If Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff has heard it once, he’s heard it 100 times: Utah and Arizona should have conducted their own Texas-style anti-polygamy raid years ago.
After all, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints resided for nearly a century on the Utah-Arizona border before building a compound in Eldorado, Texas.
And that, says Mr. Shurtleff, is the point. The FLDS didn’t suddenly relocate three years ago on a whim — it was driven out by law-enforcement crackdowns in Utah and Arizona targeting corruption and sex abuse in polygamist communities.
“We can document that they wouldn’t be in Texas if we hadn’t cracked down on them,” said Mr. Shurtleff, a Republican. “Their move to Texas was a direct response to us telling them we wouldn’t tolerate incest, crimes against children or domestic violence.
“As soon as they saw we were serious,” he said, “they started buying land in Texas.”
His counterpart, Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard, added that the two states did raid the community several times, most recently in 1953. Known as the Short Creek raid, it resulted in the removal of 200 children, gave the states a public-relations black eye, and drove polygamists underground for 50 years.
“The result was a disaster, both legally and from a human cost,” said Mr. Goddard, a Democrat. “We had 50 years of darkness and no communication. After that, the state ignored all crimes in that community.”
In interviews with The Washington Times, the two attorneys general described their years-long campaign to build bridges and combat crime in their states’ sizable polygamist communities, efforts that have been largely overlooked in the aftermath of last month’s Texas raid.
The most recent criticism came last week from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
“I think that Texas is doing what Utah and Arizona should have done a long time ago,” the Nevada Democrat told the host of a Salt Lake City radio show. Mr. Reid is a member of the mainstream Mormon church, which disavowed polygamy more than 100 years ago and has no connection to the FLDS church.
Texas authorities entered the FLDS compound in early April and removed 463 children, who now await a decision on whether they should be placed in foster care or returned to their parents.
The raid was prompted by a phone call from a woman claiming to be a 16-year-old FLDS girl who said she had been forced into an underage marriage and beaten by her much-older husband. Authorities have never found the girl and are investigating whether the call was a hoax.
The day after his comment, Mr. Reid received a phone call from the Arizona attorney general, who told him about the state’s five-year-old crackdown on crime and outreach within polygamist communities.
“I asked him, ’Are you aware of what we’ve been doing?’ ” said Mr. Goddard. “He wasn’t, so we sent him a whole lot of information, and I think he understands now. My conversation with him was very positive.”
In 2003, the two attorneys general launched Operation Safety Net, aimed at reaching out to the region’s numerous polygamist enclaves. They asked the clans to put aside their distrust of law enforcement and report crimes within their communities, notably incest, child abuse and domestic violence.
In return, authorities said they wouldn’t prosecute bigamy or polygamy between consenting adults. There was one caveat: The communities had to promise to stop arranging marriages involving anyone under the age of 18.
Most of the region’s large polygamist clans and independent families agreed to disavow underage marriages, with one large exception: the FLDS community, led by self-styled prophet Warren Jeffs.
“The FLDS met with the attorney general to discuss it,” said Paul Murphy, who coordinates Utah’s Operation Safety Net. “I heard they had a meeting afterward and said, ’No government is going to tell the prophet what to do.’ ”
Otherwise, the strategy has proved successful, he said. Members of formerly secretive polygamist families often thank him for his work in the community.
“At our last meeting, a guy stood up and said, ’We had an issue in our family, and Child Protective Services came out, and they really helped.’ I mean, how often do you hear people thank Child Protective Services?” Mr. Murphy said. “The last few years have really paid off, because when we’ve had problems, we’ve been able to work with individual families.”
Prosecutors also took on corruption. They decertified a judge and stripped the badges of a half-dozen marshals found to be more loyal to Jeffs than to upholding the law in the sect-controlled border towns of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Ariz.
Arizona took control of the local FLDS-run public school and removed the school board. State prosecutors cracked down on the United Effort Plan, a so-called charitable trust that actually helped keep members in line by controlling their assets.
The coup de grace came in 2007 when Jeffs was found guilty in Utah of accomplice to child rape after arranging the marriage of a 14-year-old girl. He faces more charges in Arizona, including incest and sexual conduct with minors.
“We’ve got their prophet in prison for five years-to-life,” said Mr. Shurtleff. “Would we have liked to prosecute more? Yes. But we felt we had to take it one case at a time.”
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