What This Salt Lake City Heatmap Tells Us About Drug Crime

Time and again, local newspapers have described The Rio Grande district of Salt Lake City as a hotbed of lawlessness—the epicenter of drug crime in the city. The situation there appears to have become so bad that county mayor Ben McAdams recently went undercover as a homeless person to better understand the area. In an interview with The Salt Lake Tribune, he recounted a “very chaotic environment” with stray needles strewn about, dealers popping out to push heroin every couple of blocks, and desperate, homeless people milling around. Now, the county has freed up more than 100 jail beds. That’s the first step in “Operation Rio Grande,”a forthcoming effort to aggressively stamp out drug crime in this part of Salt Lake City.

But how does a hotspot like Salt Lake City’s get so bad in the first place?