Poor leadership and a series of department “inefficiencies” under former Salt Lake City Police Chief Mike Brown brought down morale on the city’s force before his February departure, according to state auditors.
The department lost 282 sworn officers between 2020 and when Brown stepped down earlier this year at Mayor Erin Mendenhall’s behest, shedding nearly half its total working officers, according to an in-depth critique released Tuesday by the Utah Office of the Legislative Auditor General.
Nearly 77% of police surveyed by auditors reported low morale and a poor organizational culture, which auditors said contributed to high turnover, including among senior officers.
Before the city’s stepped-up public safety blueprint issued in January, the department hadn’t updated its internal strategic plan for three years, the 48-page state audit found, leaving many in the department unsure of its goals and shaking their underlying trust.
“Administrative leave was misused,” auditors reported to top lawmakers. “The previous chief appears to have struggled to make decisions and relied heavily on civilian staff for leadership.”
The result: a widespread lack of effectiveness within what is Utah’s largest police force, the auditors said, and, in some cases, even illegal behavior. Lax internal controls and limited accountability within the department, the audit alleges, contributed at one point to some officers falsifying their time cards during state-funded shifts to enforce camping ordinances
“That means fraud, right? On homeless mitigation funds. There’s no other way to put it,” probed House Speaker Mike Schultz, R-Hooper, as he and other legislative leaders took in Tuesday’s report.
‘Undoing’ challenges, the mayor says
(Chris Samuels | The Salt Lake Tribune) Salt Lake City Police Chief Brian Redd says his department is now back to full strength.
Mendenhall told lawmakers that Brown’s replacement in March — former state prisons director and state Department of Public Safety official Brian Redd — “dug in immediately” upon taking the department helm to investigate some of the highlighted problems, with the mayor saying the audit “has helped provide great clarity for us.”
The City Council, Mendenhall noted, has since offered much-needed financial support in recent budgets to help address discrepancies in officer pay and hiring, along with other department funding gaps.
“This is congruent with the direction that we’re going,” the mayor told lawmakers. “We’re going to keep working hand in glove as we undo the challenges that this department faced over the years.”
(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) Sat Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall and police Chief Brian Redd point to a 16-year low in the city's overall crime rate.
Mendenhall and Redd have cited a 16-year low in the city’s overall crime rate and several improving metrics from the city’s latest public safety push, including additional arrests and enforcement on illegal camping.
Brown, a 33-year department veteran with nearly a decade as chief, stepped down while the review by state auditors was still underway, though he continued in city employment on administrative leave with full pay through Aug. 29.
While Brown has refrained from talking to reporters since he retired, he issued a statement Tuesday, saying the audit was “part of a political attack” aimed at the department under his tenure — and at Salt Lake City as well.
“The auditors never contacted me directly, nor was I asked to respond to any allegations,” Brown said. “That deliberate omission is more revealing than any conclusion they have tried to represent as objective.”
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) Then-Salt Lake City Police Chief Mike Brown and Mayor Erin Mendenhall at a 2022 news conference. Browns says state auditors "never contacted me directly, nor was I asked to respond to any allegations."
Brown also called the audit, one of several related reviews released Tuesday, “a vehicle to present a manufactured partisan indictment, not a fair and independent inquiry. Bias at its foundation means it has no credibility in its conclusion.”
The former chief said his leadership had delivered “innovative policing strategies, stronger community engagement, and safer streets.”
“A politically motivated report,” Brown continued, “cannot undo or diminish those years of hard work.”
Jail beds, prosecutions also in lawmakers’ sights
The findings released Tuesday prompted top leaders on Capitol Hill to go after some Salt Lake County officials as well. Topping those concerns: inaction by the county over a lack of jail space and perceived lapses in prosecution, as well as a lack of cooperation with state auditors themselves.
Schultz, Senate President Stuart Adams, R-Layton, and others called out County Mayor Jenny Wilson, a Democrat, and other leaders over findings the county had failed repeatedly to act on expanding its jail bed capacity — despite at least four in-depth studies highlighting the shortage.
