As of June 8, 2025, the Salt Lake City Police Department (SLCPD) has recorded a startling increase in citations for illegal camping, surpassing the total issued throughout all of 2024. This year, there have been 574 citations compared to 488 last year.
This rise follows the implementation of a public safety plan in January, which emphasizes rigorous enforcement against repeat offenders within the Downtown Safety Initiative area, a location whose boundaries are not disclosed to the public. According to SLCPD spokesperson Brent Weisberg, the increase in citations could be attributed to a combination of heightened illegal camping incidents and intensified enforcement measures.
Indeed, camping citations were already on the rise preceding the initiative, having more than doubled between 2023 and 2024. Weisberg stated, “We know that when families can’t use parks, when businesses are broken into, when trails become tent sites, we have a duty to act. And that’s the expectation from the community members we hear.”
The SLCPD collaborates closely with social workers and various service providers, aiming to offer treatment and resources to individuals experiencing homelessness. “We recognize that citations alone won’t be the solution, but neither will ignoring the problem,” Weisberg added.
However, the Downtown Safety Initiative has been criticized for imposing excessively harsh penalties on homeless individuals. Hannah Sakalla, a trial attorney with the Salt Lake Legal Defenders Association, highlighted that formerly, police would often contact individuals camping illegally and ask them to relocate. Now, a greater number of individuals are receiving citations, leading to arrests and jail time. This shift, she argued, has made it increasingly difficult to predict legal outcomes for her clients.
“We can’t give legal advice because we don’t know what the judge is going to sentence the person to, how persuaded they are that there needs to be a Downtown Safety Initiative,” Sakalla remarked. “It just feels like a huge escalation that feels very random, or felt very random for us.”
The city’s public safety plan previously noted inconsistencies in pretrial release, which, according to Sakalla, has resulted in more individuals being detained until their trials. This, she indicated, adds to the challenges faced by those without stable housing.
Kseniya Kniazeva, the founder and president of the nonprofit Nomad Alliance, argued that the issuance of citations complicates individuals’ efforts to secure stable housing. “The more time people have to spend in court and legal battles and trying to fight these tickets, or even having warrants and spending time in jail, losing their things, the longer this epidemic is going to continue,” she stated.
Salt Lake County District Attorney Sim Gill emphasized that being homeless is not a crime. He has instructed his team to concentrate on habitual offenders in their prosecutions. “The direction that I’ve given to the city prosecutor side of the shop is saying, ‘focus on those top 50 or 60 people,’ and then, of course, we prosecute normally, whatever we would do with the rest,” he noted.
Sakalla acknowledged that her clients often face multiple encounters with law enforcement for offenses such as camping illegally, trespassing, or obstructing sidewalks. “It’s applied pretty specifically to a population whose existence seems to be criminalized,” she commented.
Sakalla also mentioned that she has heard prosecutors claim that repeat offenders are consuming significant resources. “And in my mind, I’m like, OK, so don’t charge them,” she suggested. “That seems like the easiest way to reduce the resources used on them.”
While the Downtown Safety Initiative specifically targets arrests within a designated area, Weisberg indicated that the increased scrutiny associated with this classification is also impacting individuals without prior criminal records. The department is currently engaged in discussions to refine the classification criteria and focus more on what they term “high utilizers.”
The implications of the new policy have compelled Sakalla to take more cases to trial, asserting that many punishments are unreasonable. “We’ve seen a huge bloating of cases filed and cases prosecuted,” she concluded.
image source from：https://www.kuer.org/race-religion-social-justice/2025-06-13/salt-lake-city-camping-citations-have-already-surpassed-2024-numbers
