"Shots Fired" by @jm_miller and the @sltrib is only the latest recent report documenting the deeply problematic conduct of police in Salt Lake and Utah. 1/ sltrib.com/news/2021/11/2…
@jm_miller and @PaightenHarkins also reviewed a decade of data that “clearly shows police in Utah disproportionately shoot at racial and ethnic minorities.” 2/ sltrib.com/news/2021/09/2…
@PaightenHarkins explained Utah police are trained to fear the worst, but asked "how reasonable one’s fear can be when" research shows that the public and police are "preconditioned to see racial and ethnic minorities as scarier than white people." 3/ sltrib.com/news/2021/11/2…
This training has deadly consequences, yet police refuse to change their training and courts refuse to hold them accountable. 4/ sltrib.com/opinion/commen…
In hardly an anomaly, when a Salt Lake officer shot an unarmed man, even though he didn't even have grounds for an arrest, the courts ruled it was reasonable. 5/ courthousenews.com/10th-circuit-s…
The court rationalized, "Despite the likely low-level of the crime under investigation (if a crime at all) and the lack of a reasonable basis to arrest Mr. Taylor (or intent to do so)," the officer somehow reasonably feared for his life. 6/ courthousenews.com/10th-circuit-s…
there was this report that analyzed body camera videos and found that in 20% of cases where a person was attacked and bitten by a Utah police dog, they had their hands up or were facedown. Most of those involved the Salt Lake City Police Department. 7/ sltrib.com/news/2021/06/0…
The department's priorities are highly questionable, focusing on low-level offenses. Between 2013-19, 70% of all arrests made by the Salt Lake Police were for quality of life offenses, while they only make arrests in about a third of all homicides. 8/ policescorecard.org/ut/police-depa…
Yet caving to fears and the "tough on crime" rhetoric that has fueled mass incarceration while not actually keeping people safe, Salt Lake and Mayor Mendenhall @slcmayor thought their police deserved a raise. 9/ deseret.com/2021/6/25/2255…
These reports should not be cast aside and these injustices —far from an exhaustive list—should not just be accepted. We can't continue with the myth that we must give police whatever they want if we want safety. We must demand real change and actual accountability. 10/10
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