County Sheriff Rosie Rivera, also a Democrat, said this latest audit on the impacts of jail overcrowding on the county’s justice system “accurately identifies our core challenge: The jail does not have enough space to manage the volume and complexity of individuals entering the system.”
Voters rejected a proposed $507 million bond in November 2024 to fund a major jail expansion and another bond proposal is under review for next year.
Auditors found that a long-standing county practice of early releases due to jail overcrowding had significantly boosted the chances that those let go will reoffend, often with more serious crimes.
Early releases have also significantly boosted the rates at which suspects fail to show up for scheduled court hearings, they reported. At the state’s urging, county officials curtailed those overcrowding releases over the summer and resurrected hundreds beds at Oxbow Jail and converted others at the Salt Lake County jail to house additional inmates.
Wilson said there was a higher level of collaboration now among leaders in county law enforcement and social services in addressing some of the underlying problems, especially since state leaders intervened late in 2024 to give the matter more attention.
“We’re seeing progress,” Wilson told lawmakers Tuesday. “We are tackling all of that now, and we’re inspired by the work.”
Lawmakers call D.A. Sim Gill to task
(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) Salt Lake County District Attorney Sim Gill says the timing of the legislative meeting clashed with county budget hearings.
Still another audit, studying operations within the county district attorney’s office, found confusion among prosecutors over how criminal cases were being screened and filed, murky rules on alternatives to jail and a lack of documentation for analyzing plea deals.
State auditors also said county officials hampered them at several junctures from obtaining information necessary for their review, including barring them from sitting in on key meetings.
In apparent frustration over a perceived lack of transparency, House Majority Leader Casey Snider, R-Paradise, sternly dressed down District Attorney Sim Gill for not attending Tuesday’s hearing, calling the Democrat’s absence “an embarrassment.”
“We have to do better than this,” Snider told colleagues on the Legislative Audit Subcommittee. “I am just so frustrated that, at a professional courtesy level, Sim Gill could not even come to this meeting. It is unacceptable. Full stop.”
A county colleague said Gill had sent his apologies for not being able to attend, citing a scheduling conflict with the county’s yearly budget hearings.
Lack of consistency
Auditors said while key trends within the Salt Lake City Police Department had improved significantly under Redd, the agency needs its own strategic plan, partly to improve stability and a clear chain of command.
Redd told the committee he had moved quickly to build that strategic plan and to fix the department’s internal affairs and complaints process “to make it more fair for the officers and more responsive to public concerns in a timely manner.”
He also said the force was realigning its command structures, “empowering our sworn leadership to make decisions and to lead their people.” The City Council, at the same time, has boosted police staffing, Redd noted, adding the department was now “at full strength.”
Before Redd’s arrival, the auditors found the highest dissatisfaction with leadership and internal culture of any government agency auditors have ever surveyed — stemming, they said, from organizational challenges due to “poor leadership.”
They also took issue with Brown’s use of administrative leave, saying it was applied “inconsistently and as a punitive knee-jerk reaction rather than in accordance with departmental policy.”
They cited the example of an employee placed on leave for over six months and two subordinates each put on a month’s leave, all related to an unauthorized purchase under the county’s tax-exempt status that resulted in roughly a $150 personal gain.
Over a similar time period, several officers were investigated for time card and overtime discrepancies related to homelessness enforcement efforts, but with no indication, auditors said, that police leaders under Brown ever referred those cases for criminal screening.
The prior administration also “did not keep consistent records” on why some were placed or remained on leave for whatever reason, with one officer appearing to rack up 17 months of leave over allegations that a subsequent investigation ultimately deemed to be unfounded.
Up to a third of the department’s officers, according to Schultz, were allegedly caught up in the time card discrepancies, yet none was subject to discipline beyond a verbal warning and, the House speaker said, “maybe a few days off without pay.”
Auditors noted in their report that five implicated officers were later placed on leave by Redd.
Multiple Utah police agencies in addition to Salt Lake City, meanwhile, looked into similar time card anomalies and issued much stiffer sanctions against their officers, including firing some of them. The discipline pursued by Brown, auditors said, “was less severe.”
Those kinds of inconsistencies, auditors said, led to perceptions that damaged morale “and eroded trust in the previous chief and senior leadership.”