Like his recent predecessors, Salt Lake City’s new police chief is set up in a spacious corner office with mountain views from the Public Safety Building’s fourth floor, complete with fresh uniforms, huge windows and a small private balcony.
Since taking over the city’s top cop in March, however, Brian Redd says he is almost never there.
Instead, he has been out on what amounts to a nonstop walking tour with ears open — focused on the intersection of crime, homelessness, mental health and addiction.
“I’ve really been spending just a lot of time out there trying to listen: to the community, to our officers, our professional staff,” Redd said in an interview, “to really get an assessment of where we are as an organization.”
That quickly led to him recall a sidewalk interaction a few days before with a homeless mom and her kids at a troubled spot along North Temple.
“I’ve spent a lot of time talking to a lot of these individuals since I’ve been here,” Redd said. “It’s really heartbreaking to see some of them.”
He said he also is zeroing in on how he listens through the officers in the field. “How does that communication get back to me,” Redd asked, “so I know how residents are feeling out in the community?”
And the point of taking this all in? “A lot of the good ideas,” he said, “come up from the ground.”
No wonder his office sits empty.
As Mayor Erin Mendenhall’s pick to replace former Police Chief Mike Brown, Redd faces pressure from the outset to get traction on elements of the city’s new public safety plan, aimed at better addressing heightened problems with vagrancy and drug activity.
Last month, the Police Department released a new online crime map. Though initiated under Brown’s tenure, the interactive tool features real data updated monthly and is now aimed by Redd at giving residents better access to crime trends in their neighborhoods — a sign of added police accountability he said he wants to elevate.
“What is the data telling us?” the chief said, hinting at a new focus on real-time crime analysis. “What do we need to do, and how are we going to intervene?”
On the ground, Redd has also pointed to early results from stepped-up efforts in police and park ranger enforcement along the Jordan River, which has seen a key trail segment shut down for more intense patrols, arrests and camp and river corridor cleanups.
Above all, the new chief said, he wants his phone to keep ringing. “Communication,” he said, “is going to be an area that we’re really going to focus on.”
Here are more excerpts from the interview, edited for clarity and length:
A couple of months in, what is your take on the city’s challenges around this intersection you‘ve talk about: crime, homelessness, mental health and addiction?
We spend a lot of time thinking about how we can change the narrative just a little bit, from this being all a homelessness problem.
We have that for sure, and we need affordable housing and behavioral health treatment, but we also, in many cases, are having crime issues in the community. It’s not all one thing, though; sometimes it’s all intermingled.
A lot of times, you‘ll have the people experiencing homelessness, and then what you have is people who come in on top of them, who are more criminogenic, who come in to deal drugs, victimize, hide amongst, and it kind of becomes this gathering point. Pretty soon you have people driving in from the different counties to buy their drugs in Salt Lake City.
And that’s what we’ve got to to figure out as a community, together. We’re really engaging with the [district attorney’s] office, the jail, the legal defenders and social services, and saying, “What can we do differently? How can we make the system work better for these individuals?”
Yes, we need more jail beds, more resource center beds and more social services. But with what we have, can we improve it? Can we do better?
How are drugs like fentanyl driving the larger picture?
(Jordan Miller | The Salt Lake Tribune) Fentanyl pills seized in Salt Lake City in 2024.
We have a lot of fentanyl flowing into Utah right now. Some of it is coming here as a trans-shipment location. Some of it’s being distributed here, but a lot of it’s moving off to Wyoming, Idaho.
Fentanyl is certainly the big one, but methamphetamine is also right there. We have some cocaine. We’ve had some marijuana seizures, and, with those, a lot of the gun activity is associated with THC carts and marijuana.
They’re all dangerous, but fentanyl and meth are the big ones.
For individuals using these substances, they are so powerful that it’s going to be really hard for them to make the decision — even if the resources are available — to leave their social environment and the drugs to get help without taking them out, either through an arrest or some way of giving them enough time in jail to sober up.
We need to create good pathways for that. When someone says, “I need help,” we need to be able to have a great intervention and actually deliver on that as well. We need to deliver consequences — not for consequences’ sake, but to get them sobered up and get them the help.
It doesn’t do them any good to get arrested, booked, released, arrested, booked, released, and we just keep stacking charges on. ... There’s no teeth in the criminal justice system, and we’re really not delivering anything to them, right? We’ve got to get better at that.
At the risk of using a controversial term — “Operation Leaf Blower” — what are some the latest hot spots in the city in reaction to increased enforcement? How are things moving around the city?
(Chris Samuels | The Salt Lake Tribune) Brooke Grundy with the Salt Lake County Health Department inspects a shelter along the banks of the Jordan River in Salt Lake City in March. Salt Lake City's new police chief says camp cleanups are a vital part of his enforcement strategy.
According to neighbors, some of it is north of where we’ve closed the Jordan River, so that type of information is good for us, because then we’ll pivot our resources.
A lot of that criminal activity has moved onto North Temple, 800 West. That’s a spot we’re watching right now. That’s an area where we’re trying to find some interventions.
We’ve had some calls in the Liberty Park area. We move them out of the park, and they’re moving into the neighborhoods. That’s frustrating to those residents, and I totally understand.
You can have an intense area with a lot of drug and criminal activity occurring and, if you decentralize that, you will move it around a little bit. But as you decentralize it, it makes it less profitable for those drug dealers, right?
Some of these encampments, that’s why they’re so damaging to cities, is because they just become a vortex. And pretty soon people from Davis County are driving down, because you just know where to drive or where to go and get yours. So you have to break it down and break it down and make it less profitable.
And that’s why it’s so critical that we engage the courts and the district attorney and the jail and make more capacity. We just have to send a message that you don’t come to Salt Lake City to deal drugs and use drugs. It’s not going to be accepted.
In the context of the Jordan River, you‘ve called for more community involvement with regard to public spaces in all this. Can you expand on that?
You can plow a field and get rid of the weeds, but if you don’t plant anything, the weeds come back. The Jordan River Trail is looking better than it has in a long time. We need the residents to start using it. We’re seeing more people out in the parks over there, running on the trail, and that’s the thing.
I want them to continue to call us when they have concerns — and that goes for anywhere in the city. We need to get the information from them. The data definitely says one thing, but also there are quality-of-life issues sometimes that aren’t reflected in the data.
Pioneer Park is another one. There are ideas for more programming in these areas. So just using the spaces, keeping eyes open, reporting, being involved in the community. I don’t know that there’s any one silver bullet. I think it’s just a matter of owning the space, right?
Look, I have a family, too. I don’t blame residents if they don’t want to use those public spaces if they’re not safe. We, as a Police Department, need to do everything that we can to make those places safe. And so I think that’s where the engagement between us and the residents is so critical, so that we can help.
I don’t want it to sound like the citizens or residents aren’t doing their job. We need to do our job together and make safe places that people feel like they can they can go visit.
