Protesters Enter Fourth Week With List Of Demands

SALT LAKE CITY, Utah – Protesters entered the fourth week of demonstrations in Salt Lake City with a list of demands, as the state and cities respond to growing calls to defund and even disband police departments.

“Overall we need to completely destroy and reconstruct our system because, as I said, it was built upon the oppression of our black community,” said Will Kemner, one of the founding members of the Salt Lake Equal Rights Movement. “This fight is going to take a while because we can’t reform a system that is this broken.”

Kemner’s group has a list of demands that they describe as beginning steps toward combating police brutality and racism. Those demands include:

1. Reexamine every prison sentence in Utah, starting with nonviolent crimes
2. Have three judges on every case
3. Separate the accused individual from judges and jury with a visual barrier
4. Set bail maximum based on crime and last reported annual income
5. Live stream officer body camera video to a public domain
6. Require officers to keep their guns in the car, with audio automatically turned on when the gun leaves the holster
7. Provide different responders based on 911 calls with police officers stationed outside, if necessary
8. Make all police complaints available to the public and require that they be investigated by community elected officials who aren’t affiliated with the department

“If we want that, we’re going to have to pay for it,” said Chris Bertram, a criminal justice professor and former Unified Police Department deputy chief. “As we talk about some of the things that they want, these are not things that the police department are going to decide on. These are what our lawmakers or elected officials are going to decide on.”

Bertram said requiring more judges on criminal cases would slow down the system even more. He is glad to see bail is part of the conversation and agrees there is room for change.

“We need to continue to have a discussion on that. People should not have to stay incarcerated pre-sentence, meaning before they go to trial, pre-trial, if they don’t need to,” he said.

Regarding streaming officers’ body camera video, Kemner said, “We deserve to know what’s going on behind the scenes.”

“If police are doing their jobs properly, which we know they’re not, there should be no discrepancies in what they’re doing,” Kemner said. “They should be completely transparent.”

But there are other concerns when it comes to video, not the least of which is the privacy of those individuals officers interact with.

“Not everything that a police officer does is for the public’s view,” Bertram said. “These are things that happen within the privacy of people’s homes. And those aren’t necessarily things that everyone in society gets to look at. Even under gramma requests we redact and we withhold things we believe are private.”

“As for leaving a gun in the car, I’m not sure that necessarily is something that’s reasonable or feasible,” Bertram said.

But what about diverting 911 calls from police to other trained professionals like social workers and mental health workers to respond to certain situations?

“Right now we just have our big police military responding to every single crisis,” Kemner said. “That’s not OK. We need specific trained professionals depending on the situation.”

That’s one demand Bertram said he “absolutely would agree with.”

“We’ve seen again some of those tragedies where people are having a real mental breakdown. Police come and then all the sudden somebody dies,” Bertram said. “Those are tragedies. If you could do it where you have social workers and mental health workers there, that would be great. But also keep in mind that some of these circumstances are very, very dangerous.”

The protests have already brought changes to the state. On Thursday, Gov. Gary Herbert announced a ban on chokeholds and asked police departments across the state to review their policies. The Salt Lake Police Department officially added a ban on chokeholds and prohibited tear gas on crowds. Its policy states police are discourage from shooting at moving vehicles, and officers have a duty to intercede to prevent the use of “unreasonable force” by another officer.

“We have the opportunity right now to look at everything we do, every system we have in place, and fix what has been broken since the beginning,” said Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall. “That’s why I was committed to securing funding from the city council to complete a citywide equity plan, and that work will commence in the next month.”

The mayor plans to launch the Commission on Racial Equity in Policing, which will work with the community and examine the “police department’s culture, budget, and policies, particularly the use of force policies, and engaging the broader community in that review.”

“Hopefully there comes a time that there isn’t a need to be protesting every day,” Kemner said. “We are going to be here until we get the justice that we deserve. And unfortunately, I think that’s going to take a while.”