A panel of residents blistered Utah's three candidates for attorney general with questions about crime and punishment in a debate Tuesday night.
KUER radio assembled 10 panelists from various walks of life for a series of forums prior to the Nov. 7 election. They showed up Tuesday night armed and inquisitive, which can be dangerous for candidates who don't want to slip up this late in the game.
Retired educator Ray Warner said it seems to him crime is on the rise. "I don't understand what we're doing in Utah to curb crime," he said.
Democrat Reed Richards, Attorney General Jan Graham's chief deputy, said that in fact, crime has dropped "substantially" the past three years, especially violent and gang crime. He did concede thefts and burglaries were up because the state has a young population.
"You can talk statistics all day, but people don't feel as safe as they did 10 years ago," countered Republican Mark Shurtleff. Homicide, rape and robbery are up this year, and graffiti is the only gang-related crime that is down.
Libertarian Andrew McCullough said there's always a crime problem. But when politicians start talking about getting tough on crime, he said that translates into more searches without warrants and police stops without cause.
"How much liberty are we willing to give up to feel safe?" he said.
Panel member Darius Gray said he has no criminal record and has never been arrested. Yet police have stopped him several times because he is black. He wanted to know how the candidates in their "zeal and passion" to cut crime would end racial profiling.
Shurtleff called profiling "intolerable" and said there ought to be a way to categorize police stops to identify when it is happening.
Tracking is only part of the solution and must be done in a way that's fair, Richards said. Profiling needs to be examined at every level, from cops to jailers to judges.
McCullough has filed three profiling cases against the Utah Highway Patrol. "I keep suing them. They keep doing it," he said, adding the issue was among those that prompted him to run for attorney general.
McCullough favors decriminalizing drug possession and legalizing marijuana to keep jail and prison populations from swelling. Neither Richards nor Shurtleff favors that approach, and Shurtleff said he would "fight to my last breath" to stop the legalization of drugs.
Prison work, education and trade programs should be expanded to keep inmates from returning to crime once they're released, Richards said.
Shurtleff said most offenses are somehow tied to drugs. He favors implementing a "re-entry court" program similar to drug court to rehabilitate prison drug addicts before they're released.
Resident Bob Vandergrift took the candidates, with the exception of McCullough, to task for supporting the death penalty and zero tolerance and three-strikes policies.
"I think there must be something inside you that is human, but I don't know what it is," he said.
Richards, who prosecuted a Weber County case in which a man raped and strangled an 11-year-old girl, said death is warranted in some cases. "If someone commits a serious crime, they should get serious punishment," he said.
Shurtleff also favors the death penalty. He cited a case in which a white prison inmate stabbed another inmate 87 times because he was black. He said he's not sure capital punishment deters crime, but it is the ultimate deterrent for the person executed.
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