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SALT LAKE CITY — More body cameras. More officers. Increased transparency. Enhanced training.
Those are among Salt Lake City Interim Police Chief Mike Brown's plans to repair public trust in a climate of heightened scrutiny of police use of force — in Salt Lake City and nationwide.
"We look at Ferguson, Baltimore, New York, Chicago — they've all had problems with use of force," Brown said. "But it also comes back to Salt Lake City. We have issues here too."
Brown briefed the Salt Lake City Council on his department's lethal force practices Tuesday. It was a meeting prompted by tension between Salt Lake police and the community following two controversial deaths at the hands of city officers.
Dillon Taylor was unarmed when he was shot and killed by a Salt Lake police officer in August 2014. James Dudley Barker was shot and killed by a police officer in January 2015 after he attacked and injured the officer with a shovel.
Both shootings were ruled justified by the Salt Lake City Police Civilian Review Board. But the board's decisions have been questioned by police brutality activists who worry the board is not holding police accountable.
"Someone needs to police the police," said Perry Tucker, whose son, Christopher Joseph Tucker, was shot and killed by police in 2009.
Jacob Jensen, a member of Utah Against Police Brutality, asked the City Council what it will do when another "police killing" happens.
"We need to have an answer as what the council will do to hold those police responsible," Jensen said. "Right now, we don't have a satisfactory apparatus to do that."
Rick Rasmussen, investigator and administrator for the Civilian Review Board, said the board is "about as autonomous as we can get."
"We don't take any direction as it relates to decisions from the council, from the mayor's office, or from the police department," he said. "As long as the board focuses on the evidence and is not influenced by groups or the loudest voices or political powers, then the board is doing its assigned task. And that's exactly what it's doing right now."
Brown said repairing public trust and avoiding lethal force situations requires more resources, training and transparency, something the department is already implementing.
"Right now, the big buzz words across the country are 'de-escalation' and 'communication.' We need to get back to that and reinstill that trust back into the communities we serve," the interim chief said.
Currently, the Salt Lake City Police Department has 380 body cameras. The department plans to purchase 90 more so "everybody, lieutenant and below, can have a camera," Brown said.
To increase transparency, the police department is also working on launching a new website, where users can look up use-of-force events and see the circumstances surrounding those situations.
"I think people will be very excited with what we're doing," Brown said.
The department will also be hiring 38 new officers after they graduate from police academies in March to bring its force up from 426 to 464.
Brown said a more robust force will allow officers to more consistently respond to calls in pairs rather than alone — a practice that should increase officer safety and decrease the likelihood of physical encounters.
Pairing officers up on dispatch calls has always been prefered, but not practical when the city's police force has been understaffed for years, Brown said. So until the department gets its new recruits, Brown has funded 36 four-hour overtime shifts per week, he said, and he's looking to add another 21 four-hour shifts per week through grant funding.
"That's made a huge difference, because now we have the resources to send two officers on each call," the interim chief said. "We're serving the citizens much better now."
Last year, the City Council pumped an additional $38,000 into the police department to fund enhanced use-of-force training.
"We invest a lot of time and energy into training our officers. We have probably one of the best training departments in the country," Brown said, indicating each officer is required to complete at least 40 hours of use-of-force training, but in reality they typically each complete more than 160 hours.
He said trainers are also beginning to conduct "walk-throughs" of scenes relating to use-of-force incidents so they can train not only new officers, but also existing officers on the lessons learned from those situations.
Mayor Jackie Biskupski said she's been meeting with Brown on a regular basis to talk about how to serve the community better.
"I'm confident that the chief with these recommendations is headed in the right direction and will create a much more effective department, but also one that is more transparent than it has been," Biskupski said.
Sharon Burkinshaw with the Community Coalition for Police Reform said she was "expecting to hear something completely different" from what she heard from Brown's report.
"I'm so happy that you have someone like Chief Brown that can go through this and disseminate what really needs to be done," she said. "We want to work with the city of Salt Lake City and Chief Brown to come up with solutions rather than blame. We want to help figure out what needs to be done, and I think he's on a great track."
Contributing: Sandra Yi
