SERVING AND PROTECTING MOAB Chief Bret Edge leads a respected and community-focused police department into the next decade Written by Rachel Fixsen | Photos by Murice D. Miller
“T
he truth can be stranger than fiction in this job,” Moab Police Officer Larry Velasquez told me as I rode along with him on one of his Friday evening patrol shifts, quoting the officer who trained him. The truth in this instance was that Moab was fairly quiet. Velasquez gave a stern reminder to one motorist that Utah law requires drivers to move over for law enforcement pulled over on a roadway. He stopped to assist someone trying to start a stalled pick-up truck. He responded to a call about a vehicle parked in a public lot; the caller had noticed that the car’s door had been open for over an hour, with no owner in sight. Velasquez was born and raised in Moab. He left town to attend school and considered a couple of career paths before returning to Moab and entering law enforcement. He worked for
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MOAB AREA REAL ESTATE MAGAZINE March–April 2020
one year for Grand County as a jail guard, but found that the routine of the position wasn’t for him. He joined the Moab Police Department four years ago. As a patrol officer, he says, no two days are the same. The MPD’s Police Chief, Bret Edge, agrees. “It varies wildly,” Edge says when asked about a ‘typical’ patrol shift. “It depends on whether it’s winter or in season; it depends on if it’s a weekday day or a weekend night.”
CHIEF BRET EDGE
Edge has been on the Moab police force for thirteen years, first as a patrol officer, then as a patrol sergeant, then as assistant police chief, and, as of last year, as the department chief. Before moving to Moab, Edge worked as a stockbroker in Phoenix and later in Denver. When
he lived in Phoenix, his roommate worked on the local SWAT team, and when Edge picked up his briefcase to go to work in the mornings and watched his friend leave for work with his police gear, he thought “‘Hey, your job’s a lot cooler than mine.’” When Edge was laid off from his job in finance thirteen years ago, he and his wife Melissa decided it was an opportunity to try a different pace of life. Both had always lived in big cities; they wanted to be in a place “where we could walk out our back door and go for a trail run, go mountain biking or go hiking,” he says. Edge applied to the police department, nudged not only by the memory of his friend in Phoenix but also by the influence of his father, who was deputy sheriff in Los Angeles for twenty years. He hasn’t looked back.
