Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/David O. Leavitt


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete. ✗ plicit  03:51, 30 April 2021 (UTC)

David O. Leavitt

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This article was nominated for proposed deletion the other day, but the rationale was just so wrong headed I could not let it stand. I suspect if I had let it slide this article would be deleted. The argument was that he was county procesutor for a "small county". The problem is that I see no way to describe Utah county as such. It has over 600,000 people. This means it is roughly the same size as the city of Detroit and several other major US cities. True, Detroit Metro Area has way more people than Utah County, and there are other factors in notability, but Utah County is not small. So much of its growth has been recent that it has not registered on the conscience of some people. On the other hand as the home of Brigham Young University, Utah county has a notability that is greater than its actual population. I am among thousands of people who have spent significant amounts of time in Utah County who do not live there currently. The county's other true university Utah Valley University, is still in some ways a technical college that has evolved to having more pgrams, but it still does have some impact and does draw more students from far beyond the borders of the state of Utah than one would expect, although some of that is people wanting to be part of the BYU culture who do not have the academic background to be admitted to BYU. When Leavitt was diagnosed with COVID-19 in April 2020 not just the Provo (county seat and largest city in Utah County) paper but the two main papers published in Salt Lake City covered it. However I do not think coverage because you were a semi-notable person who got COVID before May 1, 2020 is really enough to justifiy an article. There is more coverage of his race for state attorney general, which some might think exceptional for a candidate in the primary as opposed to general election. However Utah state wide general elections have been all won by Republicans for the last 30 years, often by huge margins and sometimes involving Democrat candidates who did things deliberately designed to alienate over half the electorate in ways that show they are not at all serious about winning and even less serious about building the relationships they would need to actually govern the state if they did win, so Republic primaries get covered because they are the deciding election, and so the coverage of a candidate in them needs to be exceptionally unsually unexpected to show notability. There is also coverage in all three papers about a staff attorney that Leavitt hired in his office, but that is more incidentally about Leavitt. I did find this from the redemptive justice institute on how Leavitt is a leading figure in introducing diversion programs and other methods to try to reduce rates of incarceration. Keep in mind Utah County is not exactly a hot bed of crime, there are some areas of Provo that have some crime true, but I believe overall the county has far lower rates than Salt Lake County, and is way below the crime rates in Wayne or LA counties, plus it has far lower rates of drug use and drunkeness and DUI and underaged drinking arrests than any other county in the US with similar numbers of college sutdents, except maybe Madison County, Iowa. So while Leavitt's programs are innovative, their overall effect is less than if he was in a place where prosecutions and arrests were far more common. THe Deseret News did published this article on the board Leavitt formed to give those conviced a chance to argue they were unfairly convicted. We do have this US News and World Report article on Leavitt appointing Patty Johnston to be the first female to be the chief investigator for Utah County. This is really just an AP rehash of the Daily Herald article, and I have to wonder if some of this comes from a confusion of thinking Johnston is the first woman in Utah to hold the position of chief investigator for the county prsecutors office, instead of the reality which is she is the first women to hold the position in Utah County. Bare in mind Utah was the second state to allow women to vote (although the federal government revoked that right) and the first state to allow women to serve on juries. The coverage there is only incidentally about Leavitt, and my first question to a breathless "first women to do x" article like this is when was this office established? I suspect that it has not existed nearly as long as the county. I am not sure county prosecutors even existed before Utah became a state, and I have my doubts that they thought they needed to appoint someone else to be the chief investigator until more recently than that. Our article on Utah county seems to say nothing about its various government offices, not even explaining the baisc structure. So there is no help there. On full consideration though I do not think we should have this article.John Pack Lambert (talk) 15:49, 15 April 2021 (UTC)

