A new state law intended to prevent discriminatory police enforcement has gone into effect.
Act 259, which Gov. Josh Green signed into law in July, opens up to liability anyone who calls law enforcement specifically to target another person based on that person’s race, gender identity or other “protected classes.”
Those classes include: “race, color, ancestry, ethnicity, national origin, place of birth, sex, age, religion, disability, sexual orientation or gender identity or expression.”
Someone who believes themselves to have been targeted specifically because of their protected class can file a lawsuit against the person who called police on them. Successful plaintiffs can be awarded damages of at least $1,000, in addition to attorney’s fees and costs.
“We want to discourage people from misusing our justice system,” Mike Lambert, director of the Hawai‘i Department of Law Enforcement, told Aloha State Daily.
A victim can sue if they believe a 911 caller intended to have the victim expelled from a place they were lawfully allowed to be, damage their reputation or financial interests, infringe on their constitutional rights or otherwise harass or humiliate them.
Lambert could not provide specific examples of recent abuses of police calls — although he gave the hypothetical example of someone calling a police raid on a mosque — and said the law is following up on national trends. In 2019, Oregon passed a similar bill allowing for victims to sue the caller for up to $250. New York followed suit with its own version in 2020, after a video went viral of a white woman calling the police on a black man in Central Park.
Also in 2020, San Francisco adopted the “Caution Against Racially Exploitative Non-Emergencies Act” — or “CAREN Act,” invoking the name “Karen” as a memetic signifier of a racially entitled white woman — allowing victims to sue for at least $1,000.
“If you’re on the beach and you see someone and you call the police just because they look a certain way … that’s just racial profiling,” Lambert said. “I think people saw the other bills on the Mainland and thought ‘that’s something we could do here.’”
Lambert acknowledged the possibility of the law being used to discourage police calls against legitimate suspicions of criminal activity — “any law has unintended consequences,” he said — but added that he believes investigations should be able to distinguish between “well-intended errors” and malicious profiling.
It is currently unclear how many lawsuits have been filed under any of the Mainland laws, let alone how many have been successful.
While the law is similar to the legal definition of “false reporting,” it is not in itself a criminal offense, Lambert said.
Further information about the law, including aid in filing a lawsuit, can be found at the state DLE website.
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