Behind the Badge 

Page 2 of 3

South Salt Lake, he says, was like the Wild West. He didn’t relish his 18 months on patrol because, he says, it involved “significant life and death experiences,” the details of which he declines to reveal. He preferred administration, public-information duties and the relatively new discipline of community policing to the adrenaline-fueled street work.

“Beau was so good at working with the public and the community,” says former South Salt Lake Chief Gray, who was Babka’s lieutenant and mentored the young officer. Babka ran a highly successful community-policing initiative at South Salt Lake under Gray while also teaching criminal justice at Salt Lake Community College.

It normally takes an officer six or seven years to make sergeant, Gray says. Babka did it in two. Such was his burgeoning reputation, Babka says, that he was approached by four senior Salt Lake County Sheriff officials and a county politician with an offer of a senior desk job and a high salary—sweetened by the promise of a bribe—if he could get South Salt Lake to move its police work to the county. Babka preferred to stay with the city and turned them down.

His rapid rise through the ranks earned him the pejorative label of “golden boy” among his peers, and his political strivings often led him to step on the toes of senior officers.

“As Beau went up the ranks, he had a tendency to burn a lot of bridges behind him,” Gray recalls. “He created enemies, I’d say, because of his ambitions.”

STAND BY ME
As fast as Babka went up the ranks, his political ambition restlessly sought new challenges. In 2002, he ran against Salt Lake County Sheriff Aaron Kennard.

Gray wasn’t convinced it was a good move. “I didn’t feel he was ready for that kind of position,” he says. “I know ambition is good, I like it in people, but you have to control it.”

Babka says his strong showing of 47 percent of the vote, led several Salt Lake County Democratic council members to ask him to run against incumbent Chris Cannon for the 3rd Congressional District seat in 2004. Second time out, despite facing Cannon’s deep pocket, Babka gained a still-credible 33 percent of the vote.

In 2005, Bob Gray successfully ran for mayor of South Salt Lake, inheriting a bitterly divided police department. Gray told Babka that if he made him chief, he had to stay the course and pull the department together. Babka agreed.

At first, Gray says, “it was working really well.” Babka says he inherited a department that was “running amok,” with two officers under investigation for raping arrestees. He was also investigating an officer at another agency for stealing gift cards.

Babka’s political clout as chief drew attention from then-Salt Lake City prosecutor Sim Gill and Sgt. Jim Winder of the Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Office. Babka says Winder visited his office multiple times during Winder’s 2006 run for sheriff seeking help with his campaign.

Gill says he warned Winder that Babka had gone back on his promise to endorse Gill in the 2006 district-attorney race and told Winder not to trust Babka. (Babka says he never promised to endorse Gill.) But around Thanksgiving in 2006, the newly elected Winder asked Babka to be his under-sheriff. Winder sought a commitment from Babka of sticking with him for two terms. “He gave me his promise.”

Babka was excited, he says, to “help my friend Jim” with his new responsibilities. While Babka says Gray encouraged him to live his dream, the former mayor expresses disappointment. “I felt like he had kind of not supported me. He wasn’t being fair to me. I put him in that position. I expected things from him.”

CHARMED LIFE
As under-sheriff, Babka was over administrative services, the police fleet, communications and human resources, and took responsibility when Winder was gone.

But, Babka says, he felt isolated from the first months; Winder, he says, favored then-legislator Jackie Biskupski, whom the sheriff had appointed in an administrative position, as his titular second-in-command. Babka says his media profile, including a weekly radio show called Ask Beau, was viewed as competition to Winder’s image-building.

Winder, however, says he quickly learned that Babka preferred to delegate and viewed his position as largely ceremonial. Winder says that, for example, when he asked Babka to oversee a presentation involving a new 911 system, Winder ended up having to take it over one week before it was due.

“I recognized Beau Babka did not know how to administer an organization of our size and had essentially risen through the ranks thanks to his significant personal charms,” he says.

After a year and a half as under-sheriff, Babka was approached by a friend about running for sheriff in Orange County, Calif.

He decided to keep his application a secret, but when he made it to the final eight, a press release announced him as one of the finalists in the running for the job.

Babka says he thought Winder would be proud of him, but he’d more than misjudged the sheriff’s reaction to the news.

“I’ll never forget his face,” Babka says. “It was a ‘I want to physically kill you’ face.”

Winder told him, Babka says, “You’re done.”

Babka’s televised interview for the Orange County sheriff position did not go well. Babka’s statement that “this department needs a father, a leader that’s going to give it integrity,” earned him derision from an Orange County Register reporter who wrote that Babka “came off as a law-enforcement version of Forrest Gump.”

In the face of imminent unemployment, with six children to feed, Babka says, he panicked. Where would he find work as a police chief?

Babka’s salvation came from an unexpected quarter, a man he had once regarded as a nemesis: Robby Russo.

BUTTING HEADS
In the mid-1990s, when Babka was a patrol sergeant running South Salt Lake’s graveyard shift, he found himself butting up against Robby Russo, a similarly up-and-coming young officer who worked in the county’s narcotics units.

Russo and his team gained a reputation while working in county narcotics units for getting low-level dealers to rat out larger players, resulting, Russo says, in seizures of hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in drug money, the bulk of which went into the county’s coffers due to the forfeiture laws in place at that time.

Tempers flared with Russo, Babka says, when South Salt Lake annexed the area between 3300 South and 3900 South from the county in the mid-’90s. The annexed neighborhood boasted an unusually high rate of violent felony crimes that kept the county sheriff’s department occupied; it was Russo’s “fun zone,” Babka says.

Russo says the Sheriff’s Association and the Fraternal Order of Police were concerned “about how petitions [for annexation] were gathered/signed; we did ask the Salt Lake County Clerk’s office to review the petitions. I don’t recall ever having any personal contact with Mr. Babka on this issue.”

Further city vs. county (and Babka vs. Russo) controversy emerged in 1998, when in a letter, former South Salt Lake Chief Drew Long complained that Russo and several of his men had pointed red-light scopes at South Salt Lake officers eating at an Arby’s on State Street.

Babka says that after he caught wind of it, he went directly to Russo’s boss to complain.

“I have never pointed a laser device at any police officer,” Russo wrote in an e-mail to City Weekly. “I was the sergeant supervising the detective responsible for using the laser pointer, and he was disciplined.”

But, Babka says, “tensions between the county sheriff’s office and local law enforcement were never far away. There’s always this philosophy the county could do it better, that we were doing things the wrong way.”

And years later, after the highly contested formation of the Cottonwood Heights Police Department in 2008, Russo’s role in the city vs. county struggle had reversed, with little love lost between Russo and Winder. And when Russo offered Babka a job and Babka accepted, Winder says, he was not surprised by what he understood to be a fairly straightforward revenge plot on the part of both men.

“He was being paid by the citizens of Cottonwood Heights to run for sheriff,” Winder says. “Why wouldn’t he go over there? He was pissed off at me, he wanted to be sheriff.”