I had thought in the late summer/fall he had been vocally against mask mandates, but on further review I realized that was the Sheriff and not Leavitt. This is one reason why it is hard to consider any county prosecutors/state district attorney's default notable. At the statewide and federal level the attorney general is both the top officer over prosecution and the ultimate top authority on decisions of law enforcement, although they gnerally have to defer to governors and presidents on some of this. They order the raids and they prosecute those raided, thus Janet Reno was balmed for the fiasco when they tried to apprehend Vern "David Koresh" Howell and his followers in Waco. At the county level, the prosecutor only handles the prosection and enforcement side, although in at least some localites some misdemeanor prosecutions and civil enforcements are handled by city attorney in incorporated areas. On the enforcment and incarceration side, sheriffs handle the jails but many cities have their own lock up facilities under the police chief, felons end up in state prison systems run under a different way, some do spend months in jail though, sherrifs oversee all enforcement in unincorporated areas, some municipalities contract police service with the county [the two county seats in Metro Detroit's 3 countries in the 2 counties other than the one that has Detroit as the county seat do this, it was done in Camden, New Jersey to brake up what was seen as a corrupt police department, and there are other cases as well]. Still, in Detroit which I live in and know best, the county prosecutor mainly handles prosecutions on cases where the arrest and investigation was made by Detroit police, and the majority of non-Detroit police cases Kym Worthy handles are from the 20 or so other police departments she takes cases for, not from the county sherif, I am not even sure who the current sheriff is, we had Benny Napoleon but he died of COVID. Yes, we do have an article on Worthy, but she is only for sure notable because she brought down "King Kwame" Kilpatrick and his corrupt regime, and because she as an assistant prosecutor was the lead in the successful prosecution of Budzyn and Nevers for allegedly causing the death of African-American motorist Malice Green. Yes her office also has handled several other notable cases, she was a judge for a time at a level that might be enough for notablity, she did a huge push to process through unprocessed evidence kits gathered in rape investigations, and there is more. Also Wayne County has roughly 2 million people and is the center of the state in every measure, and as I have explained the amount of work that comes under the County Prosecutor in Michigan's system far exceeds that processed under the county sherrif. John Pack Lambert (talk) 15:49, 15 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Automated comment: This AfD was not correctly transcluded to the log (step 3). I have transcluded it to Articles for deletion/Log/2021 April 15.  —cyberbot I   Talk to my owner :Online 16:07, 15 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Utah-related deletion discussions.  Spiderone (Talk to Spider) 16:13, 15 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Law-related deletion discussions.  Spiderone (Talk to Spider) 16:13, 15 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of People-related deletion discussions.  Spiderone (Talk to Spider) 16:13, 15 April 2021 (UTC)

 Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
 * Shorter summary I think the coverage of Leavitt's run for state attorney general falls under standard coverage and so does not meet what we expect for a politician. No one below the atterney general at the state level of enforcement is default notable. As mentioned someone like Kym Worthy is notable because of coverage, but that was true before she even became county prosecutor. The sources we have beyond that are summarized 1-an adocacy article that I am not convinced is a reliable source 2-coverage about someone he appointed that is bascially standard news, and not much about him 3-coverage of another person he appointed that is a breathless news coverage where I do not think the person who wrote it really knows what they are talking about, they are basically trying to decieve us into thinking something is going on that really is not, but even if we take it at face value it is not giving indepth coverage of Leavitt. Oh and 4-new coverage of him being diagnosed with Covid-19. I do not think we want to say that "anyone who someone felt it was newsworthy enough to report had Covid-19 is actually notable" is something we want to make one of our inclusion criteria. Leavitt is a borderline case. This is the type of case that I think would be worth discussing at AfC if we had a truly robust and discussive AfC process. On the whole I do not think Leavitt meets our inclusion criteria.John Pack Lambert (talk) 17:32, 15 April 2021 (UTC)

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks,  Sandstein   09:40, 23 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Delete does not pass WP:NPOL. I think the original PROD notification was fine. Mccapra (talk) 11:52, 23 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Delete As per nom and above, fails WP:NPOL. Frigidpolarbear (talk) 16:18, 27 April 2021 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.