In Salt Lake City, record spending boosts police budgets. What has Utah’s capital gotten for it?

Though Salt Lake City is closing out its first year of intense focus on a new public safety plan, Utah’s capital has been boosting cash flow to its police force for years.

Spending on the Salt Lake City Police Department has risen by 64% since Mayor Erin Mendenhall took office in 2020, moving steadily upward from $82.5 million her first year to nearly $135 million in the city’s most recent spending cycle.

So, as the city keeps up a concerted campaign of enforcement on homelessness and drug trafficking to improve perceived safety on its streets, where has all that money gone?

More cops. Better pay for officers. Upgraded cameras and drones. More social workers.

The results — a 16-year low in overall crime — are enough to turn a once-harsh critic of the mayor into a believer, even if he partially credits a nudge from state leaders for the progress.

“We’ve still got a lot of work to do,” businessman David Ibarra said, “but the city is better than it’s ever been in the last 10 years.”

Now, a new challenge awaits the city’s public safety agencies: a proposed 1,300-bed homeless campus on the west side. How’s that going to shatter the picture?

Expanding police ranks — and pay

In the wake of the George Floyd protests, other liberal cities across the nation moved to cut spending on police. But deflecting early in her first term the notion of aggressively “defunding” police, Mendenhall and the Salt Lake City Council instead leaned into what they say amounts to investing in the department, on many levels, over many years.

Staffing for what is the state’s largest police force is now up to about 784 full-time positions, with 630 sworn officers and 154 in civilian support staff. That has increased nearly 10% during the mayor’s tenure, filling, in some cases, long-standing vacancies in the department that had left total staffing at about 711 full-time positions when the mayor took the helm at City Hall.

Pay for officers is better, too — reflecting what Mendenhall says is an administration-wide focus on improving morale and talent retention, as well as accommodating the city’s yearslong surge in population growth.

The city ranked in the 50th percentile statewide for police pay when she won her first term, the mayor said in an interview, and now ranks among the top cities. It is on track, meanwhile, to break its prior record on calls for police service this year, and arrests are “higher than the city’s ever seen.”

All that shows, Mendenhall added, “that our officers are working very hard and responding to a higher call volume than we’ve ever seen, though our overall crime is the lowest we’ve seen in 16 years.”

The city’s public safety demands are “enormous,” she continued, “and our budget was not reflecting those realities, right? Well, I believe it is better today.”

Not all crime is down

The city’s latest numbers reflecting its new police strategies — from Jan. 1 through Nov. 16 — show overall crime is indeed down 10.8% from its most recent three-year average. Violent crimes, however, have ticked up 0.8%.

Mendenhall points to a measure of “officer proactivity” in which police aren’t dispatched by 911 but instead are “just out there seeing something and doing something about it,” decreasing overall crime.

Under new police Chief Brian Redd, hired in March after Mendenhall ousted former Chief Mike Brown, the police force continues to build a more diversified response to calls, with civilian teams and added integration with social- and youth-services providers.

Stepped-up enforcement since January targeting problems related to rising homelessness, drug use and illegal encampments has led to more spending on overtime, on bike-riding officers along the Jordan River, and on technology such as drones and cameras.

According to Redd, the public safety plan has improved collaboration with Salt Lake County, the district attorney’s office, the courts and social service providers. It has also brought crucial tracking of repeat offenders who take up an inordinate share of public resources.

“These are high utilizers,” Redd told a legislative committee over the summer. “They’re just cycling: Jail, release. Jail, release — and they’re a misdemeanor population, typically high needs, behavioral, health and substance abuse needs. We’re seeing trespassing, drug use, all of those things that are quality-of-life issues.”

Among the leading 50 offenders identified at the time, Redd said, the top one had 30 warrants and had been arrested 16 times in a one-year period.

Since the plan took effect, the Police Department’s latest reports show, year-to-date jail bookings are at an eight-year high. Citations for illegal camping have increased nearly threefold so far this year from 2024.

Between hot spots in the Ballpark neighborhood, downtown along Main Street and on the banks of the Jordan River, officers have seen a total of more than 19,000 calls for service since January, yielding some 2,300 jail bookings and roughly 1,600 misdemeanor citations. For a sense of proportion, enforcement on the Jordan River accounted for between 72% and 78% of all three.

Other city departments have also led cleanup efforts along segments of the river, clearing encampments, improving visibility and lighting, and seeking to encourage wary park users to return.

