Civil liberties, public safety, and the rule of law

I take constitutional rights seriously across the board, not selectively. Rights are not real if they apply only when they are convenient, popular, or reserved for whoever happens to hold the majority that year.

The Constitution is not a prop for a campaign speech. It is a set of limits on power. And it matters most in exactly those moments when power would rather forget those limits exist— when people are afraid, when the public is angry, and when looking away would be easier.

That is why I take the First Amendment seriously: speech, protest, religious liberty, freedom of the press, and the freedom to read and think without the government deciding which ideas are allowed in the room.

In Utah, that freedom is not theoretical. Our state has removed Slaughterhouse-Five from every public-school library, while school districts have removed I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and other enduring works of literature. The state’s “sensitive materials” law is now being challenged in federal court.

A government confident in its values does not need to empty library shelves to protect its children. Censorship is not a show of strength. It is a confession of fear.

I take the Fourth Amendment just as seriously because privacy, due process, and protection from unreasonable searches are not technicalities for lawyers to argue over. They help define the difference between a citizen and a suspect. I take equal protection and the rule of law seriously for the same reason: a government that distributes rights selectively is not preserving order. It is spending down its own legitimacy.

Public safety, the real kind, is built on trust, legitimacy, preparation, and accountability— not on how much force a government is willing to display.

I support professional policing, transparent body-camera policies, meaningful independent review, strong training standards, and clear rules that keep public authority answerable to the public. Law enforcement should serve a community, not occupy it. A badge does not place anyone above the Constitution, and the best officers understand that accountability protects their profession as much as it protects the public.

And because I intend to hold law enforcement to a high standard, let me be equally clear about the other half of that commitment.

I respect this work, and I respect the people who do it honorably. The officers I have met in West Jordan, Sandy, and Midvale did not enter public service to get rich. They accepted a responsibility that can require them to run toward danger while everyone else is trying to get away from it.

Holding the badge to a high standard and standing behind the people who carry it honorably are not opposing positions. They are the same position. You cannot credibly claim one while ignoring the other.

Standing behind officers must mean more than adjectives. It means ensuring that cities can pay them what the work is worth instead of training good officers in our communities and watching them leave for another department offering better compensation. It means staffing shifts safely so officers are not making life-and-death decisions at the end of an exhausted double shift. Understaffing is not merely a line in a budget. It creates danger for officers and the public at the same time.

It also means giving officers the training and tools to respond appropriately, including options that allow them to de-escalate situations rather than treating force as the only available answer.

And it means respecting their voice on the job.

In 2025, the Utah Legislature passed H.B. 267, which would have prohibited public employers from participating in collective bargaining with teachers, firefighters, police officers, and other public workers. Those workers organized, gathered enough verified signatures to send the law to Utah voters, and forced the issue into the democratic process. The Legislature ultimately repealed H.B. 267 during a special session in December 2025.

That repeal was the right outcome. But I have watched this Legislature long enough to know that bad ideas do not always die here. Sometimes they wait a session and return under a different bill number.

If another attempt is made to strip collective-bargaining rights from police officers, firefighters, first responders, teachers, or other public workers, I will oppose it. An officer who cannot bargain for adequate staffing, safe working conditions, and fair compensation is not more accountable to the public. That officer is simply more alone.

Real respect for the badge means the person behind it keeps a seat at the table.

I also believe that the answer to a crisis should not automatically be an armed officer when a medic, mental-health professional, firefighter, or social worker is the person actually trained to address it.

Not every emergency is a crime.

Sending an armed response into a mental-health crisis can escalate the very trauma the call was meant to resolve. A competent public-safety system sends the right response to the right situation, while maintaining the ability to call law enforcement when there is a genuine threat to public safety.

That is not softness. It is competence. It gives people in crisis a better chance of receiving help, and it frees officers to concentrate on the work only they can do.

Civil liberties also require us to confront the rapid growth of surveillance technology.

I oppose surveillance systems that outrun public knowledge, consent, and oversight. Tracking, monitoring, and the accumulation of data on ordinary people tend to grow one reasonable-sounding step at a time, and they rarely shrink on their own. A free society should not sleepwalk into a surveillance state simply because building one was easier than having an honest public argument about limits.

Automated license-plate readers are one example. Systems marketed under names such as Flock can identify plates and vehicles, compare them against alert lists, and help law enforcement locate stolen vehicles, missing people, or vehicles connected to serious crimes. Used narrowly and responsibly, that capability can have legitimate public-safety value.

But these systems can also create searchable records showing when and where vehicles were observed. When those records are stored over time and connected across a large network, an investigative tool can become a map of ordinary people’s movements and associations.

That difference matters.

The constitutional law surrounding large-scale license-plate databases is still developing. Courts have not treated every use of an automated plate reader as a Fourth Amendment search, particularly when police conduct a narrow search for a vehicle observed on a public road. But the fact that a particular search may be legally permissible under current precedent does not mean the public should accept unlimited collection, long retention periods, nationwide sharing, or access without meaningful oversight.

The Constitution establishes a floor. Good public policy should sometimes build a stronger guardrail above it.

Utah law currently permits government entities to retain captured plate data for as long as nine months, while also directing them to destroy data as soon as reasonably possible when it is no longer necessary for an authorized purpose. That vague standard leaves too much discretion and permits records to remain available far longer than most legitimate public-safety uses require.

Nine months of location records can reveal a great deal about a person’s life: the church they attend, the doctor they visit, the meetings they join, the people they see, and the nights they do not come home.

That is not information the government should collect and retain about everyone simply because it might someday become useful.

