Republicans on Utah’s Capitol Hill appear adamant about the possibility of state police intervening to bolster efforts by Salt Lake City cops to crack down on illegal encampments and drug activity.
Mayor Erin Mendenhall’s nudging Police Chief Mike Brown into retirement last week doesn’t seem to have changed that picture.
Mendenhall pushed back firmly Friday on a pending bill to require the capital city to ink an interagency pact with the state Department of Public Safety, which then could deploy its own rapid-response teams to city hot spots to enforce public safety, break up camps and make arrests.
The city wants to collaborate, the mayor told skeptical state lawmakers, but not under threat of being cut off from state funds to ease impacts of homelessness or from gas-tax money for roads.
Taking that approach — as spelled out in HB465 — is needlessly punitive toward cities, Mendenhall said, and could even harm new attempts at stepping up public safety enforcement.
“Legislation that requires cities to enter into this partnership and penalizes if we do not is not real collaboration,” the mayor told a legislative panel. “It is coercive and it is unnecessary and damaging to the trust that should be built between our levels of government if we are truly going to work together to solve big problems.”
Lawmakers’ frustration over public safety
The mayor also touted early successes of the city’s latest 27-part public safety strategy, unveiled in mid-January to target problem areas downtown, along the Jordan River and in the Ballpark neighborhood with increased police patrols and an intensified tempo of large drug busts.
But several lawmakers on the House Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice Committee fired back, some with voices raised in frustration over what they portray as years of inaction by Salt Lake City as problems with vagrancy and illicit drugs have worsened.
“For multiple years, over and over again, we refuse to enforce the law when we can see tangible and visible harm in our capital city,” said Rep. Ryan Wilcox, R-Ogden. Lawmakers, he said, now have a responsibility to step in. “To do otherwise would be to ignore the law in the first place.”
Despite a recent escalation of policing in some neighborhoods, added Rep. Melissa Ballard, R-North Salt Lake, Utah’s capital had become “a traffic way of drugs and organized crime, human trafficking — and it’s time for that to stop.”
Rep. Matthew Gwynn, R-Farr West, whose professional background is in law enforcement, said employees within the Salt Lake City Police Department have told him they are “hamstrung and they’re frustrated with their administrators.”
“Things need to change,” Gwynn said, who accused the city of “fighting against legislative intent.”
‘Step in and takeover?’
HB465, sponsored by House Majority Assistant Whip Casey Snider, R-Paradise, passed out of committee on a 7-1 vote and now moves to the full House, with three weeks left in the legislative session. Only Rep. Sandra Hollins, D-Salt Lake City, voted against it, saying the bill would set a worrying precedent of preempting city power.
“We’re going to step in and takeover?” Hollins asked. “I have an issue with that.”
Several senior lawmakers have said members of the business community had repeatedly voiced dire concerns over deteriorating conditions on city streets in recent years. On Friday, a representative of the Salt Lake Chamber expressed support for HB465.
“Businesses,” said the chamber’s chief lobbyist, Mary Catherine Perry, “are accountable to their customers, their employees, their shareholders, their investors, and we believe that public safety plans should also have accountability.”
“We see accountability,” she said, “in this legislation.”
Snider told The Salt Lake Tribune the bill’s momentum had not been affected by Wednesday’s announcement that Brown, Salt Lake City’s police chief for nearly a decade and a 33-year veteran of the force, will step down at the end of this month, at the mayor’s behest.
“My bill is about collaboration and accountability,” Snider said, “regardless of who is in charge.”
Senate President Stuart Adams, R-Layton, said he was “a little surprised” at Mendenhall’s remarks on HB465 being coercive and unnecessary.
“My understanding,” Adams said, “was the bill is reflective of the commitment she’s already made.”
Prompting Brown’s departure
Later Friday, in Mendenhall’s first public comments on Brown’s announced departure, she said that despite a solid record of lowering crime and rebuilding police staffing, crucial relationships he oversaw “are not as strong as they need to be.”
“That is not new to the conversations we’ve had with the state over the last five years,” the mayor said, who added that her decision to prompt Brown’s retirement had preceded the release last Monday of HB465.
“We have total crime at the lowest point in 16 years, and we are basically fully staffed as a large department in this state,” the mayor told reporters gathered on Capitol Hill. “The department is as strong as it’s ever been, and it’s time for us to make a change with new leadership.”
Mendenhall said she’d “thought long and hard” about the issue before her announcement last week that she had “determined that it’s time for the next chapter” for the department.
“We’re at an inflection point,” the mayor said, “about homelessness and cartel-related drug crime in the city and the state.”
That watershed, she said, is deepening the need for cooperation among city, state and federal authorities, including the state Department of Public Safety. That, in turn, highlighted “some of the difficulties in relationship that our police leadership had.”
“We want to partner with DPS,” Mendenhall said, referring again to HB465. “We do not need a legislative mandate that threatens to take our funds in order to do that partnership.”
