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FARMINGTON — A former Salt Lake police officer will be sent to prison after a jury convicted him of possessing child sex abuse material last month.
Jonathan Isaac Dew, 43, of Syracuse, was sentenced Wednesday to a term of one to 15 years in prison after a jury found him guilty on 13 counts of sexual exploitation of a minor, a second-degree felony, according to a news release from the Utah Attorney General's Office. The same jury found him not guilty of four counts of the same charge.
Dew, who was a 12-year veteran of the Salt Lake City Police Department, was arrested in November 2018 after the Internet Crimes Against Children task force began an investigation the month prior. The task force learned that a computer in Syracuse had used "sophisticated software" to offer up child pornography to download, according to charging documents.
Investigators later served a search warrant on Dew's home, and they found a laptop that Dew's wife thought was broken. However, charging documents say that four files of child pornography were found on the laptop. Task force agents went to the police department to interview Dew before taking him into custody.
Dew was booked into the Davis County Jail, and he later posted a $100,000 bond in December 2018 and was released. Dew went to trial in March and was found guilty on March 8, according to court records.
Following Wednesday's sentencing, Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes said in a statement that his office prosecutes child porn and child exploitation cases "as aggressively as we can."
"Any matters involving child exploitation are tragic," Reyes said in the statement. "And here, where a former peace officer is involved, it is even more disturbing. We must hold accountable not only the creators, suppliers and distributors of child porn but also consumers, such as in this case, who create demand for the abuse to occur."
After his arrest, the department announced that Dew would be placed on administrative leave while the investigation was ongoing. Online payroll records suggest that Dew continued to be paid by Salt Lake City through 2019.
Dew will be sent to the Utah Department of Corrections to serve his prison term.
