The Search for Sheree | Talking Cold: Who Owns Your Case? | 11 AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast Cold

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Episode: The Search for Sheree | Talking Cold: Who Owns Your Case? | 11

Author: KSL Podcasts | Wondery
Duration: 00:39:20

Episode Shownotes

Who handles your case if you go missing or are murdered? Talking Cold is the after-show podcast that dives into the key issues raised in COLD. Season 3 of COLD tells the story of Sheree Warren, who disappeared from Salt Lake City, Utah in 1985. Her case remains unsolved today,

partially because of police squabbles over jurisdiction. Talking Cold hosts Amy Donaldson and Sheryl Worsley ask retired Salt Lake County Sheriff Aaron Kennard and former Roy, Utah police chief Carl Merino why police egos and invisible borders sometimes get in the way of solving crimes.Talking Cold is the after-show podcast that dives into the key issues raised in COLD. Follow Cold Season 3: The Search for Sheree on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Summary

In this episode of Cold, hosts Amy Donaldson and Sheryl Worsley delve into the complexities of jurisdictional issues surrounding the unresolved case of Sheree Warren, who went missing in Salt Lake City in 1985. They discuss how police dynamics, influenced by power struggles among sheriffs, police chiefs, and mayors, often hinder investigations. Retired officers share their experiences, emphasizing the need for inter-agency cooperation and overcoming individual egos to enhance case resolutions. The episode advocates for improved training and better policing strategies to support the investigation of cold cases like Warren's.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (The Search for Sheree | Talking Cold: Who Owns Your Case? | 11) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_03
Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to this podcast ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts.

00:00:11 Speaker_02
Hi, I'm Amy Donaldson. And I'm Cheryl Worsley. And this is Talking Cold.

00:00:16 Speaker_04
Phone records showed that he had made literally thousands of those types of calls.

00:00:20 Speaker_06
There's so much more that I could have asked and maybe they could have found that body. I went that way and she went that way and never heard from again.

00:00:31 Speaker_05
On this season of Talking Cold, we are going to dive deep into some really fascinating and very frustrating issues raised in the latest season of the Cold podcast.

00:00:40 Speaker_02
Hopefully, you've all had a chance to listen to season three, The Search for Cherie. Amy, in case our listeners haven't heard Talking Cold before and don't know who we are, let's introduce ourselves.

00:00:50 Speaker_05
I'll start. I've been a journalist for a little bit over 30 years, most of that time spent in print journalism, and came over to podcasting about two years ago for KSL, and I'm the host of The Letter.

00:01:02 Speaker_02
And I've been in journalism for 20 plus years, most of that in newsroom management, but have managed the KSL podcast unit for the last several years. This episode is all about policing issues.

00:01:15 Speaker_02
In season three of Cold, host Dave Cauley unravels the mystery surrounding Sheree Warren's disappearance.

00:01:21 Speaker_02
And one of the aspects of Dave's reporting that really caught our attention was the role of police, both in the investigation and in the life of one of the two suspects in Warren's disappearance, Carrie Hartman.

00:01:34 Speaker_02
A big question we have is, who owns your case when you go missing or are murdered? That is, what happens when there are problems with jurisdiction? Let's play a clip.

00:01:46 Speaker_04
Carl saw how jurisdictional politics had made Cherie's case a hot potato from the start.

00:01:52 Speaker_09
The last place she was known that people knew where she was was Salt Lake. So the case should have been handled out of Salt Lake. But they said, no, she's a Royce citizen, and so we're not going to work it.

00:02:04 Speaker_05
All right, we want to acknowledge right up front that discussing jurisdictional issues is going to be confusing and maybe seem a little obtuse, but we want to explain to you why it's important in the lives of real people.

00:02:15 Speaker_05
When Sheree Warren disappeared from Salt Lake City in 1985, the Salt Lake Police Department was struggling to solve a string of murders and disappearances. Salt Lake is Utah's capital city and was, at the time, home to its largest police force.

00:02:29 Speaker_05
But Salt Lake City is just one of several cities in the Salt Lake Valley, most of which have their own police departments.

00:02:36 Speaker_02
The valley includes patches of unincorporated communities, places that aren't part of any organized city. Policing in those areas was the responsibility of the Salt Lake County Sheriff's Office.

00:02:47 Speaker_05
I covered the Salt Lake County Sheriff's Office in the 90s for the Deseret News, and it was in 1994 that Sheriff Aaron Kennard announced the creation of a cold case homicide task force.

