Fact is, the police didn't refer to the abductor as "a trusted member of the community." It is often difficult to glean facts from FR, because one poster will put out their interpretation of events and others assume them to be gospel. Yesterday, we had a poster who believed that Ricci had been cleared, probably based upon an erroneous post by Varina Davis weeks ago. Nothing could be further from the truth, as Ricci tops the list of probable suspects in the Smart abduction.
More to the point, it has been posted here on FR literally hundreds of times that police referred to the abductor as a "a trusted member of the community." You cited it twice. Problem is, that quote is not correct. I located four quotes from CNN, Deseret News and two from CBS with the identical wording: "trusted person in the neighborhood or community" all published on June 18th and 19th. I was going to cite portions of these articles and provide links, but decided not to in the interest of brevity - this is long enough already.
Even you should be willing to concede that there is a different connotation between the word "member" and the word "person".
It should also be easy to see that there is a difference between the Smart perception of Ricci in their ignorance of his criminal record at one point in time versus the police view of Ricci who had full access to his criminal record. The following quote from a Deseret News article on June 18th entitled Case stirs emotions near, far offers some insight into the culture where the Smarts live:
Some shared concern about what they see as an abrupt shift in the safe perception of Salt Lake City and Utah.
"I think of Salt Lake City as the way America was in the 1950s. The family values, the friendliness, the trust surpasses every other city in the United States if not the world," wrote New Yorker Cutter Johnson. "It breaks my heart to think that this is changing. I have always taken comfort in the fact that your city was so warm and open."
"People who have not lived in Utah can not conceive of the holistic environment the Utah community engenders," writes Ken Marker, a former Utah resident. "I recall diverting Little Cottonwood Creek down the center of the street virtually overnight. In Park City we moved the contents of the town library to the new building hand to hand like a bucket brigade. No way either of these events could have happened in another state."