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- Utah swore in 140 officers to its new Division of Law Enforcement on Monday.
- The division consolidates officers from four agencies to enhance efficiency and coordination.
- The change aims to improve resource protection and law enforcement flexibility across Utah's outdoor spaces.
SALT LAKE CITY — Being an officer is difficult in any jurisdiction, but Joel Ferry believes patrolling Utah's vast outdoor spaces can be especially hard.
On average, the state estimates one outdoor resources officer is tasked with protecting wildlife, lands, trails and other resources across 385,000 square acres — a space about five times the size of Salt Lake City. The job also comes with an expectation to protect the state's outdoor features, something many residents hold dear and that Utah is internationally known for.
"It's not faint of heart to be out in the wild alone, protecting and standing up for the resources of Utah, for the people of Utah," said Ferry, director of the Utah Department of Natural Resources.
For years, four agencies supplied officers tasked with handling issues at state parks and other state-managed lands, as well as the wildlife that roams around the state.
That's no longer the case.
Utah Gov. Spencer Cox led a ceremony Monday to swear in 140 officers to the newly formed Utah Division of Law Enforcement, essentially consolidating all of the state's natural resource officers into one agency. The voices of all the officers echoed as one through the state Capitol rotunda Monday as Cox led them in an oath.
All 140 officers sworn in were already Utah officers, but the ceremony followed a major change in state law. Utah lawmakers approved HB469 last year, which took all of the officers from the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources, Utah Division of State Parks, Utah Division of Outdoor Recreation and Utah Division of Forestry, Fire and State Lands and put them into one law enforcement division managed by the Utah Department of Natural Resources.
The Utah Division of Law Enforcement, which was officially established when the law went into effect on Jan. 1, will still patrol the same areas and laws those four agencies did. Ferry said he believes the measure helps improve communication and coordination between agencies.
There will still be certain specialties within the new division focused on different aspects of Utah's outdoor resources. For example, the division will continue to have officers who specialize in poaching and other wildlife-related offenses, since that's what they have been trained to do.
However, the change removes barriers that will make them more "flexible" to respond to other law enforcement needs, Ferry explained. He said it also should free up some administrators who were split between managing facilities and enforcing laws so they can focus more on planning out areas like state parks while the new division handles law enforcement tasks.
"It's really something that we've been looking at — as a department, multiple times over the last 10, 20, 30 years — doing. We felt like now is the time to do it," he told KSL.com after the ceremony, adding most people won't notice a difference in enforcement on state lands and other areas where the past divisions patrolled.
Four different state audits had previously recommended a consolidated division, Cox added. He said he believes the measure will improve efficiency in policing the state's natural resources.
Todd Royce, who had been the department's law enforcement director since 2018, was named the division's first chief. He agrees that unifying all the agencies will improve efficiency but said it can also improve training, resources and opportunities for all of the officers.
"It's not new; it's a new chapter," he said during Monday's ceremony. "There have been many people who have come before us and we stand on their shoulders."