00:02:57 Speaker_05
That was a little bit more than eight years after Sheree Warren disappeared. It was a cooperative effort, and each of the cities and the Sheriff's Office pledged money and manpower to try to solve some of these cases.

00:03:09 Speaker_05
News reporters asked Sheriff Kennard at a press conference if his task force would look at several Salt Lake City cases from the mid-1980s.

00:03:16 Speaker_05
Like the Cherie Warren case, or the three murders linked to a single .38 caliber handgun discussed in Cold Season 3. Sheriff Kennard said that Salt Lake Police Chief Ruben Ortega told him not to interfere.

00:03:27 Speaker_05
Let's listen to a bit of that 1994 press conference.

00:03:30 Speaker_07
What Ortega has commented to me and maintains that today is that these are active cases being investigated by Salt Lake City and that they would prefer that they handle them and I will defer to them in that regard.

00:03:44 Speaker_02
A lot of those cases never got solved, in part because of this jurisdictional tug of war and this really upset victims' families. In this clip, you hear the father of murder victim Christine Gallegos. The damn homicides are not a political issue.

00:03:59 Speaker_01
It's homicide. I mean, you know, someone's dead. The county commissioners are sympathetic, but say it's not the sheriff's case. He cannot go in and force Ruben Ortega to turn over a homicide, an ongoing homicide,

00:04:12 Speaker_01
investigation to his people if the police chief is not willing to do that.

00:04:18 Speaker_05
So we reached out to Sheriff Aaron Kennard. He was a Salt Lake City police officer for 20 years before he ran for sheriff. He was sheriff of Salt Lake County for 16 years.

00:04:26 Speaker_05
He spent almost his entire 16 years advocating for a metro police department that would, you know, basically combine all of the smaller departments into one major police agency. that served the entire Salt Lake County area, and it never worked.

00:04:43 Speaker_05
He still cares about these issues. He's retired now, lives out of state, so you're going to hear a remote recording where I had a discussion with him about jurisdictional issues.

00:04:52 Speaker_05
So what impact would you say jurisdictional issues have on solving cases? Do they delay it or prevent it? What issues does it cause?

00:05:02 Speaker_08
It causes a lot of issues because of the lack of cooperation. Sometimes it prevents immediate resolution because of cross jurisdictional boundaries.

00:05:19 Speaker_08
and especially in apprehension if we don't have the cooperation and the bad guys know that because when I was a detective with Salt Lake City and we were working in conjunction with South Salt Lake detectives because we had a rash of burglaries

00:05:40 Speaker_08
close to the boundaries between Salt Lake City and South Salt Lake. We finally caught these burglars and in interviewing them, found out that they wanted to make sure that they were on the other side of the line.

00:05:54 Speaker_08
Rather than Salt Lake City, if they were in South Salt Lake or in another jurisdiction, they didn't have to worry so much about being caught because it seemed like Salt Lake City was more aggressive at the time.

00:06:07 Speaker_05
Did you see the jurisdictional issues cropping up when you were a police officer? Were you aware of them or was that something you became more aware of when you became sheriff?

00:06:16 Speaker_08
Oh, I became aware of them the higher I went up in the ranks of the police department because as I became a sergeant and then a lieutenant and as major incidents took place, it was very evident that there were

00:06:33 Speaker_08
people with different agendas and there was resistance to cooperation. And I couldn't figure that out. I didn't understand why that was the case. And I still don't today other than I know now full well, having experienced it, that

00:06:51 Speaker_08
really just the professional jealousies that are there that really cause all this issue.

00:06:57 Speaker_05
You were an advocate for creating like a Metro Police Department at Salt Lake County. What was the resistance?

00:07:04 Speaker_08
The resistance came from the political leaders of all the respective agencies. A mayor really needs to have the power of being over a police department or a fire department

00:07:21 Speaker_08
If they have those two big dogs in their portfolio, then they have what we call power. A sheriff has total jurisdiction and responsibilities for everything in the county.

00:07:39 Speaker_08
A police chief simply responds and does what is required of local law enforcement, but really works for one person, and that's the mayor or the city manager.

00:07:53 Speaker_08
Whereas the sheriff is an elected official and works for, like I was working for 750,000 people at the time. The chief naturally did whatever the mayors wanted.

00:08:07 Speaker_05
But it seems like, does the public not aware? Why can't we fix this problem, these jurisdictional issues? Why can't we fix them in Salt Lake County?

