HB953, known as the “Blue Lives Matter” bill, recently became law in Louisiana. This law makes Louisiana the first state to categorize the murder of a police officer (or other public safety worker) as a hate crime. Most states already have enhanced penalties for assaulting or killing a law enforcement official; however, Blue Lives Matter activists argue that officers are under assault in the United States and require further protections.

Blue Lives Matter is the primary slogan for a loosely organized movement that aims to defend the rights of law enforcement officers. Like the “All Lives Matter” slogan, Blue Lives Matter was the result of a conservative reaction to Black Lives Matter, the grassroots movement seeking to draw attention to the plight of African Americans in the United States. Many Black Lives Matter demonstrations have protested the killing of unarmed black teenagers by white police officers. Blue Lives Matter, in turn, desires to defend police officers from what they perceive as leftist attacks on law enforcement officers. The movement’s stated purpose is to ensure police officers are well-protected in their line of work and remove cultural stigma against law enforcement. In reality however, the movement is largely reactionary and is basically an anti-Black Lives Matter movement. Blue Lives Matter’s message is more insidious than the slogan reveals at first; it is a movement hoping to deny the existence of systemic racism and police brutality in the United States.

The problem with HRB953 is that it willfully misconstrues hate crime laws to fit an anti-black lives matter agenda. According to the Anti-Defamation League, hate crimes are intended to protect the immutable aspects of people's identity. These include race, religion, disability, and other unchangeable aspects of the person. There is a difference between distrusting lawyers or IRS agents, and distrusting Jews, for instance. The former might be bad, but the latter is much worse. Violence against an officer is already criminalized. Along with the Blue Lives Matter bill, they can continue to dilute the necessary qualities of hate crimes.

The Blue Lives Matter movement misses the boat. Yes, obviously officers face dangers in their line of work. There are risks to simply identify as a law enforcement officer. However, these risks come with the nature of the career. Chasing criminals is always going to be a dangerous job. The unarmed African-American teenagers shot and killed, however, did not decide to be black. Treyvon Martin was walking down a street in his neighborhood, in a hoodie, and George Zimmerman murdered him. Yes, the facts are sometimes disputed, but there are so many cases with clear video footage. For every Ferguson where the details are murky, there is a Staten Island where an indictment should have been passed.

Police officers are not a persecuted group in this country. An officer, for instance, does not need to fear that should he or she be killed in the line of duty, their murderer will not be brought to justice. During the aftermath of the 2014 deaths of officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, the common perception was that a troubled person kills an officer because they hate the police. Yet, the statistics are undeniable. The occasional hit and run does not indicate persecution of or an assault on the profession. The Officer Down Memorial Page reports 114 deaths in the line of duty in 2015. According to the FBI, crimes resulted in only 41 of these deaths (as opposed to traffic accidents, illnesses, etc.), and that number has actually decreased for decades. 2015 was the one of the safest years for law enforcement in US history. In contrast, the Washington Post reports that officers killed 990 civilians in 2015.

Persecution comes only from a systemic prejudice, or the tendency for people of relative power in society (such as law enforcement) to act with impunity or with the help of the system. Surely in the old South, African-Americans sometimes killed whites; that still does not reasonably label Southern whites as a persecuted group. What made the old South racist was the common toleration of bigoted attacks. The KKK could always and often attacked others without fearing arrest or law enforcement ending their crusades.

NWA's “Fuck the police” and other symptoms of black distrust of the police do not exist because African-Americans have an irrational, age-old hatred of those in blue. Rather, according to a Justice Department report released in the wake of the shooting of Michael Brown, the Ferguson Police Department (FPD) essentially terrorized the African-American population of the city. Unlawful detainment or arrest of minority citizens was common and "coding errors in the new records management system is set up 'to hide, do away with, or just forget reports.'" The Justice Department report also contains illuminating statistics, including the figure that "African Americans are 2.07 times more likely to be searched during a vehicular stop but are 26% less likely to have contraband found on them during a search." A broad statistical survey of the FPD's records revealed that "despite making up 67 percent of the population, African Americans accounted for 85 percent of FPD’s traffic stops, 90 percent of FPD’s citations, and 93 percent of FPD’s arrests from 2012 to 2014." This is not limited to Ferguson. Programs like Stop and Frisk also statistically disproportionately affect African-Americans by large margins.

Blue Lives Matter exemplifies the self-victimization of white conservatives. Christians are neither persecuted because they have to make cakes for gay couples, nor because the governor says “holiday tree” instead of Christmas tree. It is the same problem with the slogan "All Lives Matter." If John is on a date with Alice at a restaurant, and Alice does not receive her order, “her meal matters.” The waiter complaining that “all orders matter” or that “John’s meal matters” ignores the truth of the situation. Sometimes police officers get hurt or killed, but they are not discriminated against. The problem is bigger than a just couple of bad apples; it is a systemic issue with the operation and behavior of American police forces toward minorities. Blue Lives Matter is a form of denial, a way to disregard Black Lives Matter rather than listen and face the truth of mass incarceration, police brutality, and other forms of structural racism in the country. Yes, the lives of officers matter, but they already do matter. Instead, the United States stacks the odds against African-Americans, which is why Black Lives Matter is so much more important right now.