Weeks after Salt Lake City released a plan to boost public safety, police say their stepped-up patrols have seized dozens of guns, issued hundreds of citations and captured thousands of grams of illegal drugs.
“We clearly identified actions to improve public safety and we’re taking them,” Mayor Erin Mendenhall said in her first report card on nearly 27 city action items that Utah’s capital issued in mid-January, aimed at reducing crime.
The progress report released Monday comes in light of demands from Gov. Spencer Cox and legislative leaders that the city bolster its strategies for improving a sense of public safety amid perceptions of heightened street crime, drug activity and vagrancy.
Emphasizing ‘hot spots’ including downtown, the city has expanded foot and bike patrols while using targeted investigations and data analysis to drive enforcement, officials said, with a focus on repeat or violent offenders and the powerful narcotic fentanyl.
The enforcement ramp-up has yielded 460 jail bookings, according to the city’s latest report. Officers issued 337 citations, 89 of those for illegal camping.
Since Jan. 12 — as the plan quietly geared up a few days before the mayor released it publicly — 42 guns were seized, as well as sizable amounts of drugs, including 1,567 fentanyl pills; 80 pounds of concentrated THC, or 36,000 grams; 1,838 grams of marijuana and another 660 THC cartridges; about 35 ounces of cocaine; and 39 grams of methamphetamine.
‘Action and accountability’
Police Chief Mike Brown said as part of the report that officers had arrested several suspected fentanyl dealers and others in possession of illegal firearms — many of whom, Brown added, “were already on probation or parole.”
“Our public safety plan calls for action and accountability, and that’s exactly what we’re delivering on,” the chief said in a statement. “We want to make it very clear — our officers are committed to protecting our residents, our businesses, and our city from crime.”
Highlighting one recent Saturday night sweep that led to more than 20 arrests, Brown said officers and detectives “accomplished a lot of great work in a short time to make the Jordan River Trail safer.”
“This isn’t a one-time push,” Brown said of that operation. “This is the work our officers are doing — and have been doing — every single day of the year. Our officers are out enforcing the law and building stronger relationships with our community, and I’m proud of their work.”
A spokesperson for Mendenhall, Andrew Wittenberg, said the mayor’s senior leadership team was keeping state lawmakers informed of progress under the plan and the city’s stepped-up enforcement.
The city is also poised to release an online dashboard displaying data on the plan’s results, Wittenberg said, intended to display both its progress and intensity while also better informing public perceptions.
“We don’t want to make it sound like there’s this massive explosion, because it’s been fairly consistent from our perspective,” he said. “The increased enforcement will certainly net more, but that doesn’t necessarily mean there’s that much more out there.”
‘Quicker response’ downtown
He also reiterated Mendenhall’s stance that “we cannot arrest our way out of this.”
“We need expanded facilities,” Wittenberg said, “for drug, mental health, behavioral health treatment; expanded jail space and certainly more shelter space and more deeply affordable, permanent supportive housing options.”
A spokesperson for the Downtown Alliance, representing merchants in the heart of Utah’s capital, said he was encouraged by the plan’s effects in offenders, drugs and weapons being “taken off the streets in the last three weeks.”
Anecdotally, according to Executive Director Dee Brewer, there has been a noticeable difference since the actions went into effect.
The alliance’s yellow-shirted Downtown Street Ambassadors, Brewer said, “have seen a quicker response from SLCPD to calls for assistance and we’ve also seen more” officers walking around and engaging downtown.
Brewer added that to be effective long-term, the plan depended on better cooperation between city, county and state government — “as well as state and federal funding.”
Targeting repeat offenders
In a statement issued with the report, the mayor also thanked officers and social workers who have spent weeks targeting “high-need” pockets of the downtown core, along the Jordan River and in the Ballpark neighborhood “to ensure they’re welcoming to all.”
The plan has sought to get repeat offenders off streets in those areas, as well as North Temple, while continuing to highlight other system gaps and tracking data on jail capacity, the justice system and the availability of social services.
Along with city action items, the public safety plan offers property for a temporary 1,000-bed shelter.
In terms of arrests, the plan has put in place longer periods of detention for chronic offenders, while also now flagging when they are arrested in the downtown area. Data gathered so far indicates a handful of suspects were arrested, booked into jail and then released and re-arrested multiple times from Jan. 12 to Feb. 1.
Such data, the report said, “is needed to more fully understand the outcomes of SLCPD arrests and better address gaps in the system.”
A tale of two sweeps
The city is using arrest data for a better sense of “hotspots,” the report said — letting it embed licensed clinical social workers with patrol officers where needed “to provide immediate crisis intervention and a path to recovery.”
As an example, the report describes a two-day police and social services operation a little more than a week ago outside the downtown Main Library.
Social workers coupled with police officers contacted 18 individuals experiencing homelessness, resulting in the teams issuing nine citations and arresting seven people between Jan. 22 and Jan 23 — but also referring five others for housing assistance, the report said.
Another two-day campaign along the Jordan River— running from approximately between Jan. 31 and Feb. 1 — led to 13 felony, 10 misdemeanor arrests and the breakup of 12 illegal encampments, the report said. Officers confiscated thousands of fentanyl pills, crack and powdered cocaine, heroin and nearly $3,000 in cash.
Along with drug- and intoxication-related offenses, major crimes charged in that river sweep included aggravated assault, domestic violence, theft, criminal trespassing and property damage.
One person contacted by social workers in the action accepted placement in a substance-use treatment center, the report noted. Social workers, according to the police, also provided mental health services, drug abuse treatment, and other support to one of the suspects arrested on felony charges.
