IntroductionWhere to start? A bill has been introduced in the Kentucky House of Representatives to add law enforcment and other safety workers as a category in the state's hate crimes statute. Given that 75 police officers were killed by intentional gunfire or vehicular assault in 2016 it's a little strange to many people to hear someone say that this bill should not become law (https://www.odmp.org/search/year/2016) .So if not, then why not?First, I will make a constitutional argument. Hate crimes laws, in their origins, were designed as a legal response to the violent history of white supremacist violence perpetrated primarily against Black folk with a not toward the bloody history of anti-Semitism. Yet, as these laws were crafted and pushed forward it became clear that the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment made any provision for protection of some portion of a class or persons and not others legally untenable. That is, existing hate crimes laws are written such that they apply to entire categories of people, not just historically oppressed, disadvantaged, or minority fractions of such categories. In other words, white people are as protected by "anti-white" crimes as Black folk are protected from anti-Black crimes. Similarly with other included categories: Christians are as protected as Muslims, Jews or other religious minorities; staight folk are as protect as LGBTQ folk, and so on.Hate crimes laws are, in this sense, fundamentally different from historic redress laws, e.g. affirmative actions policies and minority set-asides, that by definition must specify some class of persons to privilege in order to remedy historic--and persisting--discrepencies. Hate crimes apply as add-ons to criminal law, usually affording the possibility of enhanced penalties to classes of crime that can be proved to be motivated by bias. Thus undear the equal protection clause and basic principles of the universality of the law, hate crimes can be charged against anyone committing a "racially motivated" crime (for example), regardless of the respective racial categories of the perpetrator and the victim.What this means with respect to Kentucky's proposed law (HB 14/CI [BR 75]) which seeks to amend the state's hate crimes statute (KRS 532.031)"...to include offenses committed against an individual because of the individual's actual or perceived employment as a city, county, state, or federal peace officer, member of an organized fire department, emergency medical services personnel..."is that these particular category fractions--the general category being "occupations"--would be afforded special categorical status not afforded to other occupations. In other words if would violate the same constitutional principle that led to hate crimes laws being drafted to protect against violations motivated by any sort of racial (religious, national original, sexual orientation) bias, rather than naming particular classes of victims or perpetrators.Note that the construction of the equal protection provision in hate crimes statutes is particular and does not necessarily apply to other sorts of laws that could protect specific occupational categories for some reason other than bias. In fact, Kentucky, already has provisions enhanced penalties for crimes of various sorts committed against law enforcement and other categories of public employees. Such provisions afford a higher level of protection than hate crimes laws in that they do not require establishing motivation, which in practice can be extraordinarily difficult. Thus if you assault a police officer, particularly one acting in the line of duty, the crime can automatically be treated as different than assaulting another citizen, regardless of why you targetted them.Second, including law enforcement personnel in hate crimes statutes is not only unlikely to pass constitutional muster in the event that a case ever made it to a higher court, they actually undermine existing hate crimes laws. How? You have to start from the underlying premise that such laws were passed specifically to acknowledge the bloody history of lynching, particularly the lynching of Black folk in the aftermath of the Civil War and continuing through the Jim Crow era. Such attacks, even in fewer numbers, service to terrorize entire groups, in the way that any in fewer numbers, service to terrorize entire groups. Hate crimes laws were meant to acknowledge the vulnerability of a defina