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Alliance for a Better Utah delivers petition to councilman regarding offensive Facebook posts

Posted at 3:20 PM, Oct 24, 2017
and last updated 2017-10-24 20:33:41-04

SALT LAKE CITY – The Alliance for a Better Utah is demanding an apology from Sandy City Councilman Steve Smith and is asking him to delete several posts from his Facebook page the alliance says are offensive.

The alliance gathered almost 700 signatures last week, after discovering that Smith publicly commented on a Facebook post in response to the controversial killing of Trayvon Martin, an African American boy who was killed by George Zimmerman.

In his comments, Smith stated problems facing African American communities are caused by “black culture,” and that the focus on these problems can be seen as an attempt to blame white people for problems.

“Councilman Smith continues to double down on his extremely offensive comments” Chase Thomas said, policy and advocacy counsel for Better Utah. “We hope that Councilman Smith will take this petition seriously and publicly apologize for offending many of his constituents and in his community with his words.”

Smith has not publicly commented on these posts or the petition. The petition can be found here along with several screenshots of the original Facebook posts.