Today, Explained - Alaska's missing police force

Episode Date: August 26, 2019

A third of Alaskan communities don’t have cops. Kyle Hopkins, investigative reporter at the Anchorage Daily News, explains Alaska’s public safety emergency. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode starts with some stories about sex crimes. None of it's graphic, but this is just a heads up. If you want to skip the first couple of minutes, we'll begin in a moment. The thing that really caught the state of Alaska's attention last year was in the summertime, there was a case where a 10-year-old girl went missing in Kotzebue. Search and rescue crews are searching parts of Alaska looking for Ashley Johnson Barr. The 10-year-old girl was last seen Thursday near Rainbow Park. Dozens of volunteers are assisting the FBI and Alaska state troopers with this investigation. Kotzebue is a hub community surrounded by smaller villages in northwest

Alaska. It's a small place. It's not really connected by roads to the rest of Alaska. There's only so many places that you can go. The whole community was out canvassing, you know, just walking the tundra, walking the flats. Almost immediately, the FBI went up to Kotzebue to help investigate this case. Two search dogs are also part of the hunt. Authorities say that this case is still classified as a search and rescue mission, not a recovery. Over the next few days, this girl's body was found out in the tundra, and it was determined that she had been sexually assaulted and strangled to death. Eventually, this 42-year-old man named Peter Wilson was charged with the rape and murder of this young girl.

He had no criminal record related to sexual assault. And it seemed strange that someone in middle age would go from having never been accused been sexually assaulting children and young women since he himself was a child, that he had sexually assaulted his sister at a young age, and then another relative said that he had raped her dozens if not hundreds of times in the village. But it just raised these questions of, you know, how is it that someone can commit multiple sexual assaults against multiple victims and never be held accountable? And how common is that? What is the system in place that allows something like that to happen? In our newsroom, we're trying to get a handle on why does Alaska have three times as many reported sexual assaults as the rest of the country? This one case in Kotzebue was kind of a flashpoint for taking a new look at sexual assault in Alaska. And so we did a call out. We just told our readership across Alaska, you know, if you have experienced sexual violence in Alaska, we want to hear from you if you're willing to share your story with us.

And we were amazed at the number of people who responded. We got more than from you if you're willing to share your story with us. And we were amazed at the number of people who responded. We got more than 200 responses to our call out. Most people said they were willing to talk on the record. And what we found as we started talking to survivors of sexual assault is that many of them had experienced being exposed to this broken public safety system in Alaska and a system that treats people differently based on where they live. People living in remote villages were especially vulnerable and received less services and really less justice than I would argue maybe any population in the United States. Kyle Hopkins, you've been conducting this investigation into public safety in Alaska for ProPublica because it turns out there really isn't much public safety at all if you live in smaller Alaskan communities.

What do people need to know about the state to understand your investigation? So the way I described Alaska in one of our stories is, you know, if you take Texas and you take California and you take some of the Carolinas and maybe a handful of other states and cram them all together, that's the landmass. It's huge, just an enormous place with very few people. There's less than a million people in the whole state. And about half of those, nearly half of them live in Anchorage where I live, you know, the largest city. But the thing that makes Alaska special in my mind is the hundreds of small communities that are sprinkled all over that huge landmass. They're indigenous communities that really valued subsistence lifestyle, meaning hunting and fishing and the ability to live in

these Arctic extremes. And so you have low employment, you have high suicide rates, you have a high rate of poverty, but you have these things within the settings of these really beautiful remote places where people are living an amazing lifestyle. You know, people are living off the land to a degree unlike any other place in the United States. These hundreds of small communities you're talking about, how did you and your team go about investigating public safety in them? Well, just the simple matter of trying to identify how many communities have police, that turned out to be a huge task and really no one can answer those questions. So we set out to try and just figure

it out ourselves. You know, we just started making spreadsheets and we contacted every single village and every entity in every village. And what did you find? We found that there are at least 70 communities in Alaska that have no law enforcement. No cops at all. Yeah. And that's a very conservative estimate because we only counted communities that have a state-funded school and they have a post office, you know, so they have some federal services, they have some state services. And so there would be some expectation that there would also be some public safety services. So what do the people in these communities do when they need help, when they need law enforcement when something bad happens?

