Blue Lives Matter: Origins, Hate Crime Laws, and the Debate

Blue Lives Matter is a pro-law enforcement movement founded in December 2014 by four NYPD officers after the ambush killings of Officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu in Brooklyn.¹ It grew from a peer-support effort into a political force that pushed state laws adding police to hate crime protections, championed federal legislation to criminalize attacks on officers, and popularized the thin blue line flag as a counter to Black Lives Matter. Its meaning is contested: supporters describe it as solidarity with officers and their families, while critics argue it uses civil rights language to protect state power from accountability.

How It Started: The Brooklyn Ambush

On December 20, 2014, Officers Rafael Ramos, 40, and Wenjian Liu, 32, were shot at point-blank range while sitting in their patrol car in Bedford-Stuyvesant.² The gunman, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, 28, fled to a nearby subway station and killed himself. Earlier that day he had shot and wounded a former girlfriend near Baltimore. Before driving to New York, he posted on social media: “I’m putting wings on pigs today. They take 1 of ours, let’s take 2 of theirs,” with hashtags referencing Eric Garner and Michael Brown.³

NYPD Commissioner William Bratton called the killings an “assassination” and said the officers had been “targeted for their uniform.”³ Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association president Patrick Lynch publicly blamed Mayor Bill de Blasio, saying “there’s blood on many hands tonight.”² Blue Lives Matter was organized in that atmosphere.

What the Movement Stands For

The stated mission is practical: raise public awareness about the needs of officers, help officers assist one another, and support officers’ families in difficult times.⁴ The political posture, from the beginning, was oppositional. The founding statement blamed “the lies of Black Lives Matter, the media, and politicians” for inciting the violence that killed Ramos and Liu, and framed the racial justice movement as a campaign of “vilification of law enforcement.”⁵

Black Lives Matter had emerged in 2013 after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the killing of Trayvon Martin, and gained national reach following the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Its focus was systemic police brutality and racial inequality in the criminal justice system. Black Lives Matter leaders called attributing the actions of lone gunmen to a protest movement “dangerous and irresponsible.”⁵

Academic research has characterized the dynamic as “competitive victimhood.” A study using regression discontinuity analysis found that the 2020 George Floyd protests triggered sharp increases in Blue Lives Matter Google searches, news coverage, social media activity, and sales of thin blue line flags, while ambush-style attacks on officers did not produce comparable upticks. The same research identified racial prejudice as the “single strongest predictor of support for BlueLM among Whites,” with support higher among white respondents and in zip codes with greater white population density.⁶

State Laws Adding Police to Hate Crime Protections

The movement’s clearest policy footprint is a set of state laws adding police officers to the list of groups covered by hate crime statutes. Louisiana went first. In May 2016, Governor John Bel Edwards signed House Bill 953, authored by State Representative Lance Harris, expanding the state’s hate crime law to cover police officers, firefighters, and emergency medical responders. The bill passed the Louisiana House 91-0. Harris said he drafted it after the 2015 ambush killing of a Texas sheriff’s deputy, arguing that crimes against officers were often committed “strictly out of hate for the officer and his uniform.”⁷

Under the Louisiana statute, a hate crime enhancement on a felony can add up to five years in prison and a $5,000 fine, served consecutively to the base sentence. For misdemeanors the extra penalty is up to six months and a $500 fine.⁸

Kentucky, Mississippi, and Texas enacted similar laws, and by 2017 there had been 32 Blue Lives Matter bills introduced across 14 states.⁹ Utah also added law enforcement to its hate crime protections. A broader wave followed the 2020 protests: according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 16 state legislatures enacted some form of “Back the Blue” legislation between 2020 and October 2022. Those laws went beyond hate crime enhancements, adding measures on qualified immunity, protest-related crimes, local police budgets, and the filming of officers.¹⁰

Iowa’s “Back the Blue Act,” signed by Governor Kim Reynolds on June 17, 2021, is one example of that broader package. It codified qualified immunity in state law, increased penalties for rioting, unlawful assembly, and disorderly conduct, expanded assault to include pointing a laser at a person, and threatened to withhold state aid from local governments that violated its terms. It also included $5 million for law enforcement equipment.¹¹

The Debate Over Police as a Protected Class

The core legal argument about these laws is whether a profession belongs in a hate crime statute alongside race, religion, gender, and sexual orientation.

