Salt Lake City police last year saw an increase in overall calls for service as well as reports of officers using force. But officers still used less force in 2021 than a department-conducted analysis expected them to, a report released Friday concluded.
Officers used nonlethal force 985 times last year, according to the department’s 2021 use-of-force report. That figure does not include interactions where an officer fired their weapon, the report noted, but does include actions like physical restraint, less-than-lethal rounds, pointing a firearm, use of pepper spray and use of a taser or use of a baton.
In 2020, officers used such force 917 times. However, using a formula based on differences in comparable variables between that year and 2021 — including total arrests and calls handled, along with the amount of resistance to arrests and assaults on officers — the department expected officers to use nonlethal force 1,139 times in 2021.
“We see this increase in calls handled, increase in arrests, increase in resisting and assault on police officers, so again the question is — did use of force change in proportion to that?” Deputy Chief Scott Mourtgos said Friday during a news conference.
Mourtgos prepared the department’s 2021 use-of-force report using his experience as a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Utah with expertise in quantitative social sciences.
“We actually saw a decrease in what we would expect when accounting for those other factors that drive use-of-force incidents,” Mourtgos continued.
The 985 uses of force in 2021 amounted to 0.57% of all police calls that year. SLCPD Chief Mike Brown said community members should consider that as at, or near, “a global minimum.”
This decrease from the expected amount of uses of force is a result of the department’s policies, de-escalation techniques and officer training, Brown said.
The average use of force interaction was with a 34-year-old white man, according to the report.
When broken down by race, 48% of forceful interactions occurred with white people, 17% occurred with Hispanic people, 12% occurred with Black people, 5% with American Indian/Alaskan Native people and 4% with Asian/Pacific Islander people.
Less than 1% of forceful interactions occurred with Middle Eastern people, according to the report. People of other races were the subject of 2% of uses of force, and in 4% of uses of force, officers did not note the race of people who were the subject in such interactions.
Nine percent of cases were not included due to a data error, the report notes. According to the department, the sum of all these percentages was above 100% due to rounding.
The department is on pace in 2022 to surpass last year’s 173,256 calls for service, Brown said.
Although he doesn’t know what’s accounting for the apparent increase in calls in recent years, he noted that calls seem to be getting more aggressive, with more people carrying guns and more people willing to use them in crimes.
“I think that the volatility, and what the perpetrators are willing to do, that is definitely having an impact in our communities,” Brown said Friday.
