Park cites growth and technology as the top changes seen by his department

When Frank Park began his law enforcement career almost 30 years ago, Tooele County was a place where residents knew each other by name — regardless of being from Stansbury, Tooele or even Vernon.

While the county hasn’t physically changed in size, its population certainly has, bringing along with it challenges well beyond not recognizing faces. And Park, who now finds himself at the helm of the Tooele County Sheriff’s Office, is charged with dealing directly with those challenges — ranging from jail overcrowding to lack of manpower.

Park was born and raised in Tooele. As the son of a longtime sheriff’s deputy, Park was always destined to work in a law enforcement field. He took a detour, however, beginning his professional career as a teacher following graduation from Weber State University and then partnering with a friend to run a concrete business in Salt Lake for seven years.

“Then the economy turned bad and I started looking around for something else,” Park said. “Law enforcement was something that I was familiar with so I came out and tested with the Tooele City Police Department. I got on with them and spent about two years there. Then I had an opportunity to test for a deputy job and came over to the county and I’ve been with the county ever since.”

The Transcript-Bulletin recently sat down with Park for a wide-ranging discussion on the challenges and changes he has seen in law enforcement in the county since his election as sheriff seven years ago.

Q: What problems did you see when you first took the reins as sheriff and what steps did you take first to improve the force?

A: One of the problems I noticed upfront was that we were losing our corrections workers to other counties or even other agencies because what we were paying them was low. One of the first things we did was get pay parody, which means they make the same as a starting deputy from day one. It has really solidified our corrections office. We never had any seniority. Guys would leave the first chance they got and now we’ve got seniority. One of the first sergeant exams we had back in the jail had to be changed because we had no one who had enough years to even qualify to take it. We now have people who want to make careers back there. The other thing that I did when I first started was organize the citizen’s patrol. Most of them are retired people. They come in and sign up to take one of the vehicles around and be seen. Right now we have about 90 people signed up for citizen patrol. It really blossomed.

Q: How has the department and the nature of police work in the county changed over the past decade? How has population growth affected the work you do?

A: Years ago when I was on the road, and even years after, we knew everybody. If you got a call to Erda, you knew where you were going by the name. I think one thing the growth has given us is the job is now very impersonal. You get a call to an address and most of the time you don’t know who those people are. Technology has also changed the way we work and patrol. It used to be that when you took a report you wrote it down on paper and then you would have to come in and type it up. Now they do the whole thing in their car. There used to be a rush toward the end of the shift where people would come in to do their reports in the office. Now they can stay out and stay on station and do their paperwork and push a button to forward all that information in, even their citations. Citations are now electronically sent to the court instead of having to be hand-carried from point A to point B. It’s given us the ability to have people out on the road all the time.

Q: What’s the biggest continual challenge you’ve faced during your time as sheriff?

A: The biggest challenge that I’ve had as sheriff is dealing with personnel issues. Being sheriff is great and interesting and all those things that I thought it would be, but dealing with employees takes up a considerable amount of time. It’s just one thing after another. I’m not talking about all bad personnel issues. There’s good and bad. It’s just the fact that you have to address personnel issues. The budget is also a challenge. I’ve got $7.7 million to watch. I am insistent that I’m a part of the budget each year. It used to be fun as a deputy to take a case and work it through to fruition — to solve it and take the people to court. I miss that. Now if there’s a personnel problem I have to deal with that in the morning and a budget issue in the afternoon.

Q: What types of crimes do you feel like you’re making headway against and what types do you feel are becoming a larger problem over time?

A: I think that in the past few years we have really made some headway on child victim crimes — both physical and sexual abuse. We’ve done a good job educating the caregivers on what to look for. We also now have the Children’s Justice Center and what a great tool that is. The Children’s Justice Center and the multidisciplinary teams that they have take every case and follow it through step by step to ensure that the little victim is taken care of and that everyone is doing their job so that we get a prosecution. You’ll never get total eradication of child victim crimes, but it’s a whole lot better than it used to be. Property crimes are becoming a larger problem in the county. You can look at it and say it has to do with the economy because a lot of people are out of work, but I really don’t know what the reason is. It’s such a mobile type crime. It’s a crime of opportunity. When we get a rash of these types of crimes we try to put out sting operations and such, but it’s something we need the public’s help with. We stress for people to call us. It’s funny when you canvass a neighborhood after a crime and people say, ‘Well, I saw that but I didn’t think anything of it.’ We would rather react to 10 things that are absolutely nothing than miss the one thing that was something. If you think it is suspicious, it probably is. You know your own neighborhood. You know who should be there.