00:08:16 Speaker_08
Well, the public is aware of it, but the public doesn't care enough because there are some downfalls in that it may cost more, but you're getting more for your dollar. You're going to have more people.

00:08:33 Speaker_08
It's going to cost more to keep them there, and it's going to cost more to train. But you're going to get better trained people. And the public seem to think that, well, we've got our own little police department. We can handle anything.

00:08:46 Speaker_08
Well, you may be able to until the big one hits, and then you need some help.

00:08:52 Speaker_05
And by big, what do you mean, like a homicide or a hostage situation?

00:08:54 Speaker_08
Well, like a multiple mass shooting, homicide, something wherein you don't have enough people to respond. You don't have, you know, a lot of these smaller police departments don't have a SWAT team.

00:09:08 Speaker_08
And if you have a hostage situation or a school shooting, and you've got to go in and immediately resolve the situation. And if they don't have the manpower to do this, then they have to call on others.

00:09:22 Speaker_08
And of course, we will all respond to the call for help. It doesn't matter. We're not going to worry about jurisdictional issues or anything of that nature. When that big call comes out for help, we roll.

00:09:34 Speaker_05
Do you think it affects the rate, the solve rate? Do you think some crimes don't go or some patterns don't go get seen because there is so many agencies?

00:09:43 Speaker_08
I don't have proof of that, Amy. I just have my own gut feeling and my own observations from having been a cop for 40 years, seeing, well, this could have happened better, faster.

00:10:00 Speaker_08
I don't know that I could ever show you that there was never a crime that was not solved or somebody was not arrested because of jurisdictional issues.

00:10:10 Speaker_08
I know for a fact that it was a hindrance and it took more time and probably was not as easy as it should have been.

00:10:34 Speaker_05
You know, I think the thing that Sheriff Kenner is saying there that I hear is there's no statistic kept on the things that we should have done or could have done. Right.

00:10:43 Speaker_05
So the jurisdictional issues cause these problems and they don't have the other road. They can't go down that road and say if we had had this information or if we had shared that you don't know what somebody else knows.

00:10:55 Speaker_00
So that's.

00:10:55 Speaker_05
That's really the problem with trying to assess the real impact of jurisdictional issues is that there are no statistics on the ways in which we fail.

00:11:02 Speaker_02
We don't keep track on cases that don't get solved because we can't get along.

00:11:07 Speaker_05
Yeah. It's really not possible. All you can say is like we didn't cooperate and it didn't get solved.

00:11:12 Speaker_02
So let's talk for a minute about what we think the pros and cons of a big metro police department are.

00:11:19 Speaker_05
Yeah, I mean, I think obviously Sheriff Kenner pointed out what is the biggest detractor and that is money. If it costs more for a bigger department, people are not going to be as willing to jump on board.

00:11:30 Speaker_05
But I think if you reimagine the kind of department you created, like it takes longer to become a hairdresser than it does to become a cop. I think if you had some kind of educational requirement where people They were going to learn something.

00:11:45 Speaker_05
They were going to grow in this position, even at an entry level. I think giving a 19-year-old a gun and a badge and that much power is part of the issue that you have.

00:11:54 Speaker_02
So I think- But that would be a con whether it's part of a metro police department or a municipal police department. Absolutely.

00:11:59 Speaker_05
Absolutely. And I think a larger police department has more training opportunities. They have more diversity of jobs. You can find what you're good at. Whereas if you have eight people in the department, you're just going to be doing every job.

00:12:10 Speaker_05
I'll give you an example. When I was covering night police, there was a police department that had one dispatcher on duty and she had to call a police officer in off the street out of patrol to cover while she went to the restroom.

00:12:24 Speaker_05
And so we're going on a lunch break. I think that is clearly not a good situation. Especially for her. But especially, I mean, for everyone on the streets. Yeah, they're like, where's my police officer? Oh, you know, he's covering dispatch duty, right?

00:12:39 Speaker_05
So we have one or two police officers covering a city. And you know, that was a busy city. Yeah, you know, that's so I think that bigger is better.

00:12:49 Speaker_05
for the general public if you have the kind of police department that is interested in a holistic type and a community-oriented policing.

00:12:58 Speaker_02
Yeah. And that is key, because I'll give you a con of a potential con for a metro police department. And that is abuses are easier to cover when you are unwieldy like that and huge like that.