We do not need to preserve a long-term dossier on every driver to obtain the immediate safety benefit of the technology. When there is an Amber Alert, a Silver Alert, an outstanding warrant, or a stolen vehicle, a passing plate can be checked against an active and lawful alert in seconds. If the plate matches, officers can respond. If it does not, the government should not build a lasting record simply because the technology makes that possible.

My approach would begin with data minimization.

License-plate systems should be permitted to compare plates in real time against specific, lawful alert lists. Nonmatching data should be deleted rapidly and automatically. Historical information should be retained only for a short, clearly defined period necessary to investigate a specific incident, and access to that information should require documented legal justification, with a warrant or court order required for searches that reconstruct a person’s movements.

There should be strict limits on national-network searching and data sharing. Local information should not be quietly made available for unrelated investigations across the country, sold, supplied to data brokers, or used for federal immigration enforcement outside a lawful warrant, court order, or genuine emergency involving an imminent threat to life.

Every search should create an audit record. Agencies should publish regular transparency reports showing how often the technology was used, for what categories of investigations, how often searches produced useful results, how often access was denied, and whether any misuse was discovered.

The public should not have to take surveillance safeguards on faith. We should be able to inspect whether they are working.

And a safeguard without consequences is only a suggestion.

Intentional misuse of a surveillance system should carry meaningful personal and institutional consequences. That should include substantial civil penalties, criminal consequences when conduct is knowing and unlawful, mandatory review by Utah’s police-certification authorities, and the loss of certification after due process when someone deliberately abuses public access to track another person.

An officer who uses a surveillance system to follow an ex-partner, settle a personal grievance, perform a favor for a friend, or investigate someone without lawful authority has not committed a minor paperwork violation. That officer has used the machinery of government to invade someone’s freedom.

The consequences should follow the person who committed the abuse. Resigning from one department should not allow someone found responsible for intentional surveillance misconduct to put on a badge in another jurisdiction the following week.

Institutional misconduct also requires institutional accountability. If a department or agency knowingly builds an unlawful database, authorizes prohibited searches, conceals misuse, or shares information with an entity that has no right to receive it, the consequences should not stop with the lowest-ranking employee involved.

The agency should face escalating financial penalties, independent investigation, corrective oversight, and, in cases of repeated or deliberate abuse, the loss of authority to operate the system.

People whose information is intentionally misused should also have the right to enforce the law themselves. That means a private right of action allowing victims to seek actual or statutory damages, punitive damages for willful misconduct, and reasonable attorney fees. People should not have to wait for the same institution that violated their rights to decide whether it feels like disciplining itself.

Federal law already uses this model to protect personal information contained in state motor-vehicle records. The Driver’s Privacy Protection Act permits people to sue when their information is knowingly obtained, disclosed, or used for an unlawful purpose, and it provides for minimum statutory damages, punitive damages in cases of willful or reckless conduct, and attorney fees.

If federal law recognizes that misuse of a home address from a DMV record deserves enforceable consequences, then a detailed record of someone’s movements deserves serious protection as well.

The principle is simple: catch the kidnapper without cataloguing the commuter. Find the stolen vehicle without filing away the family driving to dinner. Investigate the crime without treating every person who passes a camera as a future suspect.

We can have legitimate public-safety tools without constructing permanent records on everyone else. The database in the middle is not automatically the safety. Without strict limits, it becomes surveillance wearing safety as a costume.

I also oppose turning civilian policing into a military operation.

I wore the uniforms of the Air Force, the Utah Air National Guard, and the Utah Army National Guard. I know what the military is trained to do, and I understand the difference between a military mission and civilian law enforcement.

The National Guard has legitimate domestic responsibilities. It responds to floods, wildfires, earthquakes, disasters, and genuine emergencies when communities need capabilities they cannot provide alone. Under lawful civilian authority, Guard members have repeatedly served their neighbors with courage and professionalism.

But the military should not become a standing national police force.

The legal rules differ depending on whether Guard members remain under state authority or have been federalized. The Posse Comitatus Act principally restricts federal armed forces, including federalized Guard forces, from carrying out civilian law-enforcement functions unless the Constitution or Congress provides specific authority.

That boundary was not drawn by accident.

Recent deployments and attempted deployments of military forces into American cities have produced repeated lawsuits, injunctions, and judicial findings concerning the limits of federal power. Whatever someone’s partisan affiliation or feelings about a particular protest, immigration operation, or local government, we should be extremely reluctant to normalize soldiers performing the ordinary work of civilian policing.

When government dresses domestic law enforcement in the posture and equipment of war, it risks treating people as a population to be controlled rather than citizens whose rights must be respected.

The men and women who serve deserve missions worthy of the oath they took. And the public deserves a government that understands the difference between defending the country and policing a neighborhood.

Safety is not measured by how frightened people are or how much force the state can summon on a quiet Tuesday. It is measured by whether people feel protected instead of targeted. It is measured by whether communities trust the institutions that claim to serve them. And it is measured by whether the law lands the same way on the powerful and the powerless— in daylight, with accountability and restraint.

At its best, the rule of law is not about power for its own sake. It is about legitimacy. It means no one stands above the law, no one falls beneath its protection, and public authority remains accountable to the people from whom that authority is borrowed.

That is the kind of public safety I believe in: constitutional, restrained, adequately supported, accountable, and worthy of trust.

I still believe government can be worthy of the people it serves— not because I am naive about power, but because I have seen what it costs when fear is allowed to write the law.

We protect liberty the way we protect anything we love: by refusing to trade it away the first time someone promises we would be safer without it.