Between jail and prison overcrowding, justice courts acting as revenue centers for cities, and , its no wonder that our Utah’s justice system is failing victims, those in trouble, and our community in general. A good community justice system is responsive to the various shareholders in the system; victims receive swift justice and protection, criminals receive appropriate sentences and treatment, and the society in general receives public safety at an efficient cost.

Utah’s justice system has lost sight of those ideals and goals. It is easy pickings to cite recent obvious examples of system failure, like the release of dangerous criminals Luis Perez and Robert Preece when the DA failed to file charges timely, the 95% conviction rate in justice courts, and, remember Richard Ricci who died in jail after being mistakenly accused of kidnapping a Utah child? The most recent page written in the book of provocative examples of a failing justice system was posted on You-Tube and picked up by local and national news, sensationalizing the story.

The video, posted below, shows a Utah man and his wife at a traffic stop by a Utah Highway Patrol officer. The driver was disputing the officer’s assertion that he was speeding and was subsequently hit with a Taser jolt by the officer when the driver failed to follow the officer’s direction. The problems the video shows are many, including violations of the man’s Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure, and an unlawful use of force. More importantly, the video shows obvious poor judgment by the officer, particularly when he leaves the tased and handcuffed driver laying very near the traffic lane on the highway. See for yourself:

In the next few weeks, I will post and hope to start a dialogue about the problems I mentioned earlier in this post and some ideas for solutions. I will do my best to include data, studies and quality information in these posts to strive for a robust dialogue that is on topic and does not succumb to sensationalism and criticism of the hard working women and men who have spent their lives trying to make Utah a safer, better place to live. Topics will include: Municipal justice courts, the Salt Lake County community justice master plan, the Utah Family Justice Center, Attorney General Mark Shurtleff’s proposal to amend the Utah Constitution to loosen search and seizure requirements, and other topics participants would like to discuss.

Hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving full of good food, good friends and family, and great memories! See you soon, and thanks for stopping by!

Salt Lake City Mayor
The Mayor’s race was stale by the time November rolled around given that all the fireworks happened in September.  That isn’t to say that Ralph Becker’s victory was anything less than a great change for Salt Lake City!  However, in an overwhelmingly Democratic city, Mr. Buhler didn’t stand much of a chance.  (I am a bit surprised that Dave gave up his seat on the City Council to run an obviously uphill race.) 

No, the real race was between Ralph and Jenny Wilson.  Conventional money, and mine!, was on Jenny to win it.

But something happened along the way that took the front runner down to a third place finish after the primary votes were counted, propelling Ralph and Dave into the general election.  Most folks would tell you that Ralph came from behind to win the race sometime late in the primary, but I think that the polls tell a different story.  Jenny started the race with around 23% of the vote, with the rest of the vote largely undecided amongst the other 3 major candidates, Ralph, Dave, and Keith Christensen.  Jenny was the natural front runner from the beginning because she had major name recognition and a compelling story to tell.  But the truth is that she never really moved from the 23% she had at the beginning of the race and was not able to parlay her early support into anything more than a base.

Now, I work with Jenny at the County, and she is an excellent public servant—considered, thoughtful, intelligent, and unafraid to ask hard questions.  She would, no doubt, have been an excellent mayor.  Ralph and Dave ran good campaigns that seemed to each carry a theme that had something for voters to sink their teeth into when they went into the booth to vote.  They set themselves apart as “the Blueprint Man” and “It’s Dave! (goofy as he may be)” and communicated something of a personal message to the electorate.

Perhaps even more importantly, Ralph and Dave both had substantial bases of voters that were densely clustered in tight geographic regions that were easy to walk and work for votes.  Ralph’s natural base in the Avenues not only got worked, but got worked over, and over, and his campaign probably mined every last Democratic vote out of that area!  (someone should get a copy of that voter file!)  He also worked the west side and focused a solid GOTV campaign in that area.  On the other hand, Dave worked the voters in his moderate eastside, Salt Lake Country-club neighborhood, which he once represented as Senator before losing his seat to Karen Hale in 1998.  The Primary vote statistics indicated that Dave had won handily, but maxed out his turnout in the Country Club area, while Becker still had room to gain if he could turn up the relatively low turnout in the avenues and Westside.