00:13:12 Speaker_02
I'm not going to say that it's automatic, that with big also comes corruption, but it's also easier to cover when that happens.

00:13:22 Speaker_05
Sure. It can become systemic, which is why I think that maybe more important than the money aspect of it is to say, if we're going to put more money into this, we're going to reimagine it. We're going to completely change the way we look at this.

00:13:34 Speaker_05
We're not just going to keep dumping money into the same system that we know can be corrupted. We're going to go ahead and reimagine it. rework this. Like what do we want? Who do we want in these roles? What do we want to ask of them?

00:13:44 Speaker_05
Do we want them to have a two-year degree?

00:13:46 Speaker_02
And here are safeguards to make sure when we screw up, we're not able to cover up for ourselves. That there is some mechanism that comes in here and makes sure that we are honest and clean.

00:13:59 Speaker_05
Yeah, because I think the problems with policing are very complicated and they cross a lot of issues. So let's make it something that is more holistic.

00:14:09 Speaker_02
So let's list some pros. These are really easy. I mean, better communication between departments, information sharing.

00:14:16 Speaker_02
I guess the thing for me is I don't understand why you need some great big Metro police force in order for police to cooperate with each other. Can't we just have a giant database? Can we just not unify like the dispatcher situation?

00:14:30 Speaker_05
Can't we be on the same team even though we're wearing different uniforms?

00:14:32 Speaker_02
Can't we be on the same team even though we're not... from the same police department? Ideally, yes.

00:14:39 Speaker_05
That would be amazing. But that's not the way it works. Well, why? To find out why, let's talk to former Roy Police Chief Carl Moreno after this break.

00:15:03 Speaker_05
Today, we're going to be joined by retired Roy Police Chief Carl Marino, who you heard from in the podcast.

00:15:08 Speaker_09
They had an opening for chief of police and I applied and they selected me.

00:15:14 Speaker_04
And so that's how Carl became Detective John Frawley's boss, just weeks after Frawley had reopened the Cherie Warren cold case.

00:15:23 Speaker_02
Thanks for joining us, Carl.

00:15:24 Speaker_04
Thanks for having me.

00:15:25 Speaker_05
So, Carl, will you give us just a little bit of background, your background with this case?

00:15:30 Speaker_09
Well, it's a convoluted mess. I've been involved with it three different times. Initially, before I became a paid police officer, I was a reserve officer with Ogden, and I was at my regular job one day.

00:15:45 Speaker_09
And our reserve coordinator gave me a call and said, I need you down here at the police department immediately with your gun. And that's always, that makes you nervous.

00:15:57 Speaker_09
You think, you know, they're asking you to turn your gun and you've done something wrong. And I couldn't think, you know, it's not where, what did I get caught doing? I couldn't think of anything I'd done wrong.

00:16:06 Speaker_09
And so I went down, and Kerry had been a reserve officer before me, and he had been issued the gun that I used, and there had been some implications that he had threatened some of his victims with a gun.

00:16:19 Speaker_09
And it was the gun I had, so they took that gun back as evidence.

00:16:25 Speaker_05
What was it like to realize that you had his gun?

00:16:29 Speaker_09
That was kind of creepy. You're thinking, what did he do with it? And I believe that was about.

00:16:38 Speaker_09
85-86 and then I worked at Salt Lake PD for most of my career for 21 years and I was assigned homicide and at that time Rocky Anderson was our mayor and it had come to his attention that there were a bunch of cases of young women in the mid-80s that had gone missing and or been murdered that hadn't been investigated properly.

00:17:08 Speaker_09
And I was assigned one of those cases along with another detective as a follow-up to go back and re-look at this cold case.

00:17:17 Speaker_05
Were you assigned Cherie's case?

00:17:18 Speaker_09
No. Salt Lake didn't even acknowledge that it happened.

00:17:24 Speaker_02
And closing the loop on your experience after Salt Lake, you returned to Roy as chief?

00:17:29 Speaker_09
As the chief, yes. I went back to Roy as the chief and one of the detectives came to me and said, can we work this case?

00:17:37 Speaker_05
So it's basically spanned your entire career. It has. From the time you were reserved to now.

00:17:41 Speaker_02
Yeah. You called that, or Dave called that, I don't know if that was you or Dave, kind of a hot potato. Should Salt Lake have done anything with Cherie's case?

00:17:51 Speaker_09
They should have. There's a lot of cases that cross jurisdictions and are hard to determine.

