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OGDEN, Utah (AP) — Two Utah jails dealt with 34 serious but non-fatal incidents last year, including inmate fights, seizures, falls from bunks, drug overdoses and mental health outbursts.
There were 20 non-fatal but serious or life-threatening incidents at Weber County Jail in 2017 that required emergency paramedic calls and trips to the hospital, according to jail records.
Meanwhile, the Davis County Jail reported 14 non-fatal but significant medical emergencies last year, according to documents obtained by the Standard-Examiner following a public records request,
However, deep analysis of county jail incidents is not easy to come by because of limitations with corrections record-keeping systems. So far, only case-by-case information has been disclosed.
Weber County's system lacks robust searching capabilities, and the sheriff's office gathered records of serious incidents only after the Standard-Examiner won an appeal for the information. The sheriff's office said it researched ambulance billings to identify relevant reports, the Standard-Examiner reported .
Salt Lake County rejected a similar request for records unless the newspaper paid $1,000 or more — fees allowed by state law — for the clerical work it said would be necessary to comb records. Then, records to be disclosed must be scrubbed of personal information.
"We have to call up individual reports; we don't have a good statistical data mining system," said Melanie Mitchell, a deputy district attorney.
"We do now have a list of deaths and are keeping track of those," she said.
The Utah Legislature in March passed a bill requiring county jails and state prisons to submit annual reports of the deaths. That came after two years of controversy over a surge of jail deaths in the state.
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Information from: Standard-Examiner, http://www.standard.net
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