The Eugene City Council may vote to criminalize the display of nooses and more than double the fine for bias crimes in the second degree, based on recent public hearings.

The council held a public hearing on Oct. 18 regarding a proposed ordinance “concerning the crime of intimidation by display of a noose.” The ordinance would also increase the penalty for bias crimes in the second degree from $2,500 to $6,250, as well as one year in jail, or both.

A bias crime is a crime motivated by a person’s real or perceived association with race, color, disability, religion, national origin, sexual orientation and/or gender identity. Bias crimes that can be prosecuted by the City of Eugene in municipal court can also include a crime motivated by unhoused status, according to the city’s website.

The proposed ordinance follows the Oregon legislature’s passage of SB 398 in June, which creates the crime of intimidation by display of a noose.

The public did not have any comments during the hearing. However, council members Matt Keating and Claire Syrett expressed their support for the proposed ordinance.

Keating said the council’s Intergovernmental Relations Committee, which considers and makes recommendations on legislative issues, unanimously recommended and ethusicatically advocated for SB 398’s passage.

“Obviously, I’m glad that we’re considering this, regardless of whether the state passed something,” Syrett said.

Syrett also thanked Councilor Greg Evans, who was absent, for his “very personal and impactful testimony to the state legislature in support of this bill, recounting his own family’s history with lynching that was never prosecuted.”

Evans, one of three council members on the committee, wrote the testimony in support of SB 398 in March. In his testimony, he said Eugene residents are not immune to the use of a noose as hate speech and intimidation, and several incidents of nooses being displayed publicly or placed in residents of African Americans have been documented.

“It is impossible for anyone to deny that when people use a noose in public, they are using it to intimidate the African American community and continue our country’s history of oppression and racism,” Evans wrote.

The public hearing on the proposed ordinance comes a month after Ashley Carr, a former Springfield resident and member of the police abolition and Black liberation group Black Unity, filed a federal lawsuit against the city of Springfield and Springfield police officer Joseph Burke.

The lawsuit alleges that Burke detained and intimidated Carr on the basis of her race and affiliation with Black Unity on July 28, 2020 while she sat outside her Springfield home.

Carr’s neighbors had frequently used racial slurs against her, and one neighbor hung a noose around a fake skeleton in his front yard, which she perceived as racially motivated and meant to scare her, the lawsuit alleges.

Black Unity planned a protest in support of Carr called “The Noose is a Nuisance,” which was set to occur the day after Burke approached Carr.

Evans wrote a passage for the complaint, describing lynching in his family in 1915 and writing that the noose is a symbol of terrorism. “From Jim Crow post-Civil War to present day, like the swastika, we all know what it means,” the complaint said.

The Eugene City Council has not yet set a date to vote on the proposed ordinance.