You know, in our reporting, we talked to communities hundreds of miles from the city. My name's Helvi Sandvik. I live in the village of Kiana, Alaska, and we're located in northwest Alaska, about 35 miles above the Arctic Circle. My family owns a small retail store and some real estate in Kiana, and has for almost 90 years now. My mother ran the store by herself, and so she was up there alone, probably in her mid-70s at that time. She was sound asleep in her bedroom upstairs,

and all of a sudden she sort of woke up and sensed something, so she yelled, who's there? And there's a flurry of activity, and she's terrified. This person in the middle of the night broke in through the kitchen window. She basically chased the guy down the stairs, and he eventually climbed out the back window again, cutting himself both coming in and coming out. She has a dresser in her bedroom right by her bed, and there was a bloody handprint. At the time of the break-in, there was nobody to call from official law enforcement. She called a teacher for help. there were examples where somebody would be acting in their words just kind of acting crazy you've got a guy he's walking around the town and he's got a gun and he maybe he's firing the gun

off in the air maybe he's talking about killing himself maybe he's talking about killing other people often he's intoxicated you know i to elders who, when something like this would happen, and it would happen enough that there was a protocol that an elder would just go out and kind of make sure that any kids who were out playing in the street, she would kind of bring them in and put a show on for them to watch for a few hours while other people, you know, adults on the street took care of the problem. And that might mean just staying on lockdown and waiting until the person calms down. Or in some cases, you know, I talked to a guy in a community called Russian Mission, you know, and he said, yeah, there's occasion where, you know, I've had to tackle people before,

or you wait until the person falls asleep, you take the gun away and you duct tape them up and you put them in the city building and you just sit on them until help arrives. Whoa. Yeah. Who's supposed to be showing up when something bad happens in these small communities? Surely there's some protocol in the state? In rural Alaska, you have a few different types of police. You have Alaska state troopers who they are the best paid, they're the best trained. There's just not that many of them. And it takes them a really long

time to get to these communities. And so the officers that I've been writing about recently, they're this tier of local police officers who are working for either a city government that pays for them literally through like bingo or raffles, whatever way of collecting revenue they have for their small city government, or they're paid by a tribe, one of these federally recognized tribes in Alaska that might get federal assistance to hire these police officers. What's life on the job like for them? I mean, is the job different from being a local cop anywhere? So, you know, the police officers we talked to, they were working for, you know, not minimum wage, but not much better than minimum wage. They had no training. None of them were armed. And he described to me that there one village police officer who was this, you know, now 50 year old grandmother of three who has been doing the job for a few years

with no backup and no gun and being asked to just, you know, to restrain grown men, you know, who might be intoxicated or might be violent to investigate sexual assaults, really to be kind of the one woman police force for her entire community. Domestic violence are the hardest ones. Also, suicide. Those are the very toughest ones. She had been instrumental in an arrest of a man who had committed a home invasion sexual assault. And in that case, she has to show up and, you know, protect the woman. And there's no safe house in town or there wasn't that night.

So she takes the victim, the survivor of sexual assault, takes her back to her own home. Right. So it's the kind of thing that a police officer, it just, you can't imagine a police officer in a city doing that. You know, they respond by themselves to kind of an active sexual assault. And not only do they have to investigate that case, but also they have to take the victim back to their own house and give them a place to stay. She was just going about doing her job. But like many of the VPOs that we talked to, she was looking for other work because this is not something that you can do for a long period of time without help. I'm stressed. I'm tired. I'm overwhelmed. Sleepless nights. Barely see my family.

I still have a few friends out there and a few families that still talk to me, but it's pretty hard when you have to arrest somebody. And then they'll start hating you for a while. In a minute, why Kiana's only cop should never have gotten the job in the first place. This is Today Explained. A week from today, you may know, is Labor Day. Stitcher would like to offer you a little Labor Day deal. If you go to stitcherpremium.com slash laborday, that's L-A-B-O-R-D-A-Y,

not like the Canadian or the British labor with a U, use the code laborday, L-A-B-O-R-D-A-Y. You'll get 30% off Stitcher Premium. Maybe you're wondering, what does Stitcher Premium get me? First and foremost, you get to listen to your favorite podcasts ad-free. Like this one. No ads, just that daily explainer you've come to know and love. Like this thing right now, you would not be hearing it.

But you get more stuff too. You get bonus episodes of lots of different podcasts. You get exclusives, early access to premium only shows. You get comedy albums, like hundreds of stand-up comedy albums. Check it out, stitcherpremium.com slash laborday. Again, that's L-A-B-O-R

D-A-Y. Use the code laborday to get 30% off. Here I was interviewing the police officer who seemed like a model police officer for rural Alaska. You know, she was respected by her community. You know, she was valued by Alaska State Troopers as a full-on law enforcement partner. You know, she was out there doing kind of this dangerous hard work every day. But she happened to have a couple of things on her record, a couple of convictions that we found, according to the state regulatory board, should have prevented her from ever being hired.

It was domestic violence, right? Misdemeanor assaults, harassment. These communities don't really have cops. And the one person they're relying on, this village officer, has been arrested for doing exactly the same crime she's supposed to police. Right. If you're going by the book, she should never have been a police officer. Is this common? What did you find once you started looking at the backgrounds of the cops who are policing these small rural communities? Well, we knew that there were isolated cases of cops in rural Alaska who had serious criminal records because it occasionally would come up. I would write a story, a breaking news story about something awful that happened in a village.

