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SALT LAKE CITY — Salt Lake County’s district attorney said Monday’s shooting rampage along State Street is unlike anything he’s ever seen before.
“This is a very complicated shooting scenario, we are very lucky lives where not lost,” Sim Gill told KSL in an exclusive one-on-one interview. “The volume of the crime scene here is unique. I’ve never seen anything like that in my experience.”
Gill said the officer-involved shooting adds to the long list of these types of cases he’s already dealing with.
He said last year was a record year with 21 officer-involved shootings. That’s more than three times the yearly average he’s seen in the eight years he’s been in office.
“That is huge,” said Gill.
So far, 13 of those cases have been ruled on and Gill says another three are expected to be finished up in the next two weeks.
As a result of Monday’s shooting, 15 officers were put on paid administrative leave, which is standard procedure for police departments in those situations.
Ten of those officers were from the Salt Lake City Police Department, which brings to a total of 17 officers in the department now on leave as a result of these shootings.
Gill said he wants to make something very clear to the public about officers being put on administrative leave.
“In the last eight years since I’ve been district attorney, we’ve asked for zero officers to be put on administrative leave because that is not our function,” he said. “[Police departments] may be waiting for my office, but it’s a decision that is theirs to make.”
Gill said too many times his office gets blamed or is given the public perception that these officers can’t go back to work until he’s ruled on the shooting whether it's justified or not.
“To turn around and say the DA is demanding that, that is an absolutely false statement,” said Gill.
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Fifteen officers from three agencies have been placed on administrative leave as a result of a fatal officer-involved shooting in South Salt Lake Monday morning.One of the cases still being looked at dates back to a Salt Lake City officer-involved shooting in April of last year.
Gill said some cases take time.
“That’s a case we want to be very thorough about and we had to retain an outside expert and gather all our files and send them for review,” he said. “Anytime we have a loss of life in our community … it’s my sense that they want us to be as thorough and deliberate about it as we can rather than rush to judgment from either side of the equation.”
