Man shot dead in Salt Lake City marks 30th police shooting in 2020 – tying 2018 for a record



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The man’s injuries were not life threatening and he was imprisoned after being released from the hospital.

(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Police are working at a shooting scene at 700 North and 1860 West in Salt Lake City on Thursday, December 17, 2020.

When state agents shot and killed a man Thursday in Salt Lake City, it marked the 30th shot this year and tied a nearly 2-year record for most shots by police in Utah from recent memory.

The shooting took place after officers from the State Investigation Bureau doing “underground work” spotted a person in a silver Mercedes van “participating in alleged narcotics activity,” the ministry spokesman said. from Public Safety, Lieutenant Nick Street.

Officers tried to arrest the person, but the man left and officers did not prosecute, Street said. Officers soon learned that the driver had an active arrest warrant.

They later spotted the van and followed it to Rose Park, where police shot the driver after “some sort of exchange” on Morton Drive, near 700 North.

Street said he did not know what happened in that confrontation because another agency was under investigation. He said it appears the man was “grazed” by the gunfire from officers.

After the shooting, the driver exited onto 700 North, near the I-215 slip road, and crashed into a white FedEx truck. It was then that the police arrested the driver. He was taken to hospital and has since been released and jailed.

The Mercedes van was parked in the middle of the street Thursday night, cordoned off with yellow police tape, the driver’s side strewn with bullets.

West Valley City is investigating the shooting, according to a valley-wide protocol that requires an outside agency to investigate all police shootings.

(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Police at the scene of a shooting, at 700 North and 1860 West in Salt Lake City on Thursday, December 17, 2020.

There has only been a month this year – November – without an officer somewhere in the state shooting someone.

The last time Utah police shot 30 people in a year, the attorney general’s office announced a study to examine why because if it wasn’t, the office said, “we won’t know. not how to react if the trend starts to repeat itself. in the years to come. “

However, due to problems collecting reports and other documents on the shootings, the office never completed the study.

While 2020 sets the record for most police shootings in more than a decade, it is the second deadliest with 17 fatal shots. In 2018, police shot and killed 19 people, according to a Salt Lake Tribune database of police shootings.

In 2019, police shot people 16 times, killing 12 people.

Salt Lake Tribune reporter Jessica Miller contributed to this story.

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