The Anti-Defamation League has argued that hate crime laws should be limited to “people’s most precious identity categories” and “immutable characteristics, those qualities that can or should not be changed,” and that a profession does not fit. The ACLU has taken a similar position, saying expanding these statutes to police dilutes their original purpose of protecting historically persecuted communities.¹²

Critics also point to redundancy. All 50 states already mandate enhanced sentences for assaulting or killing officers, without requiring proof of a hate motive. Using a hate crime statute instead adds a prosecutorial burden, because the state must prove the attacker acted specifically because of the victim’s profession.¹² The ADL has predicted convictions under these laws will be difficult for that reason.¹³ Legal scholars have warned that overly broad statutes could let prosecutors bring hate crime charges against people who resist arrest or fail to comply with police orders.⁵ The Center for Constitutional Rights has called the laws “an unnecessary solution to a non-existent problem.”¹⁴

Supporters make the opposite case. Yale Law School professor Frederick Lawrence has argued that police share a collective identity, face targeted animosity as a group, and grieve collectively, and that attacks on officers are “directed at individuals not because of who that person is, but because of what that person is.” Louisiana’s Lance Harris has said the laws provide “an extra layer of protection that reinforces morale by knowing the state… is behind them.”¹² Observers have noted no reliable data supports the claim that these laws deter attacks on police, and the statutes appear to be used sparingly where they exist.¹³

Federal Legislation and Executive Action

At the federal level, the most persistent legislative vehicle has been the Protect and Serve Act, which would create a new federal crime for knowingly assaulting a law enforcement officer and causing serious bodily injury. Penalties reach up to 10 years for injuring an officer and life imprisonment for killing or kidnapping one.¹⁵

The bill first passed the U.S. House in May 2018, sponsored by Representative John Rutherford of Florida, by a vote of 382 to 35. It was referred to the Senate Judiciary Committee and stalled.¹⁶ It was reintroduced in the 118th Congress as H.R. 743, opposed by Human Rights Watch on the ground that it used a lower mental-state standard (“knowingly”) than comparable federal hate crime statutes (“willfully”).¹⁷ It was reintroduced again in the 119th Congress in January 2025 by Senator Thomas Tillis and by Representatives Rutherford and Josh Gottheimer. As of early 2026, the Senate version remains in the Judiciary Committee.¹⁸

Executive action came in 2025. On April 28, President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Strengthening and Unleashing America’s Law Enforcement to Pursue Criminals and Protect Innocent Citizens,” directing the Attorney General to create a mechanism for legal defense and indemnification of officers sued over their official conduct. The order also directed a review of federal consent decrees with police departments, telling agencies to “modify, rescind, or move to conclude” ones the administration considers impediments to law enforcement, and directed the Attorney General and Secretary of Defense to increase transfers of surplus military equipment to local police and to assess how military training and personnel could be used to prevent crime.¹⁹ Around the same time, the administration terminated 373 grants from the Department of Justice’s Office of Justice Programs, an estimated $500 million reduction in funding for crime prevention, alternatives to policing, victims’ services, and research.²⁰

The Thin Blue Line Flag

The movement’s best-known symbol is the thin blue line flag: a black-and-white American flag with a single blue horizontal stripe. Introduced in the 2010s, it was originally a symbol of police solidarity and a tribute to fallen officers.²¹ Its meaning has since broadened and hardened.

The flag appeared alongside Confederate flags at the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville and has been a fixture at Donald Trump campaign rallies.²¹ Researcher Scott Mainwaring has described its rise as an “uncompromising, in-your-face response to Black Lives Matter.”²² Its imagery is sometimes merged with the “Punisher” skull logo, a vigilante character associated with extrajudicial violence.

