A law making it illegal in Louisiana to get within 25 feet of a police officer once one has been told to back away has been challenged in court.
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During the 2024 Louisiana State Legislature regular session, House Bill 173 was passed through both houses of the legislature – nearly entirely along party lines. Gov. Jeff Landry promptly signed the bill into law in May and it took effect in the beginning of August.
Now, the law is under threat.
The bill, while only recently passed in Louisiana, has seen various iterations in different states which have attempted to create a buffer zone around police officers.
In Arizona, a law that outlawed people from recording law enforcement officers within 8 feet was overturned, in part due to its violation of the First Amendment. The Louisiana law, however, makes no reference to recording officers. An Indiana law with the same 25-foot buffer zone was struck down by a judge at the end of 2024.
Unlike the Arizona law the Louisiana law does not explicitly ban the videotaping of a police officer from a certain distance, but dissenters still argue it creates an implicit ban – or at the very least, makes it much more difficult.
“We know that transparency is a friend of freedom,” Nathan Jones, vice president of Tulane University College Democrats said. “The reason that George Floyd’s murder became so publicized and received the international outrage that it did was because a young woman bravely recorded it.”
Indiana’s law is basically identical to the one passed in the Louisiana legislature — it was struck down in a federal court based in Indiana, but the Louisiana courts do not have to abide by the first court’s decision.
Other opponents point to existing laws that deal with obstructing police activity and argue that the law’s vagueness allows for the indiscriminate abuse of power. The language merely requires an officer to be “lawfully engaged in the execution of his official duties” to invoke it.
Maybell Romero, an associate professor of law, criticized the breadth and discretion offered to officers to invoke the law.
“It sounds to me like officers will be able to establish a 25-foot perimeter around themselves by which they might be able to order people to stay away while they’re doing anything,” she said.
“We already have statutes on the books with regard to criminalizing behavior that interferes with an officer being able to do their job… so this seems duplicative.”
Proponents of the law have defended it as a necessary safety tool for police to use in intense interactions and have cited the liberal guidelines governing when the law can be used in order to not restrict the officer’s ability to invoke it.
While the Tulane University Police Department functions as a separate entity from the New Orleans Police Department, as commissioned law enforcement officers, Romero said that she assumes they likely still have the power to invoke the law at their discretion.
“And that’s something that concerns me, too, to what extent can TUPD… use that as a way to limit student recording of the police or student interactions with the police,” Romero said.
The law is currently being challenged in court after six news organizations collectively sued the state, arguing that it violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution and impedes the organizations’ ability to report freely. They are seeking a preliminary injunction to block the enforcement of the law.
Judge John deGravelles heard arguments in December when he pressed the state attorneys on the freedom of officers to invoke the law at their discretion. Despite expectations for a ruling in the weeks following the hearing, nothing has been announced.
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