Dinse, panel hear minority concerns

In a town-meeting-style discussion that ran 40 minutes over its planned two hours, Salt Lake area minorities recounted vivid stories of racial profiling and grappled with the fact that they face a nearly all-white criminal justice system.

In response, Salt Lake Police Chief Rick Dinse and a panel of judges and lawyers urged them to keep speaking out.

The room at Calvary Baptist Church in Salt Lake City was nearly filled with African-Americans. They spoke of times they had been pulled over by police officers who said, "I thought you were somebody else," and then gave them fix-it tickets.

They spoke of stereotypes that blacks and Hispanics are drug users or just too incompetent to qualify for police work. And they spoke of police officers who, they suspect, exaggerate on reports to make traffic stops of minorities look justified.

Part of the answer, acknowledged the police chief, would be to hire more minorities in police work. But it's been difficult to recruit people of color, especially in Utah, he said.

So police and sheriff's departments are stubbornly monochromatic, even as the state's population diversifies. The Salt Lake force doesn't come anywhere near reflecting the capital's Latino population, Dinse said.

"We have Latinos, we have African-Americans, we have Native Americans who can do the job," said James Yapias, one of the relatively few Hispanics at the town meeting.

Police departments fail to recruit people of color, he said, because the would-be applicants either don't know about job opportunities or their experiences have led them to believe extra hurdles will be set up in the application process.

Meanwhile, racial profiling goes on, according to the people at the meeting. And Dinse gave statistics that bore out their anecdotes.

"We do gather data on all traffic stops," he said. "We track by ethnicity or race, and we have been doing that for about three years."

The percentage of African-Americans being pulled over is higher than their share of the population: Blacks constituted

4 percent to 7 percent of traffic stops in Salt Lake City. Only about 1 percent of residents are African-American.

"There may be somewhere in the department where racial bias is going on," Dinse said. "We take complaints . . . and we'll investigate those."