Police and prosecutors in Salt Lake City announced Thursday they are trying a new strategy to tackle violent crime: keeping a laser focus on 114 people they see as most likely to be involved in violence, based on past behavior.

To identify the group’s members, the city investigated three years of its own data and pinpointed those arrested most often for serious crimes, including shootings and assaults.

They came up with a list of 114 names and, working with the Salt Lake District Attorney’s Office, sent letters to those people in February with a warning: authorities are keeping a close eye on them and will react to any new offenses with “a focused and accelerated law enforcement response.”

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“Bottom line is, we’re not going to tolerate criminal behavior from these individuals,” said Salt Lake City Police Chief Brian Redd. “But we also want to offer them an off-ramp, and if they want to choose that off-ramp, we’re there for them as well.”

The off-ramp is an offer to connect them with mental health and substance abuse treatment programs that are already coordinating with the state courts, Utah’s parole agency and police.

The announcement comes a little more than a year after Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall laid out a new plan to address crime and homelessness in response to demands from top Republican state lawmakers. It also comes as the Legislature and Governor Spencer Cox focus their attention on “high utilizers” cycling in and out of jail, emergency rooms and homeless shelters.

Overall crime in the city is down from a high in 2021, but the number of violent crimes in February ticked up slightly from a year earlier, from 86 to 104, according to city data.

At Thursday’s news conference, Mendenhall called the new approach “absolutely innovative” and said she thinks it will have positive ripple effects beyond the limits of Salt Lake City and Salt Lake County.

City and county leaders are coordinating with the Utah Department of Corrections to carry out the program they’re calling the “Targeted Offender Partnership Strategy,” or TOPS. They also had assistance from the academic world.

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A criminology professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio helped devise a scoring system giving greater weight to prior charges for offenses such as rape, aggravated assault, robbery and homicide. The system gives a lower number of points for those deemed to have a gang affiliation or prior nonviolent felonies. Those on the list of 114 range in scores from 12 to 22, said Salt Lake City police spokesperson Glen Mills.

The Texas university has also helped police in Dallas and Boston craft solutions, with the Boston program focused on gun violence, Mills said.

Salt Lake County District Attorney Sim Gill said his office has designated two prosecutors for the program. If anyone on the list on supervised release is suspected of new crimes, Gill said, the prosecutors won’t wait to argue that they need to be arrested swiftly for violating terms of their probation or parole.

Previously, without the targeted effort, Gill told reporters, it could take weeks for that to happen, Gill told reporters.

“That is a game changer,” Gill said.