00:17:56 Speaker_09
Missing persons is a situation where wherever the person goes missing from, they could be, in this case, where she was a Roy resident, still lived in Roy, Salt Lake should have been the lead agency, and cooperating with Roy is a joint investigation, trying to tie it together.

00:18:16 Speaker_09
And then when her car turned up in Las Vegas, Las Vegas should have been brought in on it. It should have been three agencies working it together. And it turned out that the only agency that actually worked it was Roy.

00:18:28 Speaker_05
So I guess you're kind of alluding to it, but how do jurisdictional issues, when they crop up, how do they impact how a case gets resolved, if it gets resolved, how long it takes? How does it impact an actual case?

00:18:43 Speaker_09
Ideally, and I've seen it more, say, in the last 10 to 15 years, where agencies will cooperate. I worked a number of various task forces during my career, and we did a lot of cooperation. And I saw a huge benefit to that.

00:19:03 Speaker_09
But back in the 80s, it was still territorial. And you might have somebody like Salt Lake, and if they're tied into a case in Roy, they don't want to have the little guys coming up, interfering with their investigation.

00:19:19 Speaker_09
And so they won't cooperate with a smaller agency. Sometimes you won't have a smaller agency cooperate with a larger agency, because I'm not going to have the big boys tell me what to do. And it gets fairly petty.

00:19:30 Speaker_05
I mean, it seems like the incentive is to work together, like you're saying, with these task force. And everybody wants to solve the cases. I'm assuming most police officers are in this line of work because they wanted to help people.

00:19:41 Speaker_05
They wanted to solve the cases. So why does it stall out? Why do these things happen? Why does it cause so many issues?

00:19:48 Speaker_09
There's multiple reasons. Some of it is just straightly ego-driven. You know, I'm not going to let anybody else in on this. I want to be the one to solve it, which is a fatal flaw.

00:20:01 Speaker_09
One of the other things is, you know, I've talked to this detective from the other agency. I don't think he's capable of investigating, so I'm not going to deal with him. He's going to just slow me down.

00:20:15 Speaker_09
I'm the one who can solve it, or they can't solve it and they're just gonna convolute it. They've got their own theory. They're going to complicate it and make it where it doesn't progress the investigation at all.

00:20:28 Speaker_02
What are some of the cons in keeping that information so close to the vest?

00:20:32 Speaker_09
Mostly information sharing.

00:20:34 Speaker_02
Okay.

00:20:35 Speaker_09
You need to be able to share. You know, there's little things that'll just click. You'll get one detective who will go and interview somebody, and won't tell the other agency what they found out.

00:20:50 Speaker_09
The other agency might have trouble finding that person again to interview them. They get different answers. You need to compare the answers. You need to share the information. That's how you find people who are lying to you.

00:21:04 Speaker_09
You know, as I talk to somebody, I hear something and it's like, okay, you know, that doesn't make any sense. And then somebody else will have another small piece of it.

00:21:15 Speaker_09
And when you hear that, it's like, oh, wait a minute, that ties in with what I have. And that's, that's really how crimes get solved.

00:21:23 Speaker_05
Are most detectives protective or most detectives pretty open at like, look, help. Do you see anything I missed?

00:21:30 Speaker_09
Most of the detectives I worked with, I think, were more concerned with doing a good job. I can think of several who it was absolutely 100% ego-driven, and they were the ones who wouldn't share information.

00:21:46 Speaker_09
I can think of numerous investigations where we were told to go out and do interviews, and we would never be told anything that was pertinent to the case. And these were large cases.

00:21:58 Speaker_09
And so when you talk to somebody and they start telling you something, you don't know what you're looking for. And some of these cases never got solved.

00:22:10 Speaker_09
And you wonder, had we been sharing at least with the detectives who are working the cases, what would the outcome have been with that? But you do see that.

00:22:20 Speaker_09
You see egos where it gets very protective, and I'm not going to let anybody know what I'm doing.

00:22:26 Speaker_02
You have mentioned egos. I'd like to dive into egos a little bit deeper, and we have a clip for that.

00:22:33 Speaker_09
We found out that there were a lot of mistakes made early in the investigation.

00:22:40 Speaker_04
Carl told me in his experience, cops often resist sharing information with the public, victims, witnesses, and even with other officers. And there can be good reasons for that. Giving out too much info can tip off suspects or taint an investigation.

