Criminals who ambush and kill police officers could face the death penalty if an Alaska Republican gets his way.
“And that includes the states like mine that, at the state level, don’t have the death penalty,” Sen. Dan Sullivan told the Washington Examiner.
Sullivan proposed the idea as part of a suite of enhanced penalties for attacks on first responders and members of the judiciary. He believes the legislation will have at least symbolic significance, and perhaps deter attacks on police following an uptick in police fatalities over the past year.
“It sends a signal to law enforcement, whether in Alaska or nationally, ‘hey, we got your back,’ ” Sullivan said.
The former state attorney general introduced the Protect Our Heroes Act in December, after two officers in his home state were shot in the waning months of 2016. One of the officers survived; the other, who had predicted to his family that he would be shot that evening before leaving for his shift, died of complications from surgery days after the shooting.
“It’s an issue that’s on the front minds of Alaskans, my constituents, but … nationwide, this is happening,” Sullivan said. “Whether it’s Texas or New York or Massachusetts or Iowa or Georgia or Missouri, the list is really long in terms of officers — many of whom have been ambushed, right, or targeted — who have been killed and wounded.”
Sixty-four police officers nationwide were shot and killed in 2016, according to a year-end report from the National Law Enforcement Officers’ Memorial Fund. That’s an increase from the 41 fatal shootings in 2015. Texas, which lost five officers in a single attack at a Black Lives Matter protest in Dallas, led the nation with 17 slain police officers. Twenty of the fatal shootings nationwide were ambush attacks, according to the report.
Sullivan’s bill could gain momentum from President Trump’s victory, which placed Republicans in control of Congress and the White House. Trump discussed police fatalities throughout the campaign, portraying the spike in violence as a consequence of President Obama’s policies. “We’re going to restore law, order and justice in America,” Trump said in November.
At other times, Trump accused Black Lives Matter, which protests the shootings of black men by police officers, of inciting the attacks. “They certainly have ignited people and you see that. … It’s a very, very serious situation and we just can’t let it happen,” Trump said on Fox News in July.
Sullivan, perhaps with an eye toward winning the Democratic support necessary to avoid a filibuster, professed agnosticism as to what caused the recent spate of attacks and resisted the suggestion that the bill was a response to Black Lives Matter. “I don’t think any of these cases in Alaska, at least, involved — neither the victims, the police, nor the perpetrator was African-American,” he said. “I don’t think anyone has the definitive answer.”
And the legislation doesn’t simply apply to murdered police officers. Sullivan’s bill would stipulate a broad definition of “public safety officers,” ranging from volunteer firefighters to bailiffs and judges and other employees involved in the judicial system. Anyone who targets one of those public safety officers because of their vocation “shall be fined under this title and imprisoned for not less than 10 years or for life, or, if death results, shall be sentenced to not less than 30 years and not more than life, or may be punished by death,” the bill says. Anyone who lures a public safety officer into an ambush would face a minimum of five years’ imprisonment.
Still, the legislation could face objections from conservatives, in addition to Democrats. Sullivan’s bill must clear the Senate Judiciary Committee, where Utah Sen. Mike Lee is leading a criminal justice reform crusade to weaken mandatory minimum sentencing requirements for certain drug offenses, an effort Sullivan supports. It could be doubly uncomfortable for Tea Party lawmakers who have built a career opposing federal government overreach to back legislation that ignores state-based opposition to the death penalty in order to protect state and local officials.
And Sullivan admits that will be a problem for some lawmakers. “To be honest, I’m somebody who is a big believer in letting states — where it’s appropriate, and in my view, it’s almost always appropriate, except on key issues like national defense — in letting the states have the lead,” he said. “But in the area of law enforcement, there are examples. There’s hate crime legislation that federalized a lot of crimes. From my perspective, you do need to be careful on trying to federalize everything, that’s for sure, but this has become a national problem.”
If he does navigate ideological objections to the legislation, Sullivan will still need to convince colleagues that the bill should pass this year. Some experts caution against immediate policymaking in response to the killings. The number of attacks remain far lower than they were in 1991, when about 500 fatal and nonfatal ambushes took place, according to FBI data.
“[N]obody should downplay the deaths of those officers,” David Harris, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, told the Christian Science Monitor in August. “But if the question is the long-term trend, you have to move beyond six months or even a year. If it continues, we should look at policies, it’s just that we can’t tell yet if we’re there.”
Sullivan thinks it’s best to act sooner than later, due to the symbolic value of protection first responders and so that prosecutors have the maximum power to crack down on future crimes, a factor that he hopes will deter potential murderers from staging the attacks in the first place.
“The goal of my legislation would be to nip it in the bud,” he said. “This is one of those judgment calls: do you wait another year to see if that timing’s right to propose legislation based on whether the trends continue? Or do you try to address what everybody would recognize are pretty horrific trends in the past year? My inclination is to act now.”
