The following was reported by the Utah Investigative Journalism Project in partnership with the Invisible Institute and Salt Lake City Weekly.

Ken Wallentine is one of Utah policing's most high-profile figures. He frequently gives testimony to legislative committees considering bills affecting the criminal justice system, and he's served as president of the Utah Chiefs of Police Association, in addition to his role as chief of police for West Jordan, Utah's third-largest city.

His stature is perhaps a natural denouement to a lengthy career in law enforcement, which he began in the 1970s working as a security guard while a student at Brigham Young University.

Since then, Wallentine has worked as a Provo patrol officer, a prosecutor and reserve deputy sheriff in Uintah County, and a chief of the investigations bureau for the state Peace Officers Standards and Training Division, before becoming West Jordan's chief in 2018. He's also had a significant hand in shaping police policy and regulation, in Utah and nationwide.

Wallentine was hired in the early 2000s to develop a new curriculum for the state's "entire basic training program," he once said in a deposition. Street Legal, his guide to criminal procedure, has been published by the American Bar Association since 2008.

Wallentine was former Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff's chief of law enforcement, overseeing investigative bureaus and acting as Shurtleff's "representative to law enforcement executives throughout the state," he once said. He returned to the office in 2016 to develop its virtual reality training program.

Wallentine also has at times seemed supportive of police reform. He wrote a statement in early 2023 to "unequivocally condemn the circumstances that resulted in the death of" Tyre Nichols, who was killed by five Memphis police officers. He sends officers to trainings that encourage them to analyze their own thought patterns and internal biases, because officers with those skills "are those who can pursue paths of peace," he told the West Jordan Journal in 2020.

Yet Wallentine also has a well-paid side gig as a consultant and expert witness, in which he has faced accusations of working to stymie reform efforts. He's repeatedly testified in defense of police officer behavior that judges later found violated the Constitution or resulted in millions of dollars in settlements and judgments.

Defining 'Reasonable'
Since 2010, Wallentine has worked for LexiPol, a company founded by Bruce Praet, a California lawyer and former police officer. After Praet defended police departments in misconduct lawsuits in the 1990s, he began writing policy manuals to reduce liability for police.

Wallentine testified in 2015 that LexiPol policies relating to "use of force, firearms, a use of force review board," and other related topics don't "go out the door without my fingerprints all over" them.

During that time period, LexiPol's use of force policies strictly adhered to what's known as the "Graham standard." This standard is named for a 1989 U.S. Supreme Court decision, which set out that police use of force is not excessive if it is "objectively reasonable" given the information available to the officer at the time.

It has been criticized for years by some legal scholars and police officials, who feel it doesn't go far enough in limiting when and how police can use deadly force.

But to LexiPol, encouraging police departments to restrict their officers' use of force beyond what the Supreme Court requires was contrary to its mission of reducing liability for its clients.

Such policies "box officers in," a 2018 LexiPol white paper co-authored by Wallentine and Praet reads, and are "likely to create—not solve—legal issues for the agency." The company strongly opposes rules that would prohibit officers from taking actions like chokeholds or firing at moving vehicles.

"By producing policies and trainings that are silent on ... alternatives known to reduce police violence, LexiPol provides no structure for participating agencies to consider these alternatives," UCLA law professors Ingrid Eagly and Joanna Schwartz wrote in a 2022 article titled "Lexipol's Fight Against Police Reform."

Wallentine was also closely tied to LexiPol's backing of "excited delirium" protocols, which led to the deaths of George Floyd, Elijah McClain and Brian Cardall, a Utah man who died after being tased in 2009 by Hurricane police.

Medical professionals questioned the methods for decades, but until last year, LexiPol explicitly endorsed the concept. As recently as 2019, Wallentine gave a webinar on "excited delirium" protocols developed by the Institute for Prevention of In-Custody Deaths, a for-profit Nevada company co-founded in 2005 by an attorney for Taser to help defend the stun gun manufacturer against claims that its weapons were deadlier than advertised. Wallentine sits on the institute's board of directors.

In October 2017, a year before he was appointed chief of police in West Jordan, Wallentine stepped away from his role overseeing policy for LexiPol to one he still has today—writing a regular column about the law and policing for LexiPol's in-house publication, Police1.

Shannon Pieper, LexiPol's senior director of marketing and content, wrote in an email that "Chief Wallentine is a part-time employee with LexiPol focused on writing and speaking engagements. He does not have a direct role in developing LexiPol law enforcement policy content." She did not respond to follow-up questions.

