Credit: CNN

After years of protests against police abuses in Minneapolis, Baltimore, Standing Rock, and beyond, law enforcement has found a way to try and clamp down on any future mass movements by quietly lobbying for bills that seek to criminalize protesting itself.

According a Monday report from In These Times, police associations, police unions, district attorneys, and cops in leadership positions have been lobbying in favor of “protest suppression” laws in at least eight states:

According to research conducted for In These Times in partnership with Ear to the Ground, law enforcement in at least eight states—Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Washington and Wyoming—lobbied on behalf of anti-protest bills in 2017 and 2018. The bills ran the gamut from punishing face coverings at protests to increasing penalties for “economic disruption” and highway blockage to criminalizing civil protests that interfere with “critical infrastructure” like oil pipelines.

Emboldened by the Trump administration, at least 31 states have considered 62 pieces of anti-protest legislation since November 2016, with at least seven enacted and 31 […]

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