00:22:56 Speaker_09
It's a balancing act. You've got to know what you can release.

00:22:59 Speaker_04
But Carl told me police egos sometimes cause investigators to be overprotective. That can lead to turf battles that stymie investigations.

00:23:10 Speaker_09
When you're trying to solve crimes, it's not a competition except between law enforcement and whoever committed the crime.

00:23:17 Speaker_05
When you talk about egos being involved, what exactly does that look like?

00:23:22 Speaker_09
I think you have to look at the personality of a police officer to start with.

00:23:26 Speaker_09
To do the job that we do and to make the decisions and to be willing to put people in jail and live with the decisions you make, police officers have a fairly strong ego to start with.

00:23:41 Speaker_09
And then when you start getting the competition of who's the better police officer, then it can start getting out of hand.

00:23:48 Speaker_09
And when it starts getting into who's the better detective or is somebody going to look at my work and say, I didn't do the right thing, then people can get very protective of their ego more than protective of the public.

00:24:05 Speaker_02
Does that formulate into why Cherie's case was treated like a hot potato?

00:24:11 Speaker_09
I think that with Salt Lake, that was a big part of it. They had a number of missing women and murdered young women. It had every indication of being maybe a serial killer or just something that was out of control.

00:24:32 Speaker_09
You lean towards the serial killer because it's the same stereotype of victim. And so that's where you would go with that.

00:24:44 Speaker_09
And the sergeant that I had when we started working these cold cases said that the detectives from that time period, and that was before I got there, had big egos and they knew everything and they didn't like not being able to solve a case.

00:25:03 Speaker_09
So probably just didn't want to take another one that made them look bad.

00:25:10 Speaker_02
You mentioned in the clip that there were some mistakes made, and I think you might have covered some of those, but could you tell us what you meant early on in the investigation about mistakes?

00:25:21 Speaker_09
On Cherie's case, the big thing that I see is Salt Lake didn't get involved.

00:25:30 Speaker_05
So what does that mean for those of us who aren't familiar with like the resources available to Roy versus the resources available to Salt Lake PD? What does that mean to an investigation?

00:25:39 Speaker_09
Well, when you look at Salt Lake, you have about 400 officers at that time. There's more than that now, but you had about 400 officers. You had a detective division of about 80 people. With Roy at that time, there were 17 officers.

00:25:57 Speaker_09
And so even the money to come to Salt Lake, between Roy and Salt Lake, you've got a 30-mile trip each way. then you don't know the area in Salt Lake. And so you don't know even where to look.

00:26:15 Speaker_09
When I first came as a police officer to Salt Lake, I spent more time in Salt Lake my first week here than I'd spent my entire life. So I knew nothing about Salt Lake. Or when the car turned up in Las Vegas, for Roy to fund

00:26:33 Speaker_09
trip to Las Vegas, you're not going to send one, so you got to send two. So now you've sent, you know, 10% of your police department to Las Vegas to look into the investigation. And how long can you send them there?

00:26:45 Speaker_09
And how, you know, what's the expense for doing that? And so Salt Lake could have easily absorbed the investigation here, whereas for Roy it was quite an expense and quite a challenge for them to try and investigate it from there.

00:27:05 Speaker_09
All of their investigation ended up in Ogden and Roy.

00:27:08 Speaker_02
I hear this a lot from police agencies that back in, you know, back in the dinosaur ages when we didn't have computers, we couldn't cooperate because we couldn't compile all the data. How true is that? Is that a cop out? Or is it Or is it legit?

00:27:26 Speaker_09
No, there is. Back when I first started, all reports were handwritten. So if you wanted a copy of a report, you had to go get approval from the detective who had to get approval from his sergeant, maybe a captain, maybe a chief.

00:27:41 Speaker_09
release a report to another agency and you then have egos all the way up the line and there may be old turf battles even up to the chief level and say no we're not going to let XYZ investigate our case and so we won't share information with them.

00:27:58 Speaker_02
Has has technology improved that situation?

00:28:02 Speaker_09
It has, and in a lot of the counties you will have one type of report writing system that you're able to share all that information. It still goes back to a detective and a sergeant and a captain has to approve the release of that information.

00:28:19 Speaker_09
But the minute that you get that approval, you can look at everything that's there.

00:28:23 Speaker_05
How much of it is old turf battles and not wanting to share, and how much of it is we don't necessarily want other people to know how we do things?

