BILL ANALYSIS Ó
AB 246
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Date of Hearing: April 15, 2015
ASSEMBLY COMMITTEE ON APPROPRIATIONS
Jimmy Gomez, Chair
AB
246 (Roger Hernández) - As Amended March 19, 2015
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Urgency: No State Mandated Local Program: YesReimbursable:
No
SUMMARY:
This bill makes the assassination, rape, and kidnap, as well as
an attempt to commit these crimes, a hate crime when the crime
is committed against a peace officer, or an immediate family
AB 246
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member, and the crime was knowingly committed because of the
peace officer status.
FISCAL EFFECT:
1)Potential one-time costs of $75,000 (GF) to the Department of
Justice to establish a data base and for associated computer
programming to collect the data in the Criminal Justice
Statistics Center.
2)Potential one-time moderate reimbursable mandated costs (GF)
for local law enforcement agencies in Information Technology
costs for agencies to update the computer systems they use to
report hate crime information to DOJ. If 50 law enforcement
agencies have to incur programming costs, and the programming
costs are $5,000 per agency, the potential cost would be
$250,000.
3)Minor increase in state prison time commitments, as a result
of the hate crime enhancements, in rare cases where the
assailant is prosecuted under the proposed hate crime
provisions. Assuming the annual contracted bed rate of $27,000
per inmate, the annual General Fund costs would be $27,000 per
each additional year served under such conviction.
COMMENTS:
1)Background. Current law defines "hate crime" as any criminal
act committed, in whole or in part, because of one or more of
several actual or perceived characteristics of the victim,
such as: Disability, gender, race or ethnicity, religion,
sexual orientation.
AB 246
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Current law provides that a person who commits, or voluntarily
acted in concert with another person, to commit a felony
motivated by bias, or attempts to commit a bias-motivated
felony, shall receive an additional term of one, two or three
years in state prison, at the court's discretion. The penalty
for a person who commits murder in the first degree in a hate
crime, or knowingly murders a peace officer while the officer
performs his or her duties, is death or imprisonment in the
state prison for life wife without the possibility of parole.
The DOJ is required to provide an annual report on hate crime
information provided by local law enforcement agencies.
2)Argument in Support. According to the Los Angeles Deputy
Sheriffs, the sponsor of this bill, "The recent attacks on
police officers - occasioned only due to their status as
police officers - provides eloquent testimony to the need for
this bill. The gravamen of a hate crime is that the crime is
committed without any transactional motive; instead, the crime
is committed because of the status of the prospective victim.
The recent unprovoked and non-transactional shootings of
police officers are an example of exactly that activity."
3)Argument in Opposition. The Anti-Defamation League writes,
"At the outset, we want to acknowledge the importance of
efforts to protect our peace officers from violence. In the
wake of recent events across the country, tension and
aggression against law enforcement officers has been
heightened. Like Assemblymember Hernández, we believe
protection of peace officers is critically important. While
we understand AB 246 is intended to address this problem,
adding peace officers to the groups protected by hate crime
laws is not the approach we favor.
4)Related Legislation. AB 242 (Salas), pending in Assembly
Public Safety Committee, adds "peace-officer status" to the
list of actual or perceived characteristics of a victim for
determining whether a criminal act qualifies as a hate crime.
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5)Prior Legislation:
a) AB 1206 (Miller), of the 2009-2010 Legislative Session,
would have added political affiliation to the list of
actual or perceived characteristics qualifying for hate
crime status. AB 1206 was never heard in committee.
b) SB 122 (Steinberg), of the 2007-2008 Legislative
Session, would have added homelessness to the list of
actual or perceived characteristics qualifying for hate
crime status. SB 122 was held in the Senate Public Safety
committee without recommendation.
Analysis Prepared by:Pedro R. Reyes / APPR. / (916)
319-2081