Fighting Crime in Alaska’s Remote Villages – By Casey Leins (usnews.com) / Nov 15 2018
It can take troopers days to respond to crimes in the state’s hundreds of rural villages.
Dan Harrelson, 66, is the only first responder to all crimes, and he can also be called on for medical emergencies and fires in White Mountain, his Alaskan village of around 200 people.
Harrelson, a Minnesota native and a former U.S. Marine Corps aviation electrician, is trained as a village public safety officer, a position the state created in the late ’70s to help address its unique safety issues.
Alaska has the highest violent crime rate in the nation, with one murder every six days, one rape every eight hours and one assault every two hours, according to a report released by the state’s Department of Public Safety. But law enforcement is unable to respond quickly to many of these crimes.
There aren’t enough state troopers to respond quickly to all parts of the state, which is one-fifth the size of the lower 48 states combined and has more than 200 native villages, many of which are remote. The state is still recovering from the nation’s Great Recession, forcing a cap on the number of troopers it can fund. It can take a trooper multiple days to respond to crimes in rural areas, not only because each trooper is responsible for multiple villages but because of delayed notification and extreme weather conditions.
“When we say we’re the last frontier, we’re actually serious about that,” says Commissioner Walt Monegan, who oversees the state’s Department of Public Safety.
NOTE: The bar graph shows the number of offenses per year, and the dotted line represents the 5-year median of offenses. (Uniform Crime Reporting Program Annual Report/Alaska Department of Public Safety)
In response, the department created a Village Public Safety Officer Program, in which one village member is hired to serve as a first responder in his or her community until a trooper arrives. Funds for these positions, called village public safety officers, or VPSOs, are awarded to the Native nonprofit corporations that oversee the villages.
The position comes with some challenges: VPSOs must respond to crimes alone, unless they recruit other village members to assist, and VPSOs currently do not carry firearms. Legislation in 2014 made it legal for VPSOs to carry firearms if their employers grant them permission, but the Department of Public Safety and the Native nonprofit corporations are still working to implement the new policy.
As an unarmed man responding to dangerous situations alone, Harrelson admits the job can be intimidating and laughs when asked if he’s ever feared for his life while on the job.
“Ohhh, yes.”
“There’s times when you feel like you need backup sooner,” he says, before describing a situation in which he was nearly killed: A few years ago, he chased down a man on his snow machine five miles outside of White Mountain. The man had been trying to smuggle alcohol into a nearby dry village (most villages prohibit the import and sale of alcohol). The two men had what Harrelson calls a “battle” on the ice.
“I’m a short guy, I’m 5-foot-3, and this guy was like 6-foot-4. … He had his hands around my neck, strangling me, and I was seeing dots and stars.”
Harrelson managed to escape the man’s grasp and to disable his snow machine, leaving the man stranded. Harrelson rode back to his village for backup and later charged the perpetrator with attempted murder.
“I was pretty close (to being killed), you know, so that was a scary thing,” he says.
Many of the crimes in Alaskan villages are alcohol related, according to Harrelson. Additionally, he says the majority of crimes he responds to are sexual assault, burglaries and domestic violence cases, some of which have been murders.
Monegan predicts the crime rate is actually higher than studies show because, he says, many assaults probably go unreported.
(Uniform Crime Reporting Program Annual Report/Alaska Department of Public Safety)
In domestic violence cases, Harrelson says he knows when to back away to protect his safety.
“If there’s a case, say, as an example, if a guy is drunk and has a gun and he’s holding his wife in the house, we back away from that situation and make a call on the phone or talk to him at a distance,” Harrelson says. “Oftentimes you call and they sober up and they come out of the house willingly, apologetic and sorry for what they’ve done,” he adds. Other times, he has to back away and wait until the next day or until a state trooper arrives.
In some situations, Harrelson calls on family or friends for help detaining people.
“I’ve had help from folks in the community, especially if I’ve had more than one prisoner at a time.” Harrelson has a small holding cell, connected to his office, where he keeps people he’s arrested until troopers arrive.