What the data suggests, then, is that the moderate Republican base of Salt Lake City, even with a high voter turnout, isn’t enough to beat a Democrat with a modest GOTV plan when head-to-head.  Republicans in Salt Lake City now understand what it is like for Democrats to campaign almost anywhere else in Utah—you can’t wage an “air war” with flyers, billboards, and ads to pick up independents and moderate voters.  They have to see you, look you in the eye and get the sense that you are worth overriding the default button to vote for a Democrat (or Republican in Salt Lake City).

The bread and butter of Utah Democratic campaigns is the door-to-door “ground war,” which is precisely the kind of campaign Ralph ran—classic and well executed, with a bit of sass added with the Blueprint Man.  Jenny’s campaign for her County Council seat was run in this tradition with Jeff Mathis at the helm, putting up lawnsigns at the wee hours of the morning in a 13 point come-from-behind victory over then Council Chair Steve Harmsen in her first election.  I think Jenny’s team tried the Jim Matheson, the Later Years, campaign approach that is focused more on maintain than gain.  In the end, Jenny maintained the 23-24% she started the race wit.  Jenny’s team had the difficult task of collecting votes spread over the entire city district, and no natural geographic base she could concentrate her resources on.  While she raised a whole ton of money, she wasn’t able to get the same bang for her buck Ralph and Dave were in focusing on specific areas and precincts to mine for votes.  As an aside, Keith faced much of the same problem, but with obvious other larger problems. 

So to those who would say that the 2007 Salt Lake City Mayoral race seemed like a hum-drum election this year, I would respond, “there is gold in them thar hills,” go mine the data for 2008 and see if we learned anything beyond Bob Bernick’s incredibly insightful newspaper selling statement, “Salt Lake City is a tough place for a Republican to win an election.”  Duh.

The Public Safety Bond
I chock this one up to a victory for common sense.  I have to admit I was just incredulous when I saw all those polls that showed a majority of city voters supported the bond.   The name “Christmas Wish List” took life in the final days before the election and became the nail in the coffin on this one.  I have opposed the Public Safety bond from the beginning, just as I have opposed the Hogle Zoo bond proposal, because the cost-benefit analysis did not merit out a justification for raising my (and your!) property taxes some $300 a year. 

I support updating critical infrastructure needs, and that should be taken care of first and foremost. However, the City refused to play ball with the County and look at joint venture opportunities.  Those opportunities would have saved taxpayers millions, but would have come at the expense of the long-standing turf battles between police chiefs and fire captains.  I admit I am relatively uneducated as to the details of the relationship, but I take Mayor Corroon and Sheriff Winder at their word when they say they tried to reach out to the City players and work out a partnership.  They say their partnership offer was rebuffed despite the existence of a large County fire training facility just 12 blocks outside the city limits.  It smells like turf spirit to me, and I’m not gonna pay for it. 

The County is putting together a public safety master plan, which includes several of the same projects contemplated by the bond.  This kind of thoughtful approach is the kind of blueprint the City needs, and Mayor Becker has already pledged to participate.  Long-term planning for public safety needs will provide the foundation for fiscal prudence and inclusive community justice.  I am looking forward to seeing what Mayors Corroon and Becker come up with—stay tuned! 

Others ballot issues: 

Yay Luke Garrott!  Having a professor on the Council should be fun to watch!