Defending Misconduct
In addition to his work in writing policies and interpreting police obligations under Supreme Court precedent at LexiPol, Wallentine has also pursued another side career as an expert witness consultant in police use of force and other misconduct lawsuits. In all but one of dozens of cases, he was hired to produce a report exonerating police actions.

The Utah Investigative Journalism Project and Invisible Institute identified a total of 77 lawsuits—spanning from 2002 to several that are still pending—for which Wallentine served as a police expert witness.

These civil cases do not prove guilt or innocence but provide families with awards or settlements if juries are convinced the police actions were unjustified. There were 25 cases where a person died at the hands of police or in police custody—plus a miscarriage allegedly caused by police negligence.

Wallentine has defended police actions in overturned wrongful convictions in Phoenix and Kansas City, Missouri; alleged excessive force related to police K9 bites in Las Vegas and suburban Los Angeles; in-custody deaths in Charlotte, North Carolina, and the Navajo Nation; and fatal shootings everywhere from tony suburbs of Chicago and Santa Barbara, California, to rural northern Utah and a highway outside Nashville, Tennessee.

In depositions, he's noted that both LexiPol and the Utah Attorney General's Office either discouraged or outright forbid him from testifying on behalf of those filing lawsuits against law enforcement, aka the plaintiffs.

Multiple plaintiffs' attorneys interviewed said that they viewed Wallentine as being part of the policing world's "cottage industry of exoneration," as a 2021 New York Times investigation termed it.

Cases for which he's testified to defend police officer or department actions have still cost taxpayers more than $37.5 million in payments to plaintiffs, either through settlements or jury awards, according to a tally of federal and state court cases by the Utah Investigative Journalism Project and Invisible Institute. (Another $650,000 jury award was later overturned on a technicality; there are also six settlements the news organizations could not obtain amounts for.)

That includes $10 million that an Iowa jury awarded in 2013 to Jarvis Boggs, who was paralyzed at 18 after a Waterloo police officer responding to a potential burglary crashed into his car while speeding through an intersection without the use of lights or sirens (the actions of a "reasonable and well-trained officer," according to Wallentine's report).

In another Iowa case, the city of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, settled for $8 million in 2021 with Jerime Mitchell, a Black man paralyzed during a traffic stop by an officer who had killed a man during a traffic stop just over a year prior. It was reportedly the largest police misconduct settlement in the state's history.

In this case, Wallentine was hired by the city, which reportedly spent another $600,000 defending the officer in court, only to later fire the officer for dishonesty in his reports about the shooting.

Other seven-figure settlements and judgments in cases for which Wallentine was hired to produce a report exonerating police actions include:

—A $2 million settlement with the family of Brian Cardall, the Utah man whose 2009 death after being tased by Hurricane police officers on the side of the highway prompted a statewide conversation about mental health training for police. The officers' decision to tase Cardall twice as they tried to stop him from running into traffic nude was reasonable, Wallentine wrote, because Cardall was suffering from "excited delirium," which the officers had been properly trained to respond to with Tasers. A federal judge found that Cardall was at best a "nonthreatening misdemeanant" who was not resisting arrest and did not warrant a use of force being used against him.

—A $3.2 million settlement with Robert Swofford Jr., a Florida man who was critically injured by Seminole County Sheriff's deputies in 2006 after he exited his house with a handgun to investigate a disturbance on his property—which turned out to be the deputies pursuing a burglary suspect. Swofford's "decision to go into his field, armed with a handgun was unreasonable and negligent," Wallentine wrote. A federal judge disagreed, finding that "every reasonable officer ... would conclude that the use of deadly force against Mr. Swofford was unlawful." The decision was upheld by a panel of appellate judges.

—A $2.45 million settlement with the mother of Sariah Lane, a 17-year-old who was shot in the head in 2017 by then-Mesa, Arizona, detective Michael Pezzelle, during an ill-advised police maneuver to bring an acquaintance of Sariah Lane's in on domestic violence charges. Officers boxed the car in and fired into it when they thought her acquaintance was reaching for a gun; no gun was found in the car. Wallentine unsuccessfully argued that "a reasonable and well-trained officer" would have taken the same actions.

In each of these lawsuits, settlements were reached after judges rejected the police departments' claims that they or their officers should be afforded qualified immunity. Under this judicial doctrine, those bringing the suit must prove officers violated a "clearly established" constitutional right and that the officers knew or should have known that their behavior was unconstitutional, a burden of proof that experts say can be prohibitively difficult to achieve.

In many instances, plaintiffs must find a near exact copy of their case with a favorable ruling in the same federal circuit.

Despite this strict limitation, federal judges in 24 of the suits in which Wallentine testified on behalf of the police rejected the qualified immunity defense and found plaintiffs had legitimate grounds to argue that their "clearly established" constitutional rights were violated.