Arc of police spending

After the George Floyd protests in 2020, the city responded with investments in body cameras and training for its officers, along with creating a Commission on Racial Equity in Policing. More spending on additional social services and a sizable pay bump for officers ensued in the years following.

The biggest year-to-year jump in police spending came in 2023, fueled partly by annualizing those pay increases and filling additional empty slots among the ranks of sworn officers.

More salary and benefits hikes, new hiring for river patrols, upgraded technology and the prospect of building a surveillance-monitoring center at police headquarters all helped push up spending in recent budget cycles, followed by added resources this year, including those for the public safety plan.

Police are likely to have more dire budget needs in the future, one observer contends.

In a recent opinion piece, Elizabeth “Liddy” Huntsman-Hernandez of the Salt Lake City Police Foundation, a nonprofit that supports rank-and-file police, warned that officers “are now expected to act as mental health responders, addiction counselors, crisis mediators, and more” — all while handling routine calls.

Huntsman-Hernandez, a foundation member and unsuccessful City Council candidate, called for additional spending on the department as “a necessary investment that reflects the scale of the challenges we face.”

Fair wages that keep experienced officers with the department, more drones, a real-time crime monitoring center and better support for mental health, she wrote, aren’t “luxuries.”

“They’re foundational,” she wrote, “to building a department capable of serving a 21st-century city.”

Huntsman-Hernandez, like Mendenhall, also called on budget makers at the Utah Capitol to increase their spending in support of city law enforcement, jail beds, social services and more.

Praise, criticism from frontline players

Ibarra, the entrepreneur who has led out on critiquing the city’s approach to homelessness in the past, said in an interview that improved conditions reflect added statewide attention to the problems, not simply more spending.

The former mayoral candidate joined business owners and other residents in 2023 in suing the city, accusing it of a lack of enforcement against public and private nuisances caused by what plaintiffs said amounted to “allowing homeless encampments to proliferate.”

Ibarra was also a challenger to Mendenhall the first time she ran for mayor, before he dropped out and endorsed her late in that election. He was then a financial backer of former Mayor Rocky Anderson when Anderson unsuccessfully challenged Mendenhall as she sought a second term.

Ibarra told The Salt Lake Tribune he believed the lawsuit helped prompt Gov. Spencer Cox; Senate President J. Stuart Adams, R-Layton; House Speaker Mike Schultz, R-Hooper; and other lawmakers to intervene, insisting it “forced the discussion.”

“There could have been no better response, in that the mayor has responded,” Ibarra said. “It doesn’t matter what happened. I believe that the new chief of police has more control over policing.”

The Utah Supreme Court dismissed the suit in July, saying that under the state’s “public duty doctrine,” the plaintiffs didn’t prove their right to sue over perceived government failures to perform obligations that the city owes to all members of the public.

Not all the plaintiffs, though, agree with Ibarra’s take.

City resident Danielle Barrani said conditions due to chronic vagrancy may be better in Ibarra’s neighborhood but still had yet to improve in her area, along 400 South in east Central City, particularly at long-vacant commercial properties. State leaders, Barrani added, need to fulfill their duty to contribute more resources so that persistent issues don’t constantly sap the police budget in Utah’s capital.

“Is the response better? Yes. Chief Redd is so much better,” she said. “But it’s still a large mess for them to clean up. You can push the homeless all over the place, move them from one section of town to another — and sometimes that’s all that happens.”

Impacts of a new homeless campus

The city’s picture on police funding is all but certain to shift dramatically over the next two years if state lawmakers make good on proposals for a newly announced, state-backed homeless campus with up to 1,300 beds on the city’s west side.

The Police Department could need as many as 49 new full-time positions — and as much as $7.4 million yearly — to cover the full costs of public safety services for the campus, city officials now estimate. That’s potentially along with a new police substation and additional equipment for cops.

Along with that, city firefighters estimate another $2.7 million per year, 23 employees, new facilities and equipment will be needed to protect the west-side campus.

Those numbers are “not final in any way,” Andrew Johnston, the city’s director of homeless policy and outreach, told state officials. “But we do anticipate there’ll be far more impacts than even you’re seeing right now.”

Under a model being urged by Cox, the new shelter proposed at 2520 N. 2200 West would provide addiction-recovery and other services when it is slated to open in 2027. The idea is already drawing critiques from some homeless services advocates, faith leaders, environmentalists and community members.

It’s also an open question going into the 2026 session of the Utah Legislature just how lawmakers intend to fund the new campus — and whether the state will spend to offset its impacts on Salt Lake City residents.