{"id":33058,"date":"2023-07-06T12:42:16","date_gmt":"2023-07-06T18:42:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/shining-lasers-at-airplanes-is-now-even-more-illegal-in-colorado\/"},"modified":"2023-07-06T18:42:16","modified_gmt":"2023-07-06T18:42:16","slug":"shining-lasers-at-airplanes-is-now-even-more-illegal-in-colorado","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/shining-lasers-at-airplanes-is-now-even-more-illegal-in-colorado\/","title":{"rendered":"Shining lasers at airplanes is now even more illegal in Colorado"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"A
A Flight For Life crew was preparing to land at the Durango-La Plata County Airport when a person pointed a laser beam into the cockpit.<\/span>Adobe Stock<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

Last year, pilots over Colorado reported more than 300 \u201claser strike\u201d incidents \u2014 someone on the ground shining a laser pointer at an airplane or helicopter.<\/p>\n

A laser beam can ruin a pilot\u2019s night vision or even temporarily blind them, especially as the windshield scatters the light around the cockpit. It\u2019s especially dangerous when the aircraft is closest to the ground \u2013 making it an easier target just as the pilots are trying to land or take off.<\/p>\n

The perpetrators are committing a federal felony, but very few people are caught, with authorities identifying a suspect in only about 1% of cases, according to legislative analysts.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard enough to find a single laser pointer in the night, but law enforcement also faces a legal problem: While there is a federal law against the practice, the state hasn\u2019t considered it a crime, until now. That means local law agencies had little power to prosecute laser-wielding scoundrels.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur local law enforcement are pretty much limited to confiscating the laser pointer and referring the matter to the FBI. FBI resources are stretched very thin in this state, and especially where aviation crimes occur,\u201d said Rep. Matt Soper, a Republican, in a committee hearing this year.<\/p>\n

Soper hopes future incidents will be handled very differently. He co-sponsored a new law, SB23-95, to make laser strikes a state felony, too. Starting on July 1, local police and prosecutors can now take these cases to court on their own.<\/p>\n

There are relatively few restrictions on laser sales in the U.S., and it\u2019s \u201cextremely easy\u201d to get a laser that is thousands of times more powerful than your typical classroom aid, the BBC reported. Those juiced up lasers \u2013 including some available on Amazon \u2013 are powerful enough to burn paper and damage retinas. But even a low-power 5 mW pointer \u201ccan easily cause glare and distract pilots,\u201d at lower altitudes, the International Federation of Air Line Pilots\u2019 Associations reported.<\/p>\n

The number of laser strikes reported in Colorado has generally increased since 2010, reflecting a national trend. Most have happened around Denver International Airport, but more than 100 have also been reported in Colorado Springs, Longmont and Pueblo in the past 13 years. Scattered reports have also come from all corners of the state, from Akron to Kremmling.<\/p>\n

Laser strikes don\u2019t just affect commercial airliners, either. Lawmakers heard about cases where air ambulances and search-and-rescue helicopters were targeted. At a committee hearing, Kathleen Mayer, program director of Flight For Life Colorado, described a 2017 attack on one of the organization\u2019s transport airplanes as it approached its home airport in Centennial. The pilot was temporarily blinded and a medical crew member was left with permanent vision loss.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe learned that his vision had been permanently damaged by a burn to his retina that destroyed a full 30% of his vision,\u201d Meyer said.<\/p>\n

\u201cShortly after that, he left our program \u2013 long before he was ready to \u2013 because he was unable to see the ventilator settings or the monitor readings across the back of that airplane or the helicopter.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sen. Joann Ginal, a Democratic cosponsor, said she initially assumed incidents were usually \u201ckids just fooling around.\u201d But she learned that adults were behind most of the cases where a suspect could be identified.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s just people who do it maliciously, or they think it\u2019s a joke,\u201d she said. Experts also say that some people may not realize the harm they\u2019re doing, because lasers can appear to their users to reach only a short distance into the sky, even as they\u2019re actually going much further.<\/p>\n

The new law creates a Class 6 state felony, punishable by up to $100,000 in fines and 18 months imprisonment. Federal law allows five years imprisonment, and the Federal Aviation Administration has fined people up to $30,800 for repeat offenses.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo me, misdemeanors are just a slap on the hand, and I don\u2019t believe people take misdemeanors serious enough, and so I was really glad that we got this to be a Class 6 felony,\u201d Ginal said.<\/p>\n

The measure passed without opposition in the Senate, but it drew a handful of \u201cno\u201d votes from progressive Democrats in the House, who generally argue that tougher criminal penalties can derail people\u2019s lives while doing little to stop crime. Some lawmakers moved amendments, unsuccessfully, to offer a lighter misdemeanor charge and exemptions for people with less powerful laser devices, among others.<\/p>\n

Democratic Rep. Elisabeth Epps said the state should focus on education and prevention, not punishment.<\/p>\n

\u201cHow does this keep our patients and our pilots and our paramedics safer? The response was that, \u2018Well, it\u2019s a social message,\u2019\u201d she said at a committee hearing. \u201cAnd when we\u2019re weighing the consequences of creating a new felony, bringing someone into that felonization net without affirming the option of a misdemeanor, that is the thing that pushes us toward the next $2 billion (Department of Corrections) budget, and that isn\u2019t investing in that which keeps us safe.\u201d<\/p>\n

Reps. Kyle Brown, Javier Mabrey, Chris deGruy Kennedy and Lorena Garcia, all Democrats, also voted against the measure.<\/p>\n

Soper and Ginal cosponsored the new state law with Democratic Rep. Lindsey Daugherty and Republican Sen. Bob Gardner.<\/p>\n

Both federal law and the new state law include exemptions for people sending emergency distress signals, as well as authorized researchers and people in training.<\/p>\n

To read more stories from Colorado Public Radio, visit www.cpr.org<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A new state law gives local police more power to stop laser-wielding scofflaws<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":33059,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[394,168,28,107],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-33058","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-colorado-legislature","tag-crime","tag-headlines","tag-laws"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33058","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33058"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33058\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33059"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33058"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33058"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33058"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=33058"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}