00:28:32 Speaker_09
Both. There's a lot of that. If a police supervisor thinks that his guys haven't done the right thing, he's not going to let any information out and let it possibly get to the media from another agency.

00:28:47 Speaker_09
And one of the problems that you see, it seems like it should just be natural that if a report is in the system, everybody should be able to see it. But to give you an example, I worked the Elizabeth Smart case.

00:29:02 Speaker_09
And the minute she returned, we had every agency in the county who was trying to get into the database to see what really happened. completely unprofessional by every agency trying to do that, but they wanted to know the story.

00:29:19 Speaker_09
So that's why you keep control. You may have, maybe you're investigating another officer in another department for something and you don't want them to be able to see what that is either. So there's pros and cons for why it has to be that way.

00:29:36 Speaker_02
So we talked about what happened back in the 80s and technology has improved things. What are some of the jurisdictional issues that persist today?

00:29:45 Speaker_09
You will still have individual egos, but for the most part, Depending on every county that you go to, there's a lot of cooperation now. It's much better than it used to be. I think it's more a generational thing.

00:30:06 Speaker_09
With the younger generation, they're less territorial. They're not like people my age and older, who are more territorial. They're much more collaborative. Just much more social.

00:30:23 Speaker_05
Do you think it has anything to do with Clint Eastwood?

00:30:26 Speaker_09
With what?

00:30:27 Speaker_05
Clint Eastwood.

00:30:28 Speaker_02
Dirty Harry?

00:30:30 Speaker_05
Dirty Harry. No, there was in the 80s like this rogue, I can't work with anyone. Bruce Willis was this guy. I can't follow the rules. I have to do my own thing. And I think it translated to some officers who kind of wanted to be that guy, right?

00:30:46 Speaker_09
Well, I go back to the Sopranos or the Godfather. And if you read up on that, the mafia said they showed us how we should act. I think that's what TV's done.

00:31:04 Speaker_09
Like I say, if I watch most police shows, everybody's angry, and everybody's shooting somebody, and they just hate everybody. and that's just not how it is.

00:31:17 Speaker_09
But you do get officers who identify with that and that's how they, we're trying to weed that kind of person out. There's a lot of police officers who are very upset by what's come around in the last few years.

00:31:31 Speaker_09
But that's one of the things that's good is that old mentality is not what police work was. You know, I always think of the Norman Rockwell painting of the runaway with a little kid with his sitting there with the police officer.

00:31:47 Speaker_09
That's what a lot of us thought of when we became police officers and then you get in there and it's no we've got to be.

00:31:53 Speaker_05
So you had the guys who wanted to be the Norman Rockwell painting and the guys who wanted to be Dirty Harry.

00:32:00 Speaker_09
And unfortunately the the Dirty Harry guys don't make good cops.

00:32:06 Speaker_09
And I think that's probably one benefit that's come out of the last few years of police being under the microscope and being criticized so heavily is the feeling that we have to be better.

00:32:20 Speaker_09
We can't let those egos, we can't let those kind of problems hinder good police work.

00:32:27 Speaker_02
I want to turn for a second and talk about reserve officers.

00:32:31 Speaker_04
Cary Hartman and his friend Dave Moore both filled out applications to join the Reserve Corps of the Ogden City Police Department during the summer of 1980.

00:32:39 Speaker_04
A police report would later note Cary, quote, rode with officers more than an average amount of hours and was extremely interested in police work. Cary himself described his time in the Reserve like this.

00:32:52 Speaker_03
Acted as backup for partners in all types of situations, from traffic details to crowd control.

00:32:59 Speaker_02
And you're kind of unique because you've worked this case and you were a reserve officer and just directly after one of the named suspects in the case, Kerry Hartman. Can you tell us what a reserve officer is?

00:33:12 Speaker_02
And then the second question, how much training does it take to become one?

00:33:16 Speaker_09
Well, back when I started, there was no requirement. A department would bring you on as a volunteer, they would provide you what training they thought you should have, and then they would use you depending on what their need was.

00:33:34 Speaker_09
I was with Ogden City as a reserve, And they actually had a pretty good training program. Chief Randy Watt, who just retired a couple years ago as the chief, back then was the trainer for the Reserve Corps.

00:33:50 Speaker_09
And he did a phenomenal job of trying to train us. get us a basic understanding. We didn't have the authority to make arrests but we could work with regular officers and and go out with them and and you know we just were a backup is what it was.

