One is a protective cloak and the other is a glaring probe.
Two ambitious proposals up for debate in the Legislative session that began Monday share similar objectives but have strikingly different approaches to minority issues.With one, police officers across the state accused of racial profiling have a potential way of vindicating themselves under a bill that seeks to have officers track the race of each person they stop.
Another bill aims to define the categories of people who merit protection from hate crimes. While Utah has a hate crimes law on the books, prosecutors say the law is unenforceable because it it is too vague and fails to specify victims who are protected. Sen. Pete Suazo, D-Salt Lake, tried to get the bill passed last year, but it died in committee because of heated opposition.
As promised, he vowed to return with the bill despite the anticipated controversy generated by opponents who say the bill, by spelling out protected classes, doles out special consideration to those groups.
The bill on racial profiling is also meeting early opposition with police officials predicting dire consequences if it passes. They assert it will backfire with its intrusiveness and discourage officers from having contact with the public.
Rep. Duane Bourdeaux, D-Salt Lake, wants law enforcement agencies throughout Utah to record the race of each person they encounter. He wants the tracking to occur over a two-year period and then cease when it either exonerates law enforcement or proves minorities' accusations.
"I do not want to strike out at police and say they are doing this, but we will never know unless we put mechanism in place to document it," Bourdeaux said. "At the present time, we truly do not have enough concrete data to determine if racial profiling is taking place."
Racial profiling is when an officer singles out a person solely based on race, instead of relying on court-sanctioned reasons for the contact.
Although law enforcement agencies record data such as a person's race when they issue citations from traffic stops or write initial crime reports, they do not document that information in every encounter.
Bourdeaux, who is black and says he was a victim of racial profiling, says he hears from minorities across the state who allege they've been stopped or otherwise harassed by police solely due to their race. "I don't think it is right for ethnic communities to feel this way."
Top law enforcement officials, however, say racial profiling occurs infrequently, if at all.
"I have not seen it here," Weber County Sheriff Brad Slater said. " I am not aware of it occurring with any great frequency across the industry."
And they agree that Bordeaux's proposal could be problematic.
"People don't like to be asked about their race. It will create a lot larger problem," said Midvale Police Chief Gerald Maughan.
Slater said that several years ago his department used to require documenting a comprehensive list of information on simple motorist assists -- instances where officers stop to help stranded drivers.
He said they discontinued the practice because it was cumbersome for officers and the public didn't like it.
"People would get angry. They didn't like sharing a lot of information if there was the perception they'd done nothing wrong."
Maughan suggests if authorities want that information documented, it should be included on everyone's driver's license.
While prosecutors in federal court have successfully gained convictions against Utahns under the national hate crime law, no one has been successfully prosecuted under Utah's hate crime statue because it is too vague, University of Utah law professor Terry Kogan said.
"Most police officers wouldn't know a hate crime if it came up to them in the street and stared them in the face," Kogan said.
Similarly, Kogan said, Utah prosecutors are leery of using state's hate crime statue because it is so vague that lawyers don't know what they need to prove in order to get a conviction.
Last November, 3rd District Judge William W. Barrett dismissed a hate crime charge against two men accused of attacking a homosexual man.
"The statue does not identify sexual orientation as a protected class and . . . is incomplete without clearly identifying the class of persons protected," Barrett wrote.
In fact, the statute doesn't name any specific class as protected, only saying the law can be implemented an attack is committed with, "the intent to intimidate or terrorize."
But problems with Utah's hate crime law haven't stopped Moab police and prosecutors this month from using the statue to enhance a misdemeanor assault charge to a felony against a 21-year-old man.
Bill Benge, Grand County Attorney, was not available for comment. Police, however, stated in their report that hate crime charges were appropriate because the assault was specifically intended to "intimidate and terrorize (the victims)," who were an interracial couple.
Deseret News staff writer Brady Snyder contributed to this report.