Wait, that’s not already the law? It’s an apt response to a bill that would help ensure the state’s report on hate crimes is as accurate as it can be.

Rep. Joe Salazar, the statehouse’s road warrior on civil rights, is sponsoring House Bill 1138, to require the state Department of Public Safety to scrutinize reports from each law enforcement agency if there’s an element of a hate crime.

The bill up for its first hearing before the House Judiciary Committee Tuesday.

I’ve been doing this a long time. I’ve covered law enforcement in Colorado and civil rights in the Deep South. At ground level you can see that one cop’s hate crime is another cop’s harassment. The statistics Colorado sends to the FBI every year are, at best, a guessing game.

I’ve seen the narrow edge of interpretation.

Aug. 28, 2013, I was standing on the 16th Street Mall in Denver talking to two coworkers. Just behind them, like a pop of lightning, some rough-looking dude slugged a lady.

Sunila Tomas George stooped over, held the left side of her face and said, “Can someone call the police?”

Christopher Lucki kept walking into the ant-like bustle at lunchtime. I scurried to catch up to him. I considered going Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson on him, but I’d just bought a $14 tuna melt sandwich. That’s a lot to pay for a sandwich to take it to a fight.

I pulled out my phone, tapped video  and hollered, “Dude, why’d you hit that lady back there?”

He turned and focused on me. I looked for a place to put down my tuna melt sandwich.

“She’s a terrorist, dude. She’s been stalking me for 145 days, dude,” he snapped to a reporter who was stalking him.

His admission probably was the difference between a misdemeanor assault charge, a ride to the jail for a cup of coffee and a pittance of a fine, versus the felony hate crime he was charged with and the $25,000 bond he was held on. Only his mental health and a plea deal kept Mr. Lucki out of a Canon City prison.

Tomas George is of Indian and Lebanese descent. She told a reporter later Lucki called her an Afghan and accused her of trying to blow up America. I didn’t hear any of that, and who knows if anyone else who hung around to be a witness did, either. The video in my phone closed the case; what’s on a man’s lips is in a man’s heart.

We won’t ever erase judgment calls from law enforcement, but what Salazar is asking for is a second set of bureaucratic eyes on possible hate crimes.  Regardless of the excuses we might hear from law enforcement at Tuesday’s hearing, it’s not too much to ask, is it?

Legislative analysts said in a report Friday the bill, if it becomes law, would cost taxpayers nothing, beyond a workload increase for law enforcement administrators.

Importantly, the Department of Public Safety has to report back to the legislature on how it’s doing. Joe Salazar will be waiting there.

Let’s agree on something. There are racist cops in this country, just like there are racist plumbers and racist politicians. You know them by the things they do. Is it a far jump to accept that there are racist police chiefs who look the other way when a punch in the nose with a racial epithet is reported as just a punch in the nose?

The news website Vox nailed the point in a headline: “Is there a rise in hate crimes in America? The unsettling truth: we have no idea.”

The article faults the annual FBI crime report, but that report depends on reports from local law enforcement.

“This, obviously, has implications for how much we know about hate crimes in America,” Vox reporter German Lopez concluded. “The first step to addressing a problem is usually knowing what the problem is. And we just don’t.”