Police could arrest anyone who, after being ordered to stay back, comes within 25 feet of on-duty law enforcement or medical personnel under a proposal under consideration by members of the South Carolina House. (File photo/Getty Images)
COLUMBIA — Police could arrest anyone who, after being ordered to stay back, comes within 25 feet of on-duty law enforcement or medical personnel under a proposal advancing in the South Carolina House.
Similar laws passed in other states have yet to survive a legal challenge on First Amendment grounds. That didn’t dissuade the House Judiciary Committee from sending the legislation Tuesday to the House floor on a 15-4 vote. Six legislators didn’t vote. All four “no” votes came from Democrats.
“This bill isn’t a want or a need. It’s a must for law enforcement,” said JJ Jones, the executive director of the state’s police chiefs association.
The so-called HALO bill — Helping Alleviate Lawful Obstruction — would make it a misdemeanor, punishable by a $500 fine and up to 60 days in jail, to knowingly violate first responders’ orders and interfere, harass or distract them from their work.
It says nothing about videotaping, and a person can still exercise their rights to film or observe. But they must do so from 25 feet away following the officer’s warning.
Jones told members about his own experience two decades ago while on patrol: He was making a traffic stop on the side of the road near Pelion when a man with a camcorder approached him.
“He was taping me, and he was goading me on and trying to get me upset,” he said. “He went so far as putting the camera in my face. I could actually see my breath in the lens.”
The bill’s lead sponsor, Rep. Melissa Oremus, said she doesn’t want first responders to “fear for their life where they’re trying to save another.
“Our first responders are there to do a job,” the Aiken Republican said. “It’s not to punish anyone, but it’s to set those boundaries.”
Groups representing sheriffs, police officers, hospitals, emergency medical responders and firefighters echoed those sentiments in their own testimony.
State Attorney General Alan Wilson also offered his support.
“Every South Carolinian has the right to peacefully assemble and express their views,” he said in an emailed statement. “But, as we’ve seen across the country, protestors are becoming increasingly violent and preventing law enforcement from doing their jobs.”
“The legislature can send a clear message today: If you choose to engage in unlawful conduct by harassing a law enforcement officer or first responder, you will go to jail,” said the state’s top prosecutor, who is also running for governor.
But based on legal cases made to date, the proposal may not pass First Amendment muster.
Seth Stoughton, a former police officer turned University of South Carolina law professor, expressed sympathy for the difficulties first responders face when someone is yelling and cursing them, invading their space while they’re trying to do their job.
“Is it fair? No, it’s not,” he told the SC Daily Gazette. “But our government is not structured to protect police from annoyance and harassment. It’s designed to protect the citizenry from government overreach.”
A federal judge threw out a 2022 Arizona law, shortly after its enactment, that prohibited people from video recording within 8 feet of police enforcement.
Another federal judge also blocked a 2023 Indiana law enacting a 25-foot buffer surrounding an ongoing police investigative scene, finding it unconstitutionally vague.
Even after legislators went back to the drawing board last year in an attempt to clarify its position, it still wasn’t enough to pass judicial muster.
And a lawsuit by multiple news outlets blocked a 2024 Louisiana law that, following a verbal warning, bars someone from coming within 25 feet of police officers performing their duties. That case continues under appeal.
A case in Tennessee also is ongoing.
And a Florida law nearly identical to the South Carolina proposal is facing a legal challenge following the arrest of two Jacksonville women outside a charter school. Police say the two women were too close to an officer while he was trying to handcuff another woman.
“Our law enforcement officers should be safe. No one doubts that,” said Courtney Thomas, with South Carolina’s chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. “But this bill could violate the First Amendment because it could curb and chill free speech.”
There are already laws on the books to address obstruction of justice, the law enforcement leaders who testified on the bill acknowledged. But those address behavior after the fact rather than the upfront deterrent a HALO law provides, Jones said.
That’s also probably why judges keep finding these new laws unconstitutional, said Stoughton, the USC professor.