The flag’s display on government property has produced repeated conflicts. In Oregon, a county paid $100,000 to a Black employee who reported being harassed after complaining about the flag in her workplace. San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott banned officers from wearing face masks featuring the flag, calling the symbol “divisive and disrespectful.”²¹ In Hingham, Massachusetts, town officials ordered firefighters to remove the flags they had placed on trucks to honor a fallen officer, citing a policy on flags on public vehicles.²²

In Springfield Township, Pennsylvania, the Board of Commissioners passed a resolution in January 2023 prohibiting the flag’s display by township employees or on township property, stating that the symbol had come to “represent opposition to racial justice movements” and “in some instances has become a symbol of white supremacy.”²³ The local police union sued. In November 2023, U.S. District Judge Karen Marston struck down the ban as unconstitutional, ruling that “the First Amendment protects speech even when it is considered ‘offensive'” and that the township had failed to show real harm from the flag’s display.²⁴

January 6 and a Symbol Under Strain

The assault on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, complicated the movement’s own narrative. Rioters carried the thin blue line flag while attacking the officers defending the building, dragging them down steps and beating them with flagpoles and nightsticks. One officer died, 60 were injured, and the department lost another officer to suicide in the aftermath.²⁵ Capitol Police officer Caroline Edwards, testifying to the congressional committee investigating the attack, described the scene as “carnage.”²⁶

More than two dozen officers were placed under investigation for involvement in the breach, and the FBI arrested two Rocky Mount, Virginia, police officers who had posted photos of themselves inside the Capitol. Former FBI agent Michael German said the day exposed a trend of political radicalization within law enforcement, with right-wing extremists sometimes operating “under a cloak of authority” through their roles as officers.²⁵

The Movement Today

The most visible organization is Blue Lives Matter NYC Inc., a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit headquartered on Staten Island. Composed of law enforcement officers and members of state and federal agencies, it provides peer support, financial counseling, and crisis assistance to officers and their families.⁴ It hosts an annual “Archangel Gala” honoring officers injured or killed in the line of duty and remains active in media appearances on outlets including Fox News and Newsmax.²⁷

The phenomenon is larger than any one group. It runs through state legislative campaigns, federal bills, executive orders, merchandise, and counter-protest mobilization. Whether it is understood primarily as support for officers and their families or as a political vehicle that borrows civil rights language to insulate state authority depends on who is describing it. Its effect on U.S. policing law and politics is not in dispute.

1
Cornell Law Review. Blue Lives and the Permanence of Racism
2
The New York Times. Two Police Officers Shot in Their Patrol Car in Brooklyn
3
CapRadio. Two NYPD Officers Killed in Brooklyn Ambush
4
Benevity. Blue Lives Matter NYC Inc.
5
Vermont Law Review. Blue Lives Matter Bills
6
Newman et al. Blue Lives Matter Competitive Victimhood Study
7
CNN. Louisiana Blue Lives Matter Law
8
Louisiana State Legislature. RS 14:107.2 – Hate Crimes
9
SAGE Journals. Blue Lives Matter Hate Crime Laws
10
News21. More States Pass Laws to Back the Blue
11
Iowa Capital Dispatch. Reynolds Signs Back the Blue Law
12
PBS NewsHour. Killing a Police Officer a Hate Crime
13
Governing. Blue Lives Matter Hate Crimes Laws
14
Center for Constitutional Rights. The Truth: Blue Lives Already Matter
15
U.S. House of Representatives – Rep. Kelly. Kelly Backs Protect and Serve Act
16
Congress.gov. H.R. 5698 – Protect and Serve Act of 2018
17
Human Rights Watch. Opposition to Protect and Serve Act of 2023
18
Congress.gov. S.167 – Protect and Serve Act of 2025
19
The White House. Strengthening and Unleashing America’s Law Enforcement
20
American Bar Association. Policing and Sanctuary
21
The Marshall Project. The Short, Fraught History of the Thin Blue Line American Flag
22
NPR. Thin Blue Line Flags Stir Controversy in Mass. Coastal Community
23
Springfield Township. Resolution 1592 – Thin Blue Line Flag
24
WHYY. Springfield Township Thin Blue Line Flag Ban Ruled Unconstitutional
25
The Christian Science Monitor. Capitol Assault: Why Did Police Show Up on Both Sides of Thin Blue Line
26
Mother Jones. Thin Blue Line Flags in the January 6 Video
27
Blue Lives Matter NYC. Blue Lives Matter NYC – Front Page