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SALT LAKE CITY — On the heels of a recent meeting where some eastside residents called for the Salt Lake City Police Department to hire more officers, the Salt Lake Police Association has issued an open letter asking for the same thing.
Mike Millard, president of the union, would like to see the city hire 25 to 30 more officers. That's on top of the approximately half-dozen positions currently waiting to be filled within the department due to retirements or resignations.
Two weeks ago, during a meeting with Salt Lake Police Chief Chris Burbank, three City Council members and numerous residents expressed concerns that they believe more officers need to be hired because they feel too much attention is being given to downtown areas and they didn't feel safe in the eastside neighborhoods.
The chief pointed out that his department is actually receiving fewer calls now than it has in the past 20 years, and based on a statistical approach to workload, the city's police force is "pretty close" to where it should be. He said it will be closer with the mayor's budget proposal to open 12 new positions.
But Millard disagrees.
"Our crime rate has been steadily climbing, despite what the chief is telling people," he said.
Specifically, Millard said that according to the Salt Lake City Intelligence Bureau, burglaries, thefts, auto thefts and larcenies are up. Violent crimes, such as homicides, sexual assaults and robberies, are all about the same or down from a year ago, he said.
Burbank said at the meeting that more social workers were needed, not officers. He used the analogy of a drunken man who is arrested at a park but then released from jail and arrested again the very next day, Millard said.
Our crime rate has been steadily climbing, despite what the chief is telling people.
–Mike MIllard, union president
While acknowledging that the types of crimes that are up are typically indicative of drug users, Millard said drunks in the park aren't what residents are complaining about.
"By the chief's analogy, we need more social workers. That's fine. I think that's a good idea as well. But we don't stop dealing with the problems waiting for someone else who is in charge of hiring social workers to hire more," he said.
Millard also expects that getting into drug court will now be harder for some people now that the Utah Legislature reduced some drug possession crimes from felonies to misdemeanors.
"They're going backwards in that aspect," he said.
The biggest reason, he believes, for more officers is simply officer safety.
"We need to make sure we're sending enough people to calls," Millard said, referring to a current anti-police climate that has been reported across the country.
Millard wants two officers to be able to respond to every call, while still not creating a backlog of calls where residents have to wait two hours for a police officer to respond to their house.
Salt Lake City Councilman Charles Luke said he plans to propose a budget amendment to add more officers.
