In choosing Utah’s top prison system official as Salt Lake City’s new police chief, Mayor Erin Mendenhall said she’d grown impatient with a decadeslong “blame game” of trying to solve issues related to homelessness and public safety.
After urging longtime Police Chief Mike Brown to step into retirement, Mendenhall put forward Brian Redd, executive director of the state Department of Corrections since mid-2023, for vetting and approval by the City Council.
“I burned out a few years ago on both feeling like Salt Lake City was standing alone and having a circle of fingers pointing at each other about whose responsibility this is,” Mendenhall said of seeking to solve homelessness amid gaps in Utah’s complex systems of social services and criminal justice.
The mayor has touted Redd, a onetime Utah Highway Patrol officer and former leader at the state Department of Public Safety, for his skills in collaborating with other government agencies — but also, she said Thursday, as “a straight shooter” willing to be held accountable.
Redd, she said, “has never been one of those people who would displace blame and marginalize or minimize the issues at hand.”
The council’s review of the new police chief, under its powers of advice and consent, is scheduled for Tuesday.
That vetting will happen as the Utah Legislature is close to approving a new proposal that would allow the state to use eminent domain to take city-owned land for construction of a sizable new facility for homeless services.
That provision, newly added to HB465 as it advances on Capitol Hill to a final Senate vote, drew a mixed response from Mendenhall.
“I would be struck by lightning from heaven if I said I supported eminent domain toward the city by the state,” the mayor said, “but I do support the creation of more shelter, which I’ve asked for for five years.”
Nominee says approach will be ‘responsive’
(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) Brian Redd, Mayor Erin Mendenhall's pick to run the Salt Lake City Police Department, speaks at a news conference at City Hall on Thursday, Feb. 20, 2025.
Before the council’s vetting, Redd said he’d take a responsive approach to policing in Utah’s capital, with a more holistic strategy toward unsheltered residents on its streets.
“I’m really here to ensure that our officers are supported,” he said in a meeting with The Salt Lake Tribune editorial board, “and that they’re policing in a way that is reflective of community values and that is keeping the public safe.”
That’ll be based, Redd added, on regularly tapping into a wide range of perspectives — as well as applying what he’d learned from the integrated system of services delivered to inmates while overseeing state prisons.
“The prison is a community,” Redd said. “We all want safe communities, safe prisons. You want people to have good lives — and this includes our officers and the incarcerated population.”
The same goes, he said, for those who are struggling in the web of homelessness, crime, mental health crises and addiction, “so you have to bring all the partners together with all different levels of expertise to find the best path for individuals.” That, Redd said, argues for “individualized approaches” with police officers at the front line of those interactions.
He said he’d seek to build up the city’s depleted police ranks, with the possibility of boosting salaries. Also on his agenda: police response times, including, he said, “a look at how they’re calculating those and how residents are feeling.”
Crime numbers for the city are down, Redd said, but “if there are people that aren’t feeling safe or they aren’t feeling like the response times are there, well, we have to take a real hard look at the Police Department to see what we can do better.”
Pressure from the state amid Brown’s departure
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) Former Salt Lake City Police Chief Mike Brown and Mayor Erin Mendenhall in 2022.
Brown, a 33-year veteran of the force in Utah’s capital with almost a decade as chief, stepped aside Friday. Despite it being his last day in the top post, he will remain employed by the city through August while on administrative leave, public records obtained by The Tribune indicate.
The city will continue to pay him at his current rate until Aug. 29, according to his official separation with the city. State records indicate, as of this year, Brown was to earn an annual wage of $262,988 and $157,102 in yearly benefits.
The outgoing chief will then be paid an additional sum of $205,000 after Aug. 29, according to the separation agreement. In its preamble, the signed pact also says his stepping aside reflected a determination by the city that “a change in police department leadership is necessary.”
Although Mendenhall has said Brown’s ouster had nothing to do with pressure from the Utah Legislature, the move has come as state officials are ramping up criticism of the city’s past strategy toward policing drug activity and those experiencing homelessness.
Responding to concerns lodged in December by Gov. Spencer Cox, Senate President Stuart Adams, R-Layton, and House Speaker Mike Schultz, R-Hooper, over perceptions of deteriorating conditions on the city’s streets, Mendenhall launched a new 27-point public safety plan in mid-January.
That has put in motion stepped-up enforcement, added police patrols, more dispersals of homeless encampments and a series of targeted drug busts centered on downtown, along the Jordan River and in the Ballpark neighborhood.
It has also sought to place an onus on Salt Lake County and state leaders to address a lack of social services, jail beds and housing options that Mendenhall says are vital to reversing a steady rise in homelessness numbers and recent heightened drug activity.
The 27-point strategy also offers city property for a 1,000-bed shelter that was to be temporary.
GOP leaders on Capitol Hill have responded, in part, by advancing HB465, which, as now written, requires the city to sign an interagency agreement with the Department of Public Safety to allow targeted deployments of Utah Highway Patrol officers in crime hot spots — at the city’s expense.
‘Taking’ city land for a new state shelter
(Bethany Baker | The Salt Lake Tribune) People walk through the Utah Capitol in Salt Lake City on Thursday, Feb. 27, 2025.
The bill, sponsored by House Majority Assistant Whip Casey Snider, R-Paradise, originally threatened the city with a loss of funds to ease the impacts of homelessness and gas-tax money to fix city roads if it didn’t play along.
As of late last week, HB465 was stripped of those sanctions, but lawmakers have added the option of using eminent domain, giving the state narrow powers to assume ownership of unincorporated land the city owns for its own public uses. Under the bill’s latest draft, that power would remain in place until July 1, 2026.
Snider told members of the Senate Judiciary, Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice Committee that the land-taking provision targeted the same piece of property the city intended to offer for the state’s temporary use as a homelessness campus.
The city-owned property is now covered by a conservation easement meant to keep it as open space, Snider said. The eminent domain approach was legally necessary to override that, he said, while other land nearby is being considered for open space.
“This isn’t cart blanche,” Snider said of the eminent domain provision. “It’s a collaborative step in the right direction.”
Despite the mayor’s misgivings over eminent domain, her chief of staff, Rachel Otto, told the committee those amendments had moved the city from strongly opposing the bill to supporting it. The envisioned partnership with the Department of Public Safety, Otto said, is key to enacting the mayor’s public safety plan.
The city also favors additional emergency shelter space in the system, Otto said, “and this will help us achieve that.” But the city is also adamant that Utah needs to add housing, more behavioral and mental health services and other resources to help its plan succeed.
