Genee Tinsley helped organize rallies and marches in Palm Beach County, Florida, last summer to protest police brutality, demand racial justice and call for redirecting some police funding to social services.
Now she’s organizing an online forum to teach people about a Florida bill that would increase penalties for unlawful activity during a protest. The bill could give law enforcement broad discretion to declare a gathering a “riot” and charge participants with a felony crime.
The bill also would make it harder for cities to cut police funding and prevent protesters from suing for damages if they’re injured by a counterprotester.
“For me, it’s like they’re silencing protesters,” Tinsley said, “specifically Black and brown people.” Tinsley said the protests her organization, Freedom Fighters for Justice, organized this summer were peaceful.
The Black Lives Matter protests that blossomed in small towns and big cities across the nation last year awakened many Americans to systemic racism and biased policing. Former President Donald Trump and other Republicans responded to the mostly peaceful protests — a few of which involved clashes among protesters, counter-protesters and police — by calling for “law and order.”
Now Republican legislators in Florida and 21 other states are considering tough new penalties for protesters who break laws. As in Florida, some of the bills also would prevent localities from cutting police budgets and give some legal protection to people who injure protesters.
Supporters say the new penalties would help prevent acts of violence — by protesters of all political persuasions — and protect law enforcement officers. Civil rights groups and Democrats, however, say the bills would chill First Amendment rights to free speech and peaceful assembly and could be used by police to disproportionately arrest and charge people of color.
Many of the statehouse proposals target specific acts of protest that were popular among Black Lives Matter participants and that echo activism during the civil rights movement, when protesters marched through streets or sat down at whites-only lunch counters, taking up physical space in acts of civil disobedience.
Some protest activities, such as blocking traffic or marking buildings with graffiti, exist in a legal gray area, said Tabatha Abu El-Haj, a law professor at Drexel University who studies First Amendment law.
“It’s technically unlawful to block traffic, and at the same time that’s an essential tactic in the right of peaceful assembly, in my view,” she said.
Other protest tactics, such as tearing down monuments, are clearly illegal, she said, and limits on such behavior are likely constitutional.
Since the insurrection of Jan. 6, proponents say they also would hold right-wing extremists accountable for the same actions.
“We have to strengthen our laws when it comes to mob violence, to make sure individuals are unequivocally dissuaded from committing violence when they’re in large groups,” said Florida Rep. Juan Alfonso Fernandez-Barquin, a Republican and sponsor of the House version of the bill, during a subcommittee hearing in late January. Fernandez-Barquin’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
Civil rights experts, however, say the penalties could be applied unevenly. “We know from existing data on arrests and convictions, [that] folks in the Black community, in particular, are over-incarcerated and overcharged,” said Carrie Boyd, policy counsel for the Southern Poverty Law Center Action Fund, the lobbying arm of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a Montgomery, Alabama-based group that advocates for racial justice in the South.
“This bill, in our minds, is deliberately broad to cast a wide net and, frankly, to round up folks,” she said of the Florida bill.
Police in full riot gear have confronted Black Lives Matter protesters and used tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse crowds, a show of force that hasn’t been equally applied to right-wing protests.
