The idea behind this new bill in Minnesota is to better track a rise in hate crimes, including those aimed at Asian Americans.

…the hate crimes bill is now sponsored by Rep. Samantha Vang, a Hmong-American DFL lawmaker from Brooklyn Center.

“As an Asian-American woman, this is also personal,” Vang said. “During the pandemic, with the rhetoric being used to blame Asian Americans for the coronavirus, not just me but the Asian American community felt unsafe for the first time in a long time.”

But the bill in question goes beyond just tracking actual hate crimes. It would also create a new tracking mechanism to follow incidents that fall short of being crimes. If the bill passes, the state Department of Human Rights would be empowered to create a new database of bias incidents. The information would be gathered from schools, individuals and community organizations.

People on both sides of the aisle immediately raised concern about the bias incident reporting part of the bill:

“I am deeply concerned about the implications of this bill,” [State Rep. Walter] Hudson said. “We’re going to create a database of incidents that have no objective standard determining whether or not they violated the law, whether or not they had anything distinct from normal speech, an incident of bias.”

Hudson said someone could post on social media a Bible verse that defined marriage as being between one man and one woman or opposed certain “sexual proclivities.” Would that be an incident reportable under the bill? he asked.

Even the ACLU, which is not the free speech organization it once was, saw the potential problem. In a letter about the bill, the ACLU of Minnesota wrote “the expansive provisions in HF181 introduce the prospect that speech and/or associations unrelated to a particular action may be inappropriately used to infer biased motivation.”

Rep. Vang’s take on all of this is that Section 1 of the bill which involves the reporting of bias incidents is completely harmless because it has no connection to any kind of investigation or penalties. But these reports would often be 3rd party and would not be investigated for accuracy. More to the point, these reports would not be limited to actual crimes but would seem to include the reporting of what would properly be classified as free speech.

“It’s government collecting data about speech that is not criminal and therefore has no compelling state interest in being collected,” GOP Rep. Walter Hudson of Albertville asserted.

“In committee it was said we’re going to use this data to identify hot spots of bias, to label communities as problematic, based upon subjective, unverified, un-objective, vague, arbitrary claims of bias!”

Rep. Harry Niska, a Ramsey Republican, offered an amendment that would add the word “criminal” to the word “incident” in that section of the bill. He raised constitutional freedom of speech concerns, noting that private citizens could be placed into the state’s bias database by expressing political opinions.

Niska’s amendment failed after vigorous debate.

So the question remains just how far the reporting of non-criminal bias incident might go. Rep. Vang was questioned about this with a couple of specific examples. If a Minnesotan wrote and article arguing that COVID was a Chinese bioweapon leaked from a lab could that be reported? As you’ll see, her response boiled down to a yes. What about someone wearing an “I love JK Rowling” t-shirt? Here she did her best to dodge the question but the impression I’m left with is that, yes, this could also be considered a reportable bias incident if someone felt it was meant to hurt the feelings of trans people. Here’s the clip.

Rep. Vang has a provision in the Judiciary Bill that creates a government database of “hate incidents” (not crimes, which are already tracked).

Rep. Vang says “hate incidents” could include:

– Writing an article saying COVID came from China
– Wearing a “I ♥️ JK Rowling” shirt pic.twitter.com/7N2hjFBUME

— MN House GOP War Room (@MNHRCWarRoom) April 26, 2023

This strikes me as a very bad idea. The government has reason to track bias-related crimes just as it does all crimes. It should not be in the business of tracking unverified “bias incidents” which are not crimes and which are so vaguely defined that anything including a T-shirt slogan could be considered worthy of reporting.