MANTI— “It’s been good. It’s been very busy. We have a good relationship with our community; they’ve been really great. Our morale is good.”
That’s how Jared Buchanan described his first 11 months as Sanpete County sheriff during an interview the first week in January.
Buchanan was nominated by a county Republican caucus and appointed by the Sanpete County Commission in February 2021 after the elected sheriff, Brian Nielson, stepped up to a job as director of the Utah Department of Corrections.
In the last 11 months, Buchanan has restructured the top administration of the Sheriff’s Office, expanded his detective corps, renegotiated school resource officer contracts, stepped up officer training and brought a mental-health therapist into the jail.
He has continued and expanded structures designed to encourage coordination and cooperation among police agencies in the county, including the Sanpete County Major Crimes Task Force with police chiefs from throughout the county as the advisory board, and Law Enforcement Executive Direc (LEEDS), a monthly meeting with municipal police chiefs and the county attorney.
In fact, the LEEDS meeting now includes workers from the new Mental Crisis Outreach Team (MCOT) in the Central Utah Counseling Center, who respond on scene to suicide threats and other mental health crises.
Buchanan grew up in Manti. In fact, his father, the legendary Wallace “Wally” Buchanan, spent more than 40 years in the Sheriff’s Office, including six years as sheriff.
Jared Buchanan graduated from Manti High School and Snow College, and then went to Weber State University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice with a minor in sociology in 2002.
From there, he had a variety of progressively responsible jobs in law enforcement. He was a corrections officer in maximum security at the Utah State Prison in Draper working with “high-intensive management” inmates.
He joined the Sandy City Police Department, a department of about 120 officers, where he was a patrol officer, was on the SWAT team, was a field training officer and conducted background checks on applicants for police officer jobs.
In 2013, he returned to Sanpete County as deputy in the Sheriff’s Office and later was promoted to patrol sergeant supervising other deputies.
In 2019, he got an offer from Sandy City with a salary he said was hard to pass up. So from then until last year, he commuted to Sandy, where he was a patrol sergeant supervising 10 officers. That’s where he was working when he applied for Sanpete County sheriff.
His education, experience, and non-confrontational temperament appear to have shaped him into what might be described as a “modern” law-enforcement executive.
He is delighted that Sanpete County officers have a tradition of resolving situations without use of deadly force, and that as far as anyone can remember, no sheriff’s deputy or municipal officer has fired a gun at a subject in the past 20 years.
He said he wishes he never had to put a mentally ill person in his jail. He believes in training, training, training for his officers. And when he asked for funding to buy another body cam, he told county commissioners, “Our policy is that if you’re out on patrol, you wear a body cam.”
Presently, Buchanan has 73 people reporting to him, including 24 in the “patrol division” who focus on responding to calls; four in “investigations,” who focus on solving crimes; 21 officers in the jail; eight dispatchers in the 911 center; and a variety of others ranging from administrative staff, to jail therapeutic staff, to a part-time physician and full-time nurse.
Perhaps the most important thing he has done as sheriff is reorganizing the top brass in the law enforcement branch of the office. In a small, rural sheriff’s office, people have to wear a lot of hats, he explained. But some officers were doing too many diverse things and were not able to perform at their best in all of those roles. His goal was to streamline assignments.
The Sheriff’s Office still has two captains: Capt. Gary Larsen, who has been second in command in the law enforcement area for 18 years, and Capt. Robert Braithwaite, who has headed the jail for more than 15 years.
As in the past, there are six supervisory level officers reporting to Larsen. But some of the titles, job descriptions and subordinate staff have changed.
Sgt. Tyler Johnson still heads the Major Crimes Task Force, which doubles as the investigations unit. The task force used to be a combined Sanpete County-Juab County operation. Now it serves Sanpete County only.
Prior to the reorganization, Johnson had just one full-time detective working for him. Now he has three. And officers from the Central Utah Correctional Facility, Mt. Pleasant Police Department and Ephraim Police Department help out on a part-time basis.
“This makes sure cases don’t get forgotten, that there’s a thorough investigation,” Buchanan said.
Sgt. Derick Taysom, formerly a detective who was also public information officer handling media inquiries, has moved to patrol sergeant overseeing five patrol deputies. Sgt. Troy Lewis is continuing as a second patrol sergeant, also directing five deputies.
A big change is the appointment of Sgt. Keith Jensen, a former mayor of Wales and one of the applicants for sheriff, as “administrative sergeant.” He is taking administrative burdens off other supervisors.
Jensen will conduct background checks on applicants for jobs in the Sheriff’s Office and direct training. He will keep policies up to date and in compliance with new state laws and put them on the Sheriff’s Office computer system so deputies can read and sign off on them. He will also be the public information officer interacting with the media.
In a further streamlining of work, deputies no longer have to write a report on every case. If a case will not require follow-up—such as a VIN inspection—a deputy can simply log the case without writing a narrative.
A deputy or detective can get a case, and as he or she is working on it, have “another one coming in and then another one,” Buchanan said. He hopes the reorganization “will reduce some of the caseload stress” officers deal with.
Another change, this one outside the patrol and detective areas, has been the addition of a second county probation officer to assist the current officer, Deputy Jeff Greenwell, whose caseload has ballooned.
Under the county probation program, officers begin supervising people who have been arrested for drugs and other crimes even before the suspects go to trial. The program is regarded as leading-edge.
Another important Buchanan initiative has been renegotiating and rebalancing school resource officer contracts. When resource officers were first installed about 10 years ago, both school districts and almost every town contributed to the costs. Over time, a lot of towns dropped out. Meanwhile, costs increased because of inflation and the officers gaining seniority. Time and again, the county picked up the added costs.
Under the new contracts, the North Sanpete and South Sanpete school districts will be responsible for 50 percent of the cost of one deputy each, while the Sheriff’s Office covers the other 50 percent. The county will also cover 30 percent of the cost of an officer in the Gunnison Valley Police Department who serves Gunnison Valley schools.
Buchanan said one thing that impressed him when he worked for Sandy City was how much training he received. “That’s helped…with what I’m trying to do with training here,” he said.
He has revamped the field training program, where new deputies do on-the-job training with current deputies. The new officers spend one month with a designated field training officer to learn policies, procedures and the computer system. Then they spend a second month on patrol with a field training deputy and a third month doing the same thing but with a different field training officer.
Along the way, the new deputies spend a half day in the County Attorney’s Office and a half day in the investigations unit.
“I think we’re turning out really good deputies,” Buchanan said. “I would put our officers up against any deputies in the state.”
After initial training, state law requires officers to complete 40 hours of in-service training per year. Recently, the legislature has directed that 16 of those hours be related to mental health and de-escalation of crises.
A nonprofit organization called CIT Utah (CIT stands for crisis intervention training) has developed a curriculum for such training. Under Buchanan, two sheriff’s officers went through training to become CIT instructors.
The Sheriff’s Office in partnership with Central Counseling has presented the 40-hour training once locally. All police agencies in the county were invited.
As part of the training, the Sheriff’s Office brought in “people who have had a mental illness, who are in the recovery process” to talk about their experiences with law enforcement, Buchanan said.
“Eventually, I’d like to see everybody (in the Sheriff’s Office) complete CIT,” he said. “Our mental health issues are going up.”
Having navigated through so many changes and projects in 11 months, what will Buchanan do for an encore?
“I want to continue to progress on the things that are started,” he said, while identifying other initiatives “that are going to help our community and our officers.”
