HOUSE PASSES PROFILING MEASURE

Rep. Matt Throckmorton has seen racial profiling up close. And it isn't
pretty, he says.

"A few years ago, I would have never believed it could happen here" in
Utah. "Now I'm 100 percent sure it does," says the Springville Republican.

That's why he voted Tuesday afternoon for HB199, Rep. Duane Bourdeaux's
bill that would set up a statewide traffic-stop accounting system to track
and, hopefully, identify police officers and police departments that stop
drivers, not on offenses, but for racial, ethnic, age or gender reasons.

After several failed attempts to amend the bill, lawmakers passed it,
58-16, and it now goes to the Senate, where a similar bill died last year.

Throckmorton said his his wife, Valerie, before their marriage, served an
LDS Church mission in Mississippi where she and her missionary companion
baptized a black man. The man later married Valerie's companion, and the
couple settled in a small southern Utah town, which Throckmorton declined
to name.

Local police began stopping the man, Throckmorton and others believed,
because he was the only black face behind the wheel in that town.

"It would happen two and three times a month, month after month," says
Throckmorton. "Louis isn't a wanted criminal; he doesn't do drugs."
Throckmorton said he finally had to make some calls to town officials to
get it stopped. "It was completely ridiculous," he said.

Bourdeaux, the only black in the 104-member Legislature, said his bill
works this way: After an officer writes a traffic ticket or a stop is
logged, the race, age and other information on the driver's license will be
entered into a state data base. Once a month the state's Commission on
Criminal and Juvenile Justice will review the reports, which will also show
the demographic break-outs of the geographic region where the stop took place.

Researchers will be looking for any statistical irregularities. For
example, should an area with 15 percent Hispanics see 80 percent of the
traffic stops involve Hispanics, local law enforcement officials would be
notified. It's hoped officer training would correct any problems.

The bill, which has the backing of state law enforcement, also requires
that each law enforcement agency write up policies and procedures banning
racial profiling and implementing ways to prevent it.

Rep. Glenn Way, R-Spanish Fork, who supported the bill, said it gives
police administrators tools to identify problems and act against problem
officers.

One UHP trooper near Nephi was writing tickets to drivers whose last names
always seemed to end in "ez," said Way - an indication that he was stopping
a high percentage of Hispanics. Another officer had complaints of sexual
harassment against him. A review of his tickets shows he was stopping a
large percent of young women.

The system set up in HB199 would make monitoring such incidents quicker,
easier, less costly and may identify problems before the complaints come in.

But Rep. John Swallow, R-Sandy, and several other GOP House members
complained that tracking by a state data base "could have a chilling
effect" on law officers who work in areas with large minority populations.
Police may not want to stop a driver acting suspiciously, or even stop a
traffic violator who is a racial minority and risk getting tagged as a
racial profiler.

Crime prevention could suffer, said Swallow, who said he wanted to support
the bill but not with the state data base included. Swallow's attempt to
amend out of HB199 the state data base failed in a voice vote, however. "It
would have gutted the bill," Bourdeaux said.