Utah’s WBB team was harassed with slurs in Coeur d’Alene. Is that a hate crime in Idaho?

While staying in Coeur d’Alene ahead of an NCAA tournament game in Spokane, the University of Utah’s women’s basketball team said it was targeted by a series of people driving trucks and shouting the N-word at team members while revving their engines to intimidate them.

Utah’s head coach, Lynne Roberts, has since referred to the incident as a hate crime. Federal hate crime law typically covers incidents in which someone “willfully causes bodily injury” or attempts to do so. It can apply to harassment, but only when it’s used to intimidate someone out of exercising a protected right.

So where does Idaho law stand on whether racially motivated threats and harassment constitute hate crimes?

The ‘malicious harassment’ law

Title 18, Chapter 79 of Idaho state law deals with what it calls “malicious harassment.” The law aims to protect “the right of every person regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion or national origin, to be secure and protected from fear, intimidation, harassment, and physical harm.”

It explicitly prohibits attempts to “intimidate or harass another person because of that person’s race, color, religion, ancestry, or national origin.” While the law itself doesn’t use the term “hate crime,” the Idaho Legislature uses the term to describe this statute elsewhere.

Not all cases of racially motivated verbal abuse count as malicious harassment, though. In order to fall under the law, an incident needs to result in injury, property damage, or a reasonable threat of either.

At a press conference on March 26, Coeur d’Alene Police Chief Lee White said that local police haven’t determined whether there could be charges but are investigating the incident as a potential case.

“There was a number of crimes that we’re investigating currently. The first one is there’s an Idaho statute regarding malicious harassment,” White said.

White said the incident could violate state law regarding disorderly conduct, and said there’s a federal charge that “might be appropriate,” though he didn’t say which one.

What’s missing from Idaho law?

Enforcing the law is a different story. In 2022, The Associated Press reported that victims of hate crimes in Idaho don’t feel safe reporting incidents to the police. That year 13 arrests were made in the state out of 50 such cases, according to the state’s crime statistic database.

The malicious harassment statute is also noticeably missing any mention of sexual orientation or gender identity. Idaho is one of 16 states not to protect people against crimes on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. However, both are protected by federal law.