By Eric S. Peterson
comments@cityweekly.net
The following story was reported by The Utah Investigative Journalism Project in partnership with Salt Lake City Weekly and the Moab Sun.
At a Sept. 27, 2022, Moab City Council meeting, then-Chief Jared Garcia introduced his new assistant chief Lex Bell to the council, as well as another detective. It was a standard small town welcome—Bell talked about how nice everyone was, how beautiful the town was and how excited he was to take on the job. He also gave a quick resume describing his experience leading a Drug Enforcement Administration task force, working for seven years in SWAT and 10 years in the Metro Gang Unit.
“I came from Unified Police Department where I was employed 21 years,” Bell said. “I worked pretty much every assignment you could work, but most of my career was especially in a detective role.”
Bell was sworn in as Moab police chief on Sept. 26, 2023, just a year after he’d been hired on in the No. 2 spot.
The Utah Investigative Journalism Project recently teamed up with Chicago-based nonprofit journalism organization The Invisible Institute to acquire certification records for over 28,000 officers who have worked in the state, including more than 10,000 active officers. That dataset showed that Bell actually worked 18 years with the Salt Lake County Sheriff’s and Unified Police and that he then worked two years at the Herriman Police Department before heading to Moab.
The certification records also show that he resigned as a sergeant from the Herriman Police Department in 2020 while under investigation.
In fact, Bell quit his last two police jobs while under investigation for allegations of misconduct involving the same female confidential informant, according to records obtained by The Utah Investigative Journalism Project.
The woman was described in a 2018 Unified Police Department internal investigations report as a “known escort, prostitute and drug user.” That report identified a relationship “plagued with inappropriate, unprofessional, personal and flirtatious communications” that went on for years, with Bell receiving illicit photos from the woman, while he provided her information and help getting out of legal trouble. The Unified report noted that information Bell obtained from the informant “solved not one crime for the Unified Police Department or for any other agency for that matter.”
The same woman would be pivotal to a later investigation while Bell worked at Herriman Police Department, where it was alleged he accessed privileged information and gave it to the informant, so she could harass a woman dating her ex-boyfriend.
“Everything you’ve brought up as an allegation has been fully investigated and dismissed by POST or other law enforcement entities, after finding no wrong-doing on my part,” Bell wrote via email. “They have been closed for a long time.”
While POST did not discipline Bell for the separate allegations involving the informant, investigators with multiple law enforcement agencies found Bell’s behavior troubling. Unified Police recommended firing Bell, at which time he resigned his position. Herriman had an outside department investigating Bell when he decided to leave his position there.
“Thank You For Being Awesome”
The informant reported first meeting Bell when he pulled her over for a traffic stop in November 2014, according to a 2017 Unified Police Department report.
“She reports you reached into her car and took her phone and used it to call your phone to obtain her phone number,” the report read. “She was released from the scene with no other interaction with you.”
Soon, the two began texting back and forth and, according to the report, the relationship started off normally for an officer and a confidential informant.
“You would call her seeking information, and she would call when she was in trouble,” the report said.
On Feb. 28, 2017, the informant was worried that police were coming to possibly arrest her and asked about warrants her boyfriend might have.
Bell texted to reassure her “Police aren’t coming. I just checked. They were bluffing you,” according to the report. He also told her she had six warrants that were only “bs little ones.” After the informant thanked Bell, he responded “you owe me a pic tho,” but quickly followed it up with “JK. I’m not a creeper.”
The informant responded that she would send one but when it didn’t come through Bell followed up with another text: “So you sent one, or almost did, cause I didn’t get one. Anyways. No worries. Talk tomorrow.”
The informant then sent a photo of herself wearing a sports bra “and resting her hand on her breasts,” the report said.
Bell responded: “There you are!! Hottie.” After getting another photo of her breasts, he said “God damn those are big girl.” A few pictures later Bell responded “Thank you for being awesome.”
Bell told an internal affairs investigator that asking for pics was “an inside joke” and that the comment was “stupid and in poor taste,” according to the report.
Investigators noted that information he provided the woman about warrants was public record. But other information was not, such as Bell telling her that someone she asked about wasn’t charged for a crime because a witness refused to testify. The report stated that Bell acknowledged such information wasn’t public.
In another example, the informant provided Bell “a picture of a note she came across that appeared to be from an officer’s notebook” and asked if it was a “controlled buy list,” referring to documentation of drugs purchased from a dealer to be used as evidence. Bell told her he didn’t think it was.
“When asked about revealing what a controlled buy looks like, you replied you didn’t think it would be a big deal,” the report stated.
In another instance the Internal Affairs investigator noted that Bell asked a detective from Sandy to drop a case against the informant and had the courts recall a warrant against her so it wouldn’t interfere with a trip she was planning. The informant was supposed to provide information in return but never did.
The informant was interviewed by Unified investigators, who said she was “sober and spoke in a manner that came across as credible and honest.”
Bell had visited her alone at her apartment “about a dozen times” while on duty, according to her account. She said on three occasions she “stripped and danced topless” for him, letting him “touch her butt and naked-breasts.” She also gave him lap dances, but said things never became sexual. Bell denied the topless dances took place or that he ever saw her nude, and stressed to investigators that while he visited the informant without other officers, there were other people in the room with the two of them.
Besides these home visits, the informant said she had ridden in a car with Bell on multiple occasions, even accompanying him on surveillance outings. Bell did not deny ride-alongs happened, but said there were not as many as the informant had described.
The report ultimately let Bell know he would be recommended for termination. He resigned instead.
