Anchorage police are planning a new approach to patrolling Alaska's largest city, one designed to put officers in closer touch with residents, the police chief and mayor said last week.
Residents from some neighborhoods have been pressing the administration over the last year to bring back community-style policing, a concept that aims to reduce crime by fostering closer personal relationships between police and the people they serve.
Community policing, which requires a greater city investment to bolster the force, has been tried in various forms over the years in Anchorage but has not lasted, usually because of a lack of funding or manpower.
But Wednesday night, Mayor Mark Begich and Police Chief Walt Monegan told a crowd of about 400 at a church in Russian Jack that they are committed to making the concept work for Anchorage.
The commitment won eager applause from those in attendance and also gained support from community council members interviewed Friday.
The meeting, spearheaded by Anchorage Faith and Action Congregations Together, a nonprofit organization representing about a dozen churches, attracted residents from all over town and different backgrounds who shared a concern about crime in Anchorage.
Monegan, who was instrumental in bringing community policing to Mountain View for a period in the mid-1990s under a three-year grant that helped the number of cops assigned to the neighborhood jump from one to 15, told the crowd Wednesday he "absolutely" supports the concept.
But, he warned, "it's not going to happen overnight." The department is down nearly a hundred officers, and it will take time to build up the force to a point at which it can do more than just run from call to call.
No specific model was laid out at the meeting, but Monegan explained in an interview later that he has one in mind that involves creating a community-policing unit.
Officers in the unit would be assigned to neighborhoods where they would be encouraged to interact closely with the residents, attending community council and school meetings, for example, and getting to know residents and business owners. The officers would then share what they learn about the concerns and intricacies of the community with the cops who regularly patrol the area.
Many officers already stick to patrolling one part of town, Monegan said, but the demands of going from call to call leave little time for the quality interaction that community policing can afford -- especially during the busy evening shift, when most neighborhood meetings are held.
Monegan said he has no plans to go back to the model used under former police chief Duane Udland, which assigned patrol officers and many detectives to certain parts of town and dismantled some specialized, centralized detective units.
On the patrol side, that system never had enough people, Monegan said. "We were always asking for troops from other districts," he said. "It was sort of robbing Peter to pay Paul."
Dividing the detectives into different parts of town didn't really work out either, he said. "The suspects never cooperated," he said. "Criminals are not geographically bound."
The department has already taken a step toward the new model, though the full plan isn't expected to be in place for several more years. Monegan said he has assigned a sergeant, Cynthia Stanton, to be a liaison to all of the city's community councils in the interim.
"We're really impressed with her," said Ryan Stencel, vice president of