Murphy signed a bill (A1906) into law late Monday making it a crime to call 911 solely to intimidate someone because of their ethnicity, religion or gender, among other categories. Violators face up to five years in prison and fines up to $15,000.
Calling police “as an intimidation tactic against people of color is an unacceptable, abhorrent form of discrimination,” Murphy said in a statement. He added that it “places victims in a potentially dangerous situation” while eroding trust between cops and communities.
Murphy’s signature came a little more than three months after a white woman was filmed in Central Park calling police on a Black bird watcher who asked her to put her dog on a leash. She originally claimed he was threatening her, but she later apologized for her “false assumptions” and was charged with filing a false police report.
New Jersey’s law also makes filing a false police report a form of “bias intimidation,” which generally carries the threat of a year-and-a-half behind bars and up to a $10,000 fine.
State Attorney General Gurbir Grewal said in a statement a false call “interferes with 911 emergency operators trying to save lives.” Lawmakers lauded the proposal, saying it was another response to recent protests against police brutality and systemic racism.
In a fiscal note, legislative researchers said fines from violators could lessen the costs of new prosecutions, but concluded exact numbers were impossible to estimate.
Earlier in the summer, New York lawmakers also approved a bill making it easier under civil rights law to sue someone who calls the police “without reason” because of somebody’s race.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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Blake Nelson can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter at @BCunninghamN.
gingerjenley on September 1st, 2020 at 22:19 UTC »
While I fully agree with the principle that making false claims should be criminalized.... damn, Americans sure love prison as the solution to everything.
SamuelArk on September 1st, 2020 at 19:49 UTC »
I had an experience last year at least somewhat similar to this.
my brother's ex-wife was living rent-free in his house, after being divorced because of harboring an addiction and then beginning an extramarital affair with her drug dealer which fostered a child.
when I came back into town he was living at home with his son and mom and dad.
I moved into his house to clean things up, over time she became agitated called the police on me for "raping her and molesting her child".
It was all fabricated so she could continue to live rent-free in the home.
I just so happen to have my phone out when it was about to unfold, so I recorded her low-key, and showed that recording to the police.
They told me there was nothing I could do, short of citing her for assault, due to a verbal threat made during the process, which is no longer an arrestablw offense in my municipality, but instead she'll be cited and given a court date. There was nothing they could do to help evict her, nothing they could charge her with as far as a false police report, nothing.
Whereas if I didn't have that video, they would have taken me away without question.
The cop was really cool though and then ask her where she was going to take the child since I'm such a dangerous threat living here. Her thinking that I was going to get arrested, got caught on her heels that the police were simply asking this, and mistook it for an order.
I would like to see something develop in the future where there were consequences for false rape claims too - I was literally seconds away from being arrested for months, potentially years, out of a wholesale fabrication.
ShadyMcGregor on September 1st, 2020 at 19:35 UTC »
It should (and I thought was) be a crime to make false claims about anyone.
Also, it seems like it would be difficult to prove somebody made a false claim due to race, religion, gender etc. unless the person making the call outright admitted it. If I were to call the police to notify them a person of a different race was involved in a crime, and it turned out they weren’t, how do they determine if it’s racially motivated?