Investigators described Bell in the report as if he was the informant and not the police officer in the relationship, that it was Bell who provided all the information to the woman, including “whether or not a case is being handled by the DEA, that a subject was not charged because a witness refused to testify, the nuances of an officer’s notes as it relates to a controlled drug purchase,” and other information.
In return for the information she received from Bell, she wasn’t expected to supply actionable information to help solve crimes, she told investigators.
When asked what Bell meant in text and Facebook messages to her saying “You owe me,” the informant said it was “understood” that “she owed [Bell] a strip dance, a naked picture, or something of the sort.”
Law and Order
In 2018, the POST council examined Bell’s behavior and considered whether it merited disciplinary action.
As part of the POST process a hearing is held before an administrative law judge to determine if misconduct occurred and, if so, the matter is referred to the POST council to determine appropriate punishment.
The administrative hearing focused on whether Bell acted inappropriately in providing privileged information to the source. Fellow officers testified on Bell’s behalf that he was trying to get the woman to provide information on an assault suspect—though she never did. Others testified that his interactions with the informant were attempts to get intelligence from her and to cultivate her as a CI.
“Since there was evidence that it was a common practice, it can be reasonably surmised that his sharing of warrant information was an attempt to further that effort and, therefore, was for a criminal justice purpose,” the ALJ decision read.
Marcus Yockey is the assistant attorney general representing POST who took the case against Bell in the 2018 case.
He said the case hinged on if his actions violated agency policy. The other officers testifying about Bell operating within standard practices and vagaries in the policy hurt POST’s case.
“Their policy has to be very specific about what is allowed and what is not allowed,” Yockey said. “That’s what killed us.”
When Bell left Unified Police in 2018 he was immediately hired on at the Herriman Police Department. Two years after POST had cleared him of wrongdoing in his dealings with the informant, the relationship became the focus of an investigation at his new job.
A woman complained to Herriman police in August 2020 that an officer may have disclosed her personal information to a woman—Bell’s informant from his days at Unified. According to a Herriman Police Department report, the informant had told her ex-boyfriend that “she had a long-standing friendship with several police officers and that she often did ride-alongs with these officers.” She even “claimed/bragged that the officers gave her access to private information the officers had obtained from the police data base.”
The complainant told police that she had been receiving harassing text messages from mysterious numbers from her boyfriend’s ex. The victim believed that her privileged information had been leaked because the harassing text messages included very specific details. She received a text at 4 a.m. one morning, for example, saying a tow truck was coming to pick her vehicle up and identified the car by make, model and VIN.
The Herriman officer handling the complaint checked to see if any officers had queried police databases for the woman’s information and found that one had—Lex Bell. The search occurred on Bell’s day off and the database showed he conducted no traffic stops or official business that day.
Herriman handed the investigation off to the Draper Police Department for an impartial investigation. The informant told a Draper investigator that she gave a license plate number to Bell to run, fearing she was being stalked. But she said Bell did not provide her any specific information about the owner of the vehicle.
Bell did not cooperate with the Draper investigation.
The Draper investigation concluded they could not prove Bell provided his old informant with protected information, or that she used it in turn to harass her ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend. However, the report was clear that Bell accessed a private citizen’s information while off duty without justification. The information was forwarded to local prosecutors.
On Sept. 8, 2020, Taylorsville City charged Bell with two misdemeanor counts related to intentionally accessing and disseminating protected information. That case was set to go to trial until it was dismissed on Oct. 6, 2021. The docket offered no explanation. The Taylorsville City attorney’s office did not respond to a request for comment about the decision.
This matter was also taken up by POST but this time, even though it involved similar allegations to the 2018 case, never even made it before an administrative law judge. POST determined there just wasn’t enough evidence to hold a hearing.
A letter from POST to Bell on June 14, 2022, notified him the agency would not seek to suspend or revoke his license but did offer him a reminder that his “professional and personal conduct is a matter of constant scrutiny. Therefore, you must always maintain a professional and lawful demeanor, both on and off duty.”
The next month Bell, who had resigned from the Herriman department, was brought on as assistant chief of police for Moab.
“Clear and Convincing”
In a short email response to questions for this article, Bell noted that the city was fully aware of his background.
“I did disclose all pertinent information as to my work history to Moab upon my hiring as Assistant Chief of Police. They conducted a full background check at that time as well, although I am not privy to it and do not know the contents of that check,” Bell wrote.
Lisa Church, a spokesperson for Moab City, echoed that statement in an emailed statement.
“Chief Bell was thoroughly vetted and submitted to a complete and detailed background check as part of his hiring as the assistant police chief. Beyond that, for privacy reasons the city does not comment on personnel matters. Chief Bell’s work for the city has been exemplary and he has our full support.”
POST’s attorney Marcus Yockey said the agency does take seriously allegations of repeated misconduct by an officer, but said it was a different attorney who handled the investigation of Bell’s Herriman complaint and determined there was not enough evidence to take to a judge.
He also noted that POST has to meet a high bar to take disciplinary action against officers—“clear and convincing evidence”– much higher than in civil matters.
While Bell had insisted that POST found the allegations against him to be unfounded, and the decision of POST from his 2018 complaint stressed that it found that his behavior did not clearly violate agency policy, it still was not an outright vindication of his conduct.
“The evidence presented at the hearing [indicated] that Bell probably made numerous errors in judgment, was unprofessional, and may have committed possible violations of policy in his handling of the CI in this case,” the POST decision reads. “But that was not the subject of the hearing.”
The Utah Investigative Journalism Project asked Bell to comment on all the allegations derived from official police investigations from the various departments but he would not address specifics.
“Your facts, particularly regarding names and events are factually so far off it isn’t worth my time to try to correct them,” Bell wrote.
