SALT LAKE CI TY — Salt Lake City police are struggling to expunge thousands of criminal records that are legally supposed to be sealed, creating a backlog that’s slowing an opportunity to move on with their lives.
Auditors in August told Salt Lake City Police Chief Mike Brown that between 16,000 and 62,000 expungements had not been started. The bigger number would take one employee working fulltime 14.9 years to process, according to a police department PowerPoint presentation obtained by FOX 13.
The figures were disheartening to wife and husband Mysti and Manuel Lopez. Both were arrested by Salt Lake City police. Mysti Lopez has served an expungement order on Salt Lake City; Manuel Lopez is pursuing expungements.
“I can't take my daughter on a field trip, or anything like that,” said Manuel Lopez, who has been convicted of assault and receiving stolen property.
Mysti Lopez has received orders expunging her forgery and drug convictions. She is pursuing a bachelor’s degree while working at a substance abuse recovery center.
“Well, it's extremely discouraging,” she said of the Salt Lake City backlog, “because I worked really hard to get those expungements.”
It’s not clear how many of Mysti Lopez’s records Salt Lake City has expunged. That’s because Salt Lake City also doesn’t have a process in place to notify people when their records are expunged.
Micheal Holje is an attorney who, in September of 2022, served Salt Lake City with an expungement order on behalf of a client.
“We have not received confirmation that the expungement order has been processed,” Holje said.
A state law says police forces must provide confirmation to anyone who has served an expungement order that the records have been sealed.
Holje’s paralegal has sent multiple emails to Salt Lake City police asking the expungement’s status. The emails reviewed by FOX 13 show the police department did not respond to the most-recent inquiries.
Eric Hutchings, who used to represent Kearns in the Utah Legislature and supported bills making expungements easier, said the backlog erodes faith in the entire criminal justice system.
And while the legislator didn’t provide local governments extra money to process the expungements, Hutchings points out it wasn’t the Legislature who prosecuted people in the first place.
“They're arrested at a local level,” Hutchings said. “They're incarcerated at a local level. They're prosecuted at a local level by a local judge in a local courthouse.”
There’s two ways to receive expungements in Utah. Those who qualify can ask a judge or the state’s board of pardons to expunge the convictions, making it as though the convictions never happened. Arrests and prosecutions – even when they don’t result in convictions – can be expunged, too.
Then in 2019, the Utah Legislature passed the Clean Slate Law that automatically expunged low-level offenses committed years ago.
Salt Lake City police spokesman Brent Weisberg says a lack of information was slowing the automatic expungements. The state Bureau of Criminal Identification, which is responsible for notifying local police of expungement orders, wasn’t always forwarding information like case numbers.
“But we have improved that efficiency,” Weisberg said, “going from a lengthy 25-step process down to a four-step process.”
As for the expungement orders approved by a judge or the board of pardons, Weisberg said the department has addressed those.
“The Salt Lake City Police Department has prioritized those in-person petition requests,” he said. “Today, we do not have a backlog when it relates to that.”
When asked whether Salt Lake City could establish an expungement tracking system, like counties use so voters can track their mail-in ballot or shipping companies use to confirm package delivery, Weisberg replied: “That sounds like a great idea. And something that if we don't already have could be explored.”
When FOX 13 first asked for the presentation discussing the expungements, Salt Lake City denied the station’s public records request, claiming the document was a draft.
FOX 13 obtained the presentation independent of the police department. Nothing in the documents label them as drafts or otherwise suggests the findings were preliminary.
Auditors suggested hiring more staff to process the expungements. Salt Lake City Council Member Alejandro Puy, whose district includes parts of downtown and the city’s west side, hadn’t seen the presentation, but said he would support adding the staff.
Manuel Lopez said he and his wife had been held accountable for their actions.
“There should be accountability on [the police] side as well,” he said.
A spokeswoman for Unified Police Department said it and the Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Office had a combined backlog of about 4,400 expungements. West Valley City provided data showing a backlog of 4,211.