In another six cases for which Wallentine served as expert witness, a federal district court judge or appellate panel found that qualified immunity should be denied, but were contradicted by another judge elsewhere in the process.

In six cases where Wallentine spoke on behalf of qualified immunity (but was denied), juries still found in favor of police. By contrast, judges in 15 lawsuits Wallentine was brought in on granted police qualified immunity. There's no data about police expert witnesses and how their testimonies affect the ultimate outcome of cases.

When qualified immunity is denied, "it's often because there are factual disputes that a jury needs to decide," said Schwartz, the UCLA law professor. If the plaintiff successfully argues that a constitutional violation of a "clearly established right" may have occurred, "then it should be for the jury to decide."

Wallentine's testimony didn't turn the tide on a number of state-level cases he was hired for. The Orange County, Florida, Sheriff's Office asserted a "stand your ground" defense in a state court lawsuit over the fatal shooting of William Charbonneau, who was having a mental health crisis, in suburban Orlando.

In that case, the state judge found in 2019 that Wallentine's argument—that Charbonneau, while lying prone on his lawn, could have flipped around a shotgun that was pointed at his own head to shoot at the deputies within a "fraction of a second"—was "not credible based on common sense, physiology, and physics." That lawsuit was later settled for $125,000.

Wallentine has also asserted that police department officials had exercised proper oversight over rogue officers, in clear contradiction of other evidence.

In 2005, a lawsuit alleged that South Salt Lake Officer Gary Burnham had raped a 19-year-old, and claimed that his police department was negligent for allowing Burnham to continue working after both of his ex-wives filed criminal charges alleging domestic violence and rape, sexual conduct while on duty, and sexual assault of one of their children.

Not so, Wallentine argued, finding that the department had thoroughly investigated the claims. He dismissed the claims of the officer's ex-wives as "largely unsupported." Wallentine also noted that Burnham's "ecclesiastical authority ... spoke highly of him" during the hiring process, and that a polygraph showed that he "held traditional values."

Utah federal Judge Clark Waddoups, however, found holes in the department's investigation, ruling that investigators never attempted to interview women whom Burnham had allegedly had sexual contact with while on-duty—despite having enough information to locate them.

Then-SSLPD Chief Theresa Garner even testified during her deposition that she believed the allegations against Burnham constituted a pattern, but did nothing to increase supervision before he allegedly raped the teen. The case settled for $125,000.

'Can Do No Wrong'
It's not clear if West Jordan—which pays Wallentine over $200,000 a year in salary and benefits—is aware of the extent of his work as an expert witness.

On city disclosure forms—required under his employment agreement—Wallentine wrote that he engages in "occasional short-term consulting."

He has consulted on at least 17 cases since beginning work at the city five years ago.

Meanwhile, his consulting fees as of 2022 were a flat $300 an hour with travel ranging from $1,200 to $1,750 a day.

In lieu of a response to requests for comment and a detailed list of questions sent a week before publication, Wallentine responded through West Jordan spokesperson Tauni Barker that he was on family leave and unavailable for an interview.

Barker also declined to make West Jordan Mayor Dirk Burton available for an interview, but wrote in an email that "the City of West Jordan requires employees to disclose outside employment. This policy, adhered to by all employees, including Police Chief Ken Wallentine, helps maintain transparency and accountability." Barker said that Wallentine's disclosure "has not been flagged for any potential policy violations" in response to a follow-up question.

She provided a statement from Mayor Dirk Burton that lauded Wallentine for his experience and dedication to public safety, calling him "an invaluable asset to our city."

The statement also credited Wallentine for "maintaining staffing levels and fostering an exceptional workplace culture that prioritizes equity, inclusion and policing with an outward mindset."

Todd Macfarlane is a Kanosh attorney who opposed Wallentine while representing the family of Brandon Eric Chief, who was killed by West Valley City Police in 2010. He said Wallentine's mindset, in his experience, is centered around finding the evidence to justify police actions, no matter how egregious their conduct.

Macfarlane, who clerked with Wallentine for a Utah appellate judge early in both of their careers, continued, "He's one of those guys [whose] worldview is that law enforcement officers, as a general rule, can do no wrong.

"Truly, in my view," Macfarlane said, "the way he is hard-wired is to always look for and find the evidence that will support the law enforcement position." CW

Sam Stecklow is a journalist with the Invisible Institute, a Chicago-based nonprofit public accountability journalism organization, where he works on the organization's Civic Police Data Project and its investigations. He was also a member of the award-winning team behind the "Shots Fired" project, produced by The Salt Lake Tribune and PBS Frontline.