Alabama House approves bill changing riot definition, punish local governments that abolish police departments

The Alabama House of Representatives has approved a bill that would increase penalties for attacking a first responder, change the definition of riot and punish communities that abolish their police departments. 

The measure, sponsored by Rep. Allen Treadaway, R-Morris, passed the House 74 to 25 after a tense debate.

"Our job is to protect and serve and keep everyone safe," said Treadaway, a retired assistant police chief in Birmingham. "But what we've never seen in law enforcement is what we're seeing today. This organized attempt to come in hellbent on destruction and hijack the cause."

The bill creates a new crime of assaulting a first responder, a Class B felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison. The crime would include physical contact with a responder that would be considered 'extremely offensive or provocative, including, but not limited to, spitting, throwing, or otherwise transferring bodily fluids, bodily pathogens or human waste.'”

It also changes the definition of riot from a person engaged in "tumultuous and violent conduct" to "the assemblage of five or more persons resulting in conduct which creates an immediate danger of damage to property or injury to persons."

More:Alabama House committee approves bill changing rioting definition

The bill also would eliminate state funding for local governments that abolished their police departments without making plans to reconstitute or replace them.

Treadaway's measure, emerging after the protests over the killing of George Floyd by police last May,  came on a tense day when the Republican supermajority used cloture to pass several controversial bills over Democratic filibusters. Democratic speakers, all of them Black, said the bill would be used to silence peaceful protest of major problems. 

Alabama's history of deploying force against Black citizens was on the minds of many. Rep. Merika Coleman, D-Pleasant Grove, read a resolution passed by the Alabama Legislature on Sept. 1, 1965 that called civil rights demonstrations a "guise" that drained law enforcement resources and led to increases in crime. The resolution demanded President Lyndon Johnson "recognize that demonstrations constitute a grave threat, and that the federal government should discredit demonstrations and demonstrators going forward." 

"We use our First Amendment right, our right to speak, to peacefully assemble, and then ultimately to use that to change public policy," she said. "What I'm afraid of with your bill is that it will be used as a tool to keep people from going out to use that First Amendment right."

Treadaway said during the debate that the bill aimed to protect those protestors, and noted that he worked with members of the House Judiciary Committee to revise portions of the bill (which Coleman and other speakers acknowledged). 

"You've got peaceful protestors that have every right to protest, and you've had folks come in and hijack that," he said. 

But Rep. Ralph Howard, D-Greensboro, said the bill missed the point of the protests.

"We don't need this law," he said. "We need a system of justice that applies it fairly to everybody."

Howard compared the death of Eric Garner, choked to death by a New York City police officer in 2014 for selling cigarettes, to images of rioters at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 moving in and out of the Capitol unmolested. 

"Do you think I could go out today, take a flagpole and beat the pulp out of a police officer and walk away?" said Howard, who is Black. 

The cloture of debate angered many Democratic legislators, who felt that they were being silenced.

"We're going to spring break, and it seems like we wanted to get some of the worst bills that we can find, put them on calendar together, and do cloture motions to silence a bunch of people on issues that we just don't want to talk about," said Rep. Christopher England, D-Tuscaloosa.

Contact Montgomery Advertiser reporter Brian Lyman at 334-240-0185 or blyman@gannett.com.