Harrelson says some VPSOs are now being asked if they want to carry firearms. He was recently asked, but declined the offer. He says he thinks walking into a scene with a weapon could induce more “instantaneous violent acts by people.”
With 26 years of experience under his belt as a VPSO, Harrelson travels to other villages to help officers new to the job or to assist in search-and-rescue operations.
Harrelson is the only first responder to crime in White Mountain, but some villages also have law enforcement positions known as village police officers and tribal police officers. A village might only have one of the three positions, or it might have all of them. Most villages also have volunteer firefighters, who are trained their village’s VPSO, and health aides who often respond first to medical emergencies.
One advantage VPSO officers hold over state troopers is the fact that they know everyone in their community and aren’t dealing with strangers, he says.
“A law enforcement officer in D.C., they knock on the door and they don’t know what’s on the other side,” he says. “At least here we have a relationship with community members and you get to know their ups and downs and how to handle them a little bit,” he adds.
However, these tightly knit communities deter many people from becoming VPSOs.
“If we’re hiring a VPSO that’s lived in that community his entire life, he grew up there, he’s related to the entire village pretty much. … he’s going to be arresting his cousins, his uncles, his brothers,” says Captain Andrew Merrill, who manages the VPSO program.
For Harrelson, this isn’t so much of an issue. He says he tries to be a fair law enforcer, no matter his relationship with the person he’s arresting, and he didn’t grow up in White Mountain; he married into the village. Still, Harrelson says he gets his share of criticism.
“Say if I arrest somebody, for example, with a DUI or domestic violence charge, oftentimes I’ll hear, ‘You didn’t arrest your brother-in-law and he was drunk driving a week ago,'” he says. “People will have comments like that, but you have to deal with it.”
This idea of arresting family or friends is one reason why the state has had trouble recruiting VPSOs. Alaska currently has only 48 out of 78 funded positions filled, leaving many villages (there are 229 federally recognized tribal communities) without a trained first responder, according to Merrill.
(Uniform Crime Reporting Program Annual Report/Alaska Department of Public Safety)
He says people are also deterred from being a VPSO (or a state trooper) because there has been a growing negative view of law enforcement during the past five years.
“People are like, ‘Why would I want to be a cop when we’ve seen an increase in murders of cops, when we’ve seen cops ambushed and murdered outside their home or at shopping malls or just going to have lunch,'” Merrill says.
Alaska has also had difficulty recruiting state troopers, according to Monegan. A couple years ago, there were only four people training at Alaska’s academy for state troopers, but last year there were 24, Monegan says.
The original idea was to hire VPSOs who already lived in the villages where they would be working, but Merrill says that isn’t the case for half of those who currently hold the position.
He says this is somewhat surprising because these people have to uproot their lives to move to the village, and most of the communities don’t have running water or a hospital. But a VPSO’s pay is enticing since the starting salary is only a couple dollars per hour lower than that of a state trooper, “so we’re trying to keep it competitive,” Merrill says.
In order to better protect Alaska’s many communities, especially those without a VPSO, the state is floating the idea of community watch programs to the villages.
A state trooper trained through Alaska’s Department of Public Safety would travel to a village and meet with community members to teach them how to best assist law enforcement and reduce crime.
These community watch members could then set curfews and teach others how to better protect their homes, among other safety measures.
Harrelson recently received information about the resources available to form a community watch group, but says he doesn’t think it would be of much help since he already has plenty of eyes and ears in the village.
“If there are issues, community members are more than willing to share what those issues are,” Harrelson says.
Monegan says the state is working on a number of other safety initiatives, such as trying to change the law around VPSOs. The current guidelines state that VPSOs can only be placed in villages with fewer than 1,000 people, but Monegan says the goal is to change that requirement to 2,000 people so that more communities are included.
Alaska is also trying to build a statewide 911 communication operations center. Right now, 911 calls are directed to a state trooper’s cell phone or to one of their posts, and law enforcement has no way of tracking a caller’s location.
“We’re working to try to bring us into the 20th, if not the 21st century, and it’s a challenge,” Monegan says. “The recession the whole country went through … Alaska’s still not out of it. The oil prices are starting come back and things are looking a little brighter, but we’re not out of the woods yet.”