Boo Jordan School District.  Having grown up in Cottonwood Heights I think I have a little license to say the following:  those people are crazy!  Mayor Cullimore and his ilk have succeeded in creating their own little fiefdom over there.  When they proposed incorporation to their residents, they promised that it wouldn’t cost taxpayers a lot of money because they vowed not to create their own fire department, police force, or large municipal government.  All of which has, of course, proven not to be true.  The temptation to increased your sphere of power was just too great for the local elected officials out there, and now their State Senator has pushed the break away of the already-built-out Eastside from the burgeoning Westside, and left them to fend for themselves after subsidizing the Eastside for all those years.  Again, I understand the desire to have smaller school districts, but at the end of the day, in lieu of more local control, what you get is another redundant bureaucracy managing fewer schools.  For resource programs alone, they will have to duplicate services and hire twice as many teachers and resource education professionals to accommodate the same number of students as before.  It just doesn’t seem to square with conservative principles, so I am, again, confused why Republican leaders are pushing this one. 

Yay Eagle Mountain.  Elected, yet another, new mayor.  Lets hope they can keep this one a full term!

Vouchers
Wow.  74% rejection rate for vouchers in Salt Lake City!  It reminds me of those new chemistry.com commercials where the person says a few salacious things and gets a large REJECTED stamp marked across their body in reply.  The only difference is that there is no alternative website for the pro-voucher group to go to seek comfort and understanding.  Not even the Republican Legislative leadership is offering extended arms for respite and hugs for the battle weary Parents for Choice.  I suppose they could all convene down at Overstock.com and see if they can find some other way to insult the intelligence of Utah voters and sneak tax dollars into private companies under the label “choice.” Much has been written on the subject of vouchers by others far more well-versed in the issue than I, but I want to add the following for discussion of the future of education in our state: our schools can and should do better.  What frustrates me often in politics is that we spend SO MUCH time, energy, and resources fighting over what kind of band-aid to use to cover over a problem instead of getting at the heart of the matter and finding common ground to build workable solutions.  We argue over the propriety of abortions rather than preventing unwanted pregnancies and we argue over how to get our kids out of a failing public school system rather than focusing on how to make it not fail.  I understand the propensity to want to draw a line in the stand and make a stand somewhere, but the fact is, no matter how you spin it, Utah’s public education system needs help.   To draw a bad analogy, it would be like taking your kid who can’t read to another school and blaming his/her failure on the school rather than looking at why the kid can’t read in the first place. 

I don’t think that a change in venue to a private provider is the panacea the pro-voucher camp would have us believe.  My twelve-year-old little brother has been in public schools for the past eight years, and I can tell you, he isn’t getting a top notch education.  He is an articulate little kid (who likes salmon and sushi and has used words like although and interesting since he was five;  I guess that’s what happens when your big brothers and sisters are in their twenties—can you say caboose?).   But when he was in the third grade, his teacher came to us and said, Matt is not reading at grade level, you’re going to have to teach him.  What??  We couldn’t even imagine.  Wasn’t that why he was in school?  Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic?  Why was this bright, intelligent and thoughtful (ok, I may be big-sister bragging a little) not reading at grade level? 

So I understand why parents are attracted to options and alternatives that provide more choice in education, but subsidizing an entire new school system is not the answer. 

By the way, have you ever asked yourself why conservatives were pushing vouchers?  A conservative philosophy would naturally support smaller, more efficient government.  So it boggles my mind why Republicans would be pushing to create to dual school systems that require a critical mass of resources to build infrastructure that would largely be duplicative, and certainly inefficient.  Its like paying for two mortgages so half your family lives in one house, while the other half lives in another, all while one house would fit the whole family quite nicely, except that the other house has a swimming pool and cool uniforms! 

The Legislature has been given a mandate by the People to fix the public school system rather than create a private one.  Clearly Utahns want to stick with public education, so lets sit down at the drawing board and come up with a master plan that includes benchmarks and deadlines for implementation.  The University of Utah’s Center for Public Policy and Administration would be a great candidate to prepare such a report and can be entrusted to provide a robust, objective report similar to the one produced on the voucher issue. 

The way I see it, we can and should do better for public education.  Hiding behind the “we have too many children and not enough tax base” simply doesn’t cut it anymore.  For years, Republican administrations have given back big tax surpluses that add up to mere dollars when refunded to individual taxpayers, but in aggregate could have made a significant impact on class size, for example.