The Hammer Effect: Salt Lake County’s Inmate Data Blackout Continues
More than seven months after Salt Lake County removed demographic and identifying information from its public-facing jail tools, those fields are still gone.
The Sheriff’s Office currently tells visitors that “certain personal identifiers have been removed” from the public jail roster under Utah’s Government Data Privacy Act and Salt Lake County Policy 2022.
The county still publishes inmate names, charges and custody information, along with aggregate statistics about the jail population. What disappeared was much of the information attached to individual people in the system.
The changes came shortly after the anonymous X account SLC Fatigue,
@MarinasHammer, began publishing daily “Hammer Reports” using Salt Lake County’s own arrest and inmate data.
SLC Fatigue documented the first round on Feb. 10, when age, sex, race and city and state of residence disappeared from the county’s daily arrest list. On Feb. 27, the account documented another change to the inmate lookup system, this time including citizenship, country of birth and physical descriptors.
The Sheriff’s Office has attributed those changes to privacy-law compliance.
Sheriff Rosie Rivera addressed the issue during a March 24 County Council meeting, saying the public would continue receiving information including an inmate’s name, booking date, charges and custody status. Other information the office had previously provided would no longer be released, she said, because of the GDPA and County Policy 2022.
SLC Fatigue wasn’t satisfied with that answer.
On Aug. 4, the account published the results of a months-long investigation into the changes, including a review of the laws cited by the Sheriff’s Office and a comparison of jail-record practices across all 29 Utah counties.
The account argues that Salt Lake County adopted its own restrictive interpretation of the privacy law rather than carrying out an explicit statewide requirement to remove those fields.
There are a couple of things worth noting about that argument.
The Utah Division of Archives and Records Service says the GDPA does not supersede Utah’s Government Records Access and Management Act. The agency describes the newer privacy law as an enhancement of GRAMA’s existing privacy protections, not a replacement.
Salt Lake County’s own Policy 2022 also recognizes that personal information can still be public. Section 5.3 says personal data classified as a public record under GRAMA may be available to the public.
That doesn’t mean every piece of information Salt Lake County removed has to be posted online. GRAMA allows some personal information to be treated as private, and the Sheriff’s Office says records it releases may be redacted for certain third-party identifiers.
But the statewide privacy law hasn’t produced one statewide approach to inmate information.
Davis County still publishes individual inmates’ gender and age on its online roster. Weber County does the same, and its individual inmate pages include additional physical descriptors such as height, weight, hair color and eye color.
Those counties operate under the same Utah Government Data Privacy Act.
That doesn’t tell us whether Salt Lake County’s interpretation is legally wrong. It does tell us that removing these identifiers is not simply something every Utah sheriff did when the GDPA took effect.
SLC Fatigue is now asking the Legislature to set statewide minimum disclosure standards for arrest lists, inmate rosters and release information.
I spent the last 7 months investigating crime in Utah and wrote an 18 page paper on my findings…
Hopefully some nerds out there still like to read. There’s some damning info in here every Utahn needs to know.