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WEST VALLEY CITY — They are tasked with cracking down on crime where it is happening the most, and already the officers in West Valley City Police Department’s Crime Suppression Unit believe they are making a difference.
The unit, which only has two full months of statistics under its belt, was responsible in February and March for 100 total arrests, 64 felony arrests, 9 recovered stolen vehicles and $83,000 in recovered stolen property, according to numbers the police department supplied to KSL News.
Supervisor Sgt. Todd Gray said department analysts organize crime stats by type, times of day, and area to create maps with “hot zones” showing what is happening where in the city.
“We try to establish where the majority of these are occurring,” Gray said.
He said officers will observe those areas, make stops, and identify potential suspects who may ultimately be tied to larger patterns of home burglaries, business burglaries, car burglaries, car thefts, stolen car recoveries and robberies.
“Statistics show that the majority of your crime is going to be committed by a smaller percentage of those people,” Gray said. “We build these cases and take down the people we think are doing it, and we watch and see.”
The unit, he said, is already paying dividends.
“I think it’s huge,” Gray said. “We’ve already seen some numbers drop.”
Friday night, a KSL-TV crew followed the unit as it pursued leads based off of a case two nights earlier, where a stolen rental pickup truck crashed into a canal while trying to elude officers.
Gray said the unit received intelligence that a third woman, later identified by police as Mary Lundell, was connected to the vehicle theft.
“That home where the suspect lived on Ottawa Drive happened to be right square in the middle of the hot zone where we’ve been having numerous vehicle burglaries and vehicle thefts and stolen vehicles being abandoned,” Gray said.
Statistics show that the majority of your crime is going to be committed by a smaller percentage of those people. We build these cases and take down the people we think are doing it, and we watch and see.
–Sgt. Todd Gray, WVCPD
Police tracked the woman down at her home just after 7:00 p.m. Friday, but officers still were looking for another man they hoped to find at the address.
Officer “Joe” Tan said the man, later identified by police as Dalton Bergevin, was suspected of assaulting his girlfriend with a hand gun.
Information quickly led police to a second address blocks away on Crest Field Drive, where an associate of Bergevin was known to be living.
As police approached the front door after dark, Gray said one officer yelled “gun” while observing the associate come from the basement with a gun in hand.
Fortunately, officers – with guns drawn – were able to take the man into custody.
“He understood why we had our weapons out,” Tan said. “He said, ‘Yeah, I stashed [the gun] in the stairway.'”
Police said the man, later identified as Scott Memmott, was arrested and booked on a weapons violation as a restricted person, possession of drug paraphernalia, obstruction of justice, and a misdemeanor warrant for theft by deception.
Another woman in the home with Memmott, identified by police as Kristi Rose Dickinson, was booked into the Salt Lake County Jail for obstruction of justice and drug warrants.
Police said Memmott and Dickinson initially lied about the whereabouts of Bergevin, who was ultimately discovered hiding in the garage.
A jail probable cause statement said Dickinson explained to police she “was nervous and she just did not know what to do.”
Bergevin was booked on domestic violence aggravated assault, a weapons violation for a restricted person, and a misdemeanor warrant.
Lundell was booked on warrants, according to the jail.
Investigators said the homeowners of the second house were not connected to any criminal activity.
"They're a victim of circumstance of trying to help someone out and the gentleman obviously is not telling them, being honest about his dealings and his activities," Gray said. "They're not very happy about that either."
West Valley City police spokesperson Roxeanne Vainuku said officers recovered a handgun, four rifles, user amounts of a controlled substance, and drug paraphernalia from the second home.
Officers in the unit told KSL News these types of cases are examples of the work they do to reduce crime in the “hot zones.”
“It was not a surprise when we realized the area and the location of that [first] home, and the people there that were obviously back active doing that kind of activity again,” Gray said.
Tan put the work and the people the unit encounters into perspective.
“A lot of the guys that we catch are good people that do bad things,” he said. “(Our) primary objective is to stop them from victimizing innocent people.”