Q: What challenges are currently facing jail staff? What changes have been made to mitigate overcrowding issues?

A: We have 104 beds in the jail. Our average population in 2008 was 114. We are probably up around 116 this year. That means people on the floor. Everything has been double bunked since 1994 and that wasn’t predicted to happen until 2000. Another problem is our female population. We always have females down on the floor even when our population is under 100. It’s not a good situation for the temperament in the jail and it’s not a good situation for my officers who have to deal with it. It’s something that we wish we could get a handle on. We are trying to do everything humanly possible to mitigate overcrowding. We started an electronic ankle monitoring program, which allows us to release some non-violent offenders. I’m from the old school ... ‘If you’ve done the crime you’ve got to do the time.’ It’s really against my nature to early release, but we have to sometimes.

Q: What is your deputy-to-population ratio and is it enough to function effectively? Is there a need for more officers?

A: Staffing with the county has been an issue for years. We had 24 deputies in 2003 and we’ve got 27 deputies now. The national average for law enforcement officers per 1,000 residents today is about three. That ranges from 3.5 in the Northeast to 2.5 on the West Coast. We are at 1.4 officers per 1,000. In order to reach the minimum of 2.5 I’d need 10 more officers today. That’s not going to happen with the economy. Having enough officers is a big issue to me. It’s not necessarily just having an officer per 1,000 people. My issue is I’ve got one officer per 1,000 square miles. It’s a little different if you’ve got three guys on a shift and your closest backup is two minutes away versus three guys on a shift and your closest backup is 45 minutes away. We are down dangerously low. I petition the commissioners every year for more deputies, but the commissioners have to do what they have to do with the money they’ve got. I’m not happy about it, but it’s not necessarily their job to make me happy.

Q: The Sheriff’s Office covers a broader expanse of land than any other police agency in the county. Are there areas that you tend to focus your time on?

A: We take care in tracking our offenses and so the places with the most crime gets most of our attention. Unfortunately, because of the huge differential in population, the Stansbury, Erda and Lake Point areas get most of our attention. That’s not to say that the person who lives in Stansbury deserves to have a deputy drive by their house more than the person who lives in Vernon. The problem is we don’t have enough people to patrol the entire area that we should be patrolling. On the weekends we get thousands of people out in that desert and in the mountains that we have to respond to when they get into trouble and it’s difficult.

Q: What are your future plans for the department?

A: The jail is something that we’ve either got to face up front or we are going to face it as a lawsuit that will cost someone a lot of money. It’s a 20-year-old jail attached to a 30-year-old building. It’s old and we try and keep it up, but it’s costing us a lot of money to do that. We’d like to keep this jail because it’s attached to the court. We could use it as a pre-sentence facility and after sentencing we could move inmates to another site. That’s a perfect world scenario, however. A new jail is something that was needed yesterday and we are working on. We have a pretty good set of plans for the size of jail that we’d like to build. We have an area where we’d like to build it in, but right now we are waiting for the money issues to be worked out. I’m not the money person. I’m the person who cries about all the problems.

Q: You see many of the worst aspects of society on a daily basis, why do you like this line of work? Is there one single crime that has been harder to work than any other?

A: I enjoy this line of work because of the good outcomes you see a lot of the time. That’s the thing that brings you back, because you’re not in it for the money. You don’t make any money. You are in it for the feeling of helping someone. It’s an unbelievable feeling. That’s the reason why the person who retires from law enforcement turns around and gets back in. You do see the worst of society. You see some things that you would never wish anyone to see, but that’s our job and you get used to it. The crimes relating to kids are the hardest to deal with. They never leave you.

Jamie Belnap: jamieb@tooeletranscript.com