In the two years that Rick Dinse has served as chief of police in Salt Lake City, crimes motivated by hate have occurred 43 times in the city.
"The issue of hate crimes in the community is very real and very much alive," the chief said. "Those are terrorist threats."
Hate crimes affect entire communities, and Utah lawmakers should take "responsibility" and pass a bill that enhances the penalties for those who "would commit hate crimes by terrorism against our domestic communities," Dinse said.
Dinse stood with Jonathan Bernstein, director of the San Francisco office of the Anti-Defamation League, and leaders from numerous Utah religious faiths on Capitol Hill Monday to endorse HB68, a penalty enhancement for crimes of hate.
Sponsored by Rep. David Litvack, D-Salt Lake, the bill details a list of categories that would be protected, including race, religion, gender, age, sexual orientation, national origin, color, disability or ancestry. A list of nearly 80 community, religious, education and business community leaders who support the bill was also being circulated among legislators on Monday.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was not represented Monday but did not oppose "as drafted" a nearly identical bill carried by Litvack in 2003, which also included sexual orientation. Asked for a statement on this year's legislation, church spokesman Dale Bills said he could only reiterate the church's position of 2003.
But HB68 is not the only bill that seeks to address the problem of hate-based crimes to come before lawmakers this year. SB41, sponsored by Sen. James Evans, R-Rose Park, also seeks a penalty enhancement but does so without defining any categories or groups.
The two lawmakers are scheduled to appear together today at 7 p.m. in the Salt Lake County Council chambers, 2101 S. State, along with the ADL's Bernstein. The event is being characterized by some as a discussion and by others as a debate.
Evans dismisses group classification lists as exclusionary and discriminatory. SB41 instead refers only to bias or prejudice committed against "the victim," he said.
"Under my bill, no group is excluded," Evans said. "I could not support a bill that listed group classifications because that's inherently discriminatory. My bill is simply not discriminatory because the legislative intent in my bill is not to exclude any group classification."
Evans says that under his bill, people with characteristics as "unusually short" or "overweight" or "rich" could be protected, while they would not be under Litvack's bill.
The question is which bill would give police and prosecutors a better tool to work with? Utah's existing hate-crimes statute, which asks prosecutors to prove that a person's civil rights have been impeded, has been dismissed as overly broad and unenforceable.
"We don't know," said Paul Boyden, executive director of Utah's Statewide Association of Prosecutors, when asked about the bills' effectiveness. "They are opposite approaches. We feel the most effective way that we can serve prosecution and the public at large is to try to see that whatever bill goes into law is as clear and legally sound as possible."
Evans believes his bill will do that. SB41 borrows heavily from language in Georgia law that Evans said was upheld by a district-court-level judge when challenged.
He also objects to the argument used by some that because the courts in many states have ruled in favor of the group classifications that such lists belong in Utah law.
"The courts have said, yes, it's OK to discriminate in these areas, and the question is, does that mean that that is what we want to do?" he said. "And that's where I say we have the opportunity to pass a bill that treats everyone equally, and I guess I just don't understand why there are those who insist that we discriminate."
Nationally, about 8,000 hate crimes are reported annually to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the ADL's Bernstein said. The last report to the FBI indicated that 54 hate crimes — mostly committed because of the victims' religion, race or sexual orientation — were committed in Utah.
Hate crimes, he added, are different from other crimes in that they tend to be more brutal, causing twice as many injuries and four times as many hospitalizations. And unlike other kinds of crime, there is little a victim can do to prevent being targeted, Bernstein said.
"You can't change your background, you can't change the color of your skin, you can't change your religion, you can't change your sexual orientation; it makes you feel extremely vulnerable," Bernstein said. "And so it has a much greater emotional and psychological impact on the victim and the victim's community."
Across the nation, 47 states and the federal government have hate-crimes laws in place. Of those, only Utah and Georgia fail to list group classifications. Many states have passed their laws without those classifications but later went back and added them because prosecutors found vague legislation too difficult to use, Bernstein said.
In some cases, it has taken episodes like the beating death of Matthew Shepard in Wyoming or the dragging/beheading of James Byrd in Texas for lawmakers to act, he said after the press conference.
"Unfortunately, that's a bit of human nature; we tend to put up road rails after a car goes off the road," he said.
E-mail: jdobner@desnews.com