When it comes to protected free speech, the judicial system is extremely skeptical of what’s known as prior restraint — anything that may stop someone from speaking out of fear of legal repercussions. Any law that may impede speech must be narrow in scope and so far judges have ruled these proposals apply too broadly, Stoughton said.
Specifying a distance becomes problematic, he said: What if the person doing the yelling or filming is a passenger in the car during a traffic stop or a neighbor standing in their own yard that is less than 25 feet away?
Continuing to pass such laws after they’ve been repeatedly struck down isn’t likely to make a difference for the challenges first responders face, Stoughton added.
“It’s not meaningfully helping policing; it’s just confusing the issue,” he said.
He contends the law could instead set up officers for failure and cities and departments for legal liability.
Oremus said her goal is to keep everyone safe, not impede anyone’s rights.
While the bill is meant to apply just to state and local officials, Oremus pointed to clashes between federal immigration agents in Minnesota and those protesting against mass deportation efforts.
“We’ve seen such chaos in our world today,” she said.
“What we’re seeing on social media and the news tends to show us the worst case scenarios in every situation,” Oremus later told the SC Daily Gazette. “And what the world is witnessing now is our law enforcement being impeded. And you can clearly see it.”
She said people are increasingly using their cellphones to capture whatever can get them social media clicks.
“People are more willing to whip out their cameras than they are to actually assist in whatever the emergency is,” she said. “They want to be the first to say I got this captured.”
But bystander recordings have sometimes shown a story different from officers’ accounts and played a major role in recent years in holding law enforcement accountable, according to the ACLU.
“When police can kill, so often the only recourse for the public is to witness and watch and record,” Thomas said. “This law, while it does not outlaw that, would make it harder.”
If this bill were law in 2015, she said, we might have never known about the true circumstances of the death of Walter Scott, an unarmed Black man in North Charleston who a police officer shot eight times as he ran away.
Two months after Scott’s death, the Legislature passed a law encouraging all law enforcement agencies to wear body cameras and creating a state grant program to fund them.
“I’m not saying cameras are a bad thing,” Oremus told the Daily Gazette. “It’s just added to the hype, created a hysteria.”
“We need to get back to a law and order society,” she added. “Law enforcement, the ones who are protecting us, protecting our communities, are crying out saying we need help.”
Rep. Justin Bamberg, an attorney from rural Bamberg, said the bill could force people to prove in court they had a legitimate reason for breaking the buffer: Maybe they were worried about the person’s safety and wanted to film but needed to get closer because their old cellphone can’t zoom in well.
“I get that these are all real problems we’ve seen in the law enforcement arena, where folks want to go and they want to film the cops and it can amp a situation up sometimes,” said the son of the Bamberg County sheriff.
“These are just some real-life things to think about,” he added. He was among Democrats voting “no.”
Unlike other states’ laws, Oremus’ bill would also extend protections within the state’s hospitals.
“We have a problem in South Carolina that’s continuing to grow in our hospitals, and that is that gang bangers are following the injured parties into emergency rooms,” said the committee chairman, Rep. Weston Newton.
“Our hospitals all don’t have metal detectors at the door,” the Bluffton Republican said. “They don’t have armed guards at every door. They don’t want them. They don’t want to have to fortify every hospital.”
Rep. Kathy Landing, R-Mount Pleasant, pointed to the second annual workplace violence survey put out by the state’s hospital association.
The report said at least seven workplace violence incidents occur in South Carolina hospitals every day, largely against nurses. However, according to the data, 77% of that violence came from the patients the employees were trying to help, 11% were fellow employees, and 9% were family members of patients.
“I am sick and tired of hearing us constantly talk about how we can’t do a law to protect our citizens,” Landing said before voting “yes” to advance the bill. “You can stay out of the police’s face. You can stay out of the healthcare worker’s face when they’re trying to do their job.”
Stoughton said the bill’s protections would be unnecessary in Newton’s example, since threatening a victim is already illegal.
Courtesy of South Carolina Daily Gazette
