State Sen. Floyd Prozanski of Eugene is sponsoring a bill that would make it a crime to threaten a public official. (Photo by Amanda Loman/Oregon Capital Chronicle)
Elected and other government officials are being threatened more often and in more ways than they were even just a few years ago, and legal pushback has been limited.
The effort to counter that wave of intimidation should be broader than most advocates have proposed in the past, but maybe framed in different ways — as an Oregon judge proposed at a legislative hearing earlier this month.
The hearing concerned Senate Bill 473, which would create a new crime of threatening a public official. It was proposed by the city of Eugene, and sponsored by Senator Floyd Prozanski, D- Eugene, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee. The measure would target a person who “knowingly delivers or conveys, directly or indirectly and by any means, a threatening communication to a public official or a member of the public official’s immediate family,” and it could be reasonably interpreted as a warning of violence. It would be a misdemeanor first time out, and felony for repeat instances.
Some opposition has arisen. In a few cases, it comes from people arguing it goes too far.
“This seems like a law that would be abused to silence members of the public and limit protected free speech,” one opponent said in written testimony.
The bill’s supporters pointed out, however, that only threats of imminent violence would be covered under its terms. Though differing in some details, it is set up along the lines of existing laws on menacing, harassment, stalking and intimidation.
Similar bills have failed before, but the pressure to take some effective action has grown. One national study released in December said that in 2024 there were about 600 threat and harassment incidents targeting local officials, across almost all states, a number up by 19% from the year before and 108% the year before that.
In response to the proposal, the Taxpayers Association of Oregon said that, “During a three-year period of the Portland violent protests, the Taxpayers Association of Oregon documented many examples of violent threats placed upon local officials — including state lawmakers. These threats were sometimes placed on public buildings or accompanied by arson and vandalism. Three Portland elected officials had arson events outside their homes.”
The new bill came from the Lane County area partly because of a seeming explosion of threatening messaging there. The city of Eugene cited dozens of threatening emails to attorneys and others in the court system, Eugene’s mayor and chief of police and many others.
Much of the comment about the bill suggested, however, that limiting a new crime to threats of immediate harm wouldn’t go nearly far enough to address the problem.
The League of Women Voters, for example, urged that doxxing — the use of digital records to harass psychologically, economically and otherwise — should be barred.
Most provocative, though, was committee testimony from a judge of Oregon’s Court of Appeals, Ramon Pagan. Before his current posting, he was a Washington County judge assigned to the family law team.
While there in 2021, he encountered a litigant who, he said, behaved without problem at the trial but later began a pattern of threatening behavior. Pagan recalled that the man’s attorney said he “had become delusional, had started forming conspiratorial thoughts about me and had been repeatedly pointing out that he knew where I lived.”
The man started sending online maps showing, among other things, where Pagan and his wife walked their dogs. He even researched and copied paperwork related to his wife’s personal history.
Pagan said his life changed entirely because the man made a veiled threat but knew enough not to be direct about it.
This sort of harassment, which also included elements of doxxing, would not be covered by the new Eugene legislation.
Pagan had another suggestion: Instead of basing a law around prohibiting menacing or harassing conduct, the committee should consider a different angle and orient it instead around the idea of coercion.
“If the intent was either to affect a pending proceeding or to harass a judge for revenge for a prior proceeding it should be enforceable,” Pagan testified.
He suggested that it would be in the government’s interest to prohibit action that impeded or intimidated public officials from doing their jobs, whatever mechanism a harasser used.
That, too, is a complex question, and legislation would have to be crafted carefully to avoid reeling in people who are using their right to speak out in criticism of government action.
But Pagan’s broader argument, focusing on the specific problem resulting from the new-style campaigns of intimidation, probably offers a road map for developing a more effective law. As the Senate Judiciary Committee starts adjusting legislation, that might be something for lawmakers to consider.
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