POLICING THE POLICE
charged with murder.
Francum’s death elicited a wave
of “cop killer” outrage directed at
Stewart. Eight days after the raid,
Weber County Attorney Dee Smith
announced that he’d be seeking
the death penalty. As more details
emerged, however, a growing chorus
of critics began to question whether
the aggressive police tactics had
really been necessary, and whether
the battle on Jackson Avenue could
have been avoided entirely.
An editorial in the Salt Lake
Tribune asked why the police decided to wage “a military-style
attack on a small-time weed
grower.” The editors of Ogden’s
Standard-Examiner expressed
similar concerns over “beefedup police tactics” and called for
a “re-evaluation of how local law
enforcement handles its duties,
particularly concerning raids and
late-night police procedures.”
“It’s very clear that middle-ofthe-night arrest warrant servings
by armed officers need to be reconsidered,” the editors wrote.
In the months following the raid,
a number of other controversial
police actions hit the news. Police
in Salt Lake City broke into the
home of a 76-year-old woman during a mistaken drug raid. A SWAT
HUFFINGTON
11.17.13
An editorial in the Salt Lake
Tribune asked why the
police decided to wage
“a military-style attack on
a small-time weed grower.”
team in Ogden went to the wrong
address in search of a man who
had gone AWOL from the Army
and ended up pointing its guns at
an innocent family of four. Two
narcotics detectives shot and killed
a young woman in a suburb of Salt
Lake City as she sat in her car.
Together, these incidents have
spawned a budding police reform
movement in Utah. At the head of
it, Stewart’s family members have
been joined by a political odd couple: Jesse Fruhwirth, a longtime
progressive activist rabble-rouser,
and Connor Boyack, a wonky libertarian with a background in
Republican politics. And independently, in Salt Lake City and
Salt Lake County, the police chief
and lead prosecutor have already
begun to adopt some unconventional, reform-minded approaches
to crime and punishment.
That Utah, one of the most conservative states in the country,
would become a hotbed for police
reform, is surprising. But these