And I would start to look into the person who had been arrested. And occasionally I would find that they were an active police officer. And then I'd look at the record and I think, well, how could this person have been hired as police officer because they have all these other things on their record? That doesn't make any sense. And that led to some of the reporting that became part of the project that we're working on where we thought, well, how often is this happening where someone is an active police officer in rural Alaska, and they also are on active probation, are a registered sex offender, are a convicted felon? Is that common? That led to a more prolonged and ambitious reporting effort to just try and identify every single one of these officers and what we found was that of the police officers i was able to identify

one in four had a criminal record that should have prevented them from ever being hired as a police officer one in four so the state must know this is happening are they trying to do something about it they know it's happening i mean we written, you know, I've written a few stories about this issue in the past about isolated cases. I talked to a former public safety commissioner for Alaska who shared with me a letter that he had sent to the state that spelled out exactly this problem. He said, look, we have requirements on the books for police officers. They're not supposed to have serious criminal records. And yet we have all these officers who are being hired. They're not being trained. We're falling down on our job of regulating these police officers. And this was a note that went to the regulatory board more than 10 years ago. What's happened is it's such a difficult problem to solve that the can just gets kicked down the road. No one has been willing to

really tackle it head on. And this is why the attorney general had to make a trip to Alaska himself back in May. Alaska's two U.S. senators had really been urging him to visit. And what he saw there, I mean, it prompted him to call public safety in much of the state an emergency. He went to a few of these remote villages. He spoke to local leaders. Someone asked me, why are you here? Why did you pick Alaskans? Because to me, my job is to go where the need is greatest. And I think the need is greatest here. These are people that are just asking for the basic physical security. And it's not much to ask.

Now, the attorney general said he's hoping to find a broad solution that will also involve the tribal governments. And today, the Justice Department plans to announce new funding for Anchorage because of its disproportionately high crime rate. So Barr is going to throw some federal money at this, something like $10 million. Is that the issue here? Alaska can't afford giving these villages more cops? Well, one challenge in our early reporting is that we don't want to imply that just the solution to all these issues is just more cops. It's more a question of, are people living in these remote communities, are they receiving the same constitutionally mandated services as people living in the cities? And we think the answer is clearly no, that there's a two-tiered justice system. There's a little bit of a civil war in Alaska right now over what to do with this money that our state has received from oil wealth, you know, because the state got rich on oil.

There's something called the Alaska Permanent Fund, and it's just this big fat bank account that was created when we were flush with oil money. It was basically like, we have more money than we can spend right now. Let's set it aside as a fund that's going to create interest. And so we have billions upon billions of dollars in this fund. And every year, anyone who's been in Alaska for like a certain amount of time, they get a check from the government just for living there. I get one, my kids get one. Universal basic income? Yeah, basically. What's the check look like? Well, right now, it's probably going to be like $1,600. Every month?

No, no, just once a year. Okay. But like every member of a family will get one. Right. You know, my kids are seven and 10. They're both getting that check. You know, my wife is getting that check. I'm getting that check.

Just for living in Alaska? Just for living in Alaska. So there is money in Alaska. And there's no statewide income tax. Okay. Right? And so people from outside Alaska look at it and they say, well, it seems like you guys have a lot of money and you have no state income tax. So, like, why are you having so much trouble just funding basic services?

Or, like, not finding a police officer who hasn't committed crimes. Right. What's happened is there's this debate right now because oil is a finite resource and we haven't found something to replace it, really. But that's not an Alaska problem. That's an everywhere problem. Right. But the Alaska economy has been so dependent upon oil that there's been this debate for years now about, well, how do we make Alaska a sustainable state some of them say it's too expensive to provide services there. And I imagine indigenous communities don't take too kindly to being told to leave. Well, the indigenous people of Alaska were there first, first of all. You know, why should they move?

And it's expensive to move. If you have a family of four or a family of five and you're living hundreds of miles off the road system to uproot and move to the city, that's a really expensive proposition. I mean, some people just can't afford it. But also, you know, we're talking about cultures that are rooted in the place that they live. You know, the language even is kind of based on the place names and the culture is based on being of and from that place. So to move from that place is really, you know, to abandon part of your culture or that that's how it can feel to some people who choose to move or who are forced to move. In the village of Kiana, where Officer Annie Reed is from, you know, the city manager, Eli Cyrus, I thought explained this well, you know, when he said. Most of the oil is located within rural Alaska. Most of the fisheries is rural Alaska. Most of the mining is located in rural Alaska. And the perception is that the state is taking

our resources. And what are we getting back in return? The value of Alaska is in the remote parts of Alaska. And so what you'll hear from some village leaders is that's also where the investment should be made. Kyle Hopkins is an investigative reporter for the Anchorage Daily News. His investigation into public safety in remote Alaskan villages was done in partnership with ProPublica. The series is called Lawless, and you can find it at ProPublica.org. I'm Sean Ramos-Furham. This is Today Explained. Thank you.