00:34:09 Speaker_02
Did you have weapons training?

00:34:12 Speaker_09
We did, yes. We got all of that kind of arrest control, all of that kind of stuff. But we didn't get all the legal training, so we didn't make the decisions on who had broken which laws.

00:34:26 Speaker_09
We had a general idea, but that decision was made by a fully trained police officer. Like I say, we were there as a backup.

00:34:32 Speaker_02
So you were with someone always.

00:34:34 Speaker_09
Right, always.

00:34:36 Speaker_05
Did you have to pass a background check?

00:34:38 Speaker_09
We did. We had to have a background check.

00:34:41 Speaker_05
And then how long would you say it would be? Like was it months, was it weeks, the training that you went through?

00:34:47 Speaker_09
We would be trained, we were being trained twice a week and then once you got through the initial phase, which took us about two months, then you'd have monthly trainings that you would have to attend, just that kept up to date, kept refreshing you.

00:35:06 Speaker_05
And when you were out as a reserve officer, did you feel equipped to deal with what your responsibilities were as a reserve officer?

00:35:12 Speaker_09
As a reserve officer, I wouldn't have wanted to be out on my own and making the decisions that a full-time officer made. I absolutely not. And it wasn't the same type of a background investigation that a full-time police officer goes through.

00:35:29 Speaker_02
Why do police departments lean on reserve officers? Why do they do it?

00:35:35 Speaker_09
It's a force multiplier. Most police departments that have reserve corps don't pay them, but a lot of them do because they'll pay them part-time.

00:35:47 Speaker_09
And usually now what you see is with the reserve officers, they're a full police officer that either has worked or does work for another agency, and it's a chance to get extra money.

00:36:04 Speaker_09
Most of them, though, are full-time police officers, and they go out on their own.

00:36:09 Speaker_05
They take a car and... Do you know, are they still common around the country, these reserve officers?

00:36:14 Speaker_09
Not as much as it used to be.

00:36:19 Speaker_05
It used to be very common in the 80s, 90s, right?

00:36:23 Speaker_09
Yeah, it was used to supplement. Ogden used theirs for any parades or like the rodeo for security there. They could put reserve officers there. It cut down tremendously on their overtime budgets.

00:36:38 Speaker_09
But now, for the most part, to become a Category 2 or a police officer, most people are putting themselves through the academy, which is about a $7,000 to $8,000 bill to train yourself. And then the agencies will hire you.

00:36:55 Speaker_09
There's a limited number of state-trained where the department hires you and sends you through the academy on their own.

00:37:04 Speaker_05
Why did you do it?

00:37:07 Speaker_09
My father and my brother had both been police officers. It's kind of a family business type thing and I always had an interest but I couldn't afford to live off what a police officer made.

00:37:20 Speaker_09
And the company that I worked for, I was a sales, industrial sales rep.

00:37:25 Speaker_09
And they restructured commissions several years in a row and supposedly to our betterment, but every year it went down and finally it got low enough that I could afford to take another pay cut and become a full-time police officer, which is what I wanted to do.

00:37:41 Speaker_02
In most cases, somebody who wants to do a job, that's usually a good thing, right? But in some cases, do you find that there are or were people who wanted to be a reserve officer so they could flash a badge and have authority?

00:37:58 Speaker_09
Yes, you that was that is one of the drawbacks to reserves. You'll get you get the ones that this guy has a huge ego. He's never wrong. And, you know, as a chief, you just don't hire people like that.

00:38:21 Speaker_02
Thanks again to Carl Marino and Aaron Kennard for joining us. We'll be back with another episode of Talking Cold.

00:38:27 Speaker_05
If you have a comment for us or the COLD team, you can call us with your questions or comments at 801-575-4399. Leave us a voicemail with your reaction and we might play it on the show.

00:38:39 Speaker_02
Production is by Nina Ernest and mixing by Trent Sell. For Amazon Music and Wondery, Managing Producer Candice Manriquez-Wren, Producer Claire Chambers, Senior Producer Lizzie Bassett, and Executive Producer Morgan Jones.

00:38:53 Speaker_02
Special thanks to Kale Bittner and Alison Vermeulen.

00:38:57 Speaker_05
With Workhouse Media, Executive Producers Paul Anderson and Nick Piniella, and KSL Podcasts Executive Producer Cheryl Worsley.

00:39:04 Speaker_02
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00:39:29 Speaker_00
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00:39:39 Speaker_00
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