Six months into a surge to improve public safety on its streets, Salt Lake City reports a rise in arrests and jail bookings, more drug and gun seizures and a big jump in tickets written for illegal camping.
Mayor Erin Mendenhall said Wednesday that after recognizing last year the “hard truth” that the city wasn’t doing enough to make residents feel safe in the face of heightened vagrancy and drug activity, its 27-step plan to improve conditions unveiled in January has brought “tremendous progress.”
Twelve of those 27 strategies were enacted over the past six months alongside a campaign of targeted patrols in the downtown area, along the Jordan River and North Temple, and in the Ballpark neighborhood, a new report from the city says.
Yet Mendenhall also pointed to persistent gaps in financial support from Capitol Hill to boost crucial shelter beds and add social services. Talks with and among state officials toward building and paying to operating a new 1,000-bed shelter campus, she said, appeared to have bogged down.
“Salt Lake City is not letting a broken system prevent us from fixing the pieces that we can control,” Mendenhall said in a news conference at City Hall, standing with newly hired police Chief Brian Redd. “We’re not letting a lack of space in the shelter system mean a lack of effort on our part.”
At the same time, she said, inaction by the Legislature “ties the entire system’s hands.”
‘Proactivity’ by SLC officers is up
(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall listens as Brian Redd speaks at a City Hall news conference on Thursday, Feb 20, 2025.
Along with stepped-up enforcement, Mendenhall said city officers are working more proactively in their public interactions under Redd’s leadership and are building community trust, with police referring hundreds of people toward help, healing and supportive services along the way.
On the flip side, a specially created police team devoted to apprehending violent criminals has spent intervening months investigating and conducting targeted busts and seizing thousands of fentanyl pills and other narcotics, as well as nearly 100 illegally possessed firearms.
“While these numbers are important — and it’s important that we hold people accountable," Redd said, “our officers are also working hard every day to help individuals who are out on our streets, who are struggling and who are vulnerable.”
Overall crime rates are at an eight-year low, statistics show, although violent crimes and burglaries are up so far this year — trends that Redd said mimic national patterns and may be partly attributed to local police disrupting narcotic supplies.
“We don’t view these statistics as definitive success,” Mendenhall added. “Rather, they’re a sign that we’re moving in the right direction. They’re also a constant reminder that this work is never done and we will never stop measuring and listening about our progress toward our goals.”
‘Connecting’ with repeat offenders
The city’s public safety plan was released amid public pressure last year from Utah’s legislative leaders to address rising homelessness and perceived public safety concerns in Utah’s capital.
As part of its strategies, the city recommended key steps by government partners and offered land for use by state officials as a temporary homeless shelter. The mayor said Wednesday the state is considering that city-owned property for a permanent facility “and progress has now stalled.”
“The city has done everything in our power to support this effort,” Mendenhall said. “Now we need the state to act to fully fund development and ongoing operations for this state-owned campus.”
The latest city budget approved earlier this year calls for $4 million in new spending as of July 1 toward public safety-related items, including more police cameras and a permanent city cleanup crew to address encampments and graffiti. There’s also another $5 million set aside this year to promote affordable housing suited to transitioning folks off the street.
New security guards are in place at nine public parks and a recently closed portion of the Jordan River near Cottonwood Park has been cleaned and reopened— more examples, the mayor said, that the city was “listening to our residents and we’re responding with urgency.”
And in new strategy called Project CONNECT, social and criminal justice agencies are assessing the needs of a small group of repeat offenders who account for an outsize share of contact with police and the courts.
Redd said the tracking would “put them to the front of the line and get them the help they need, reducing the burden on the criminal justice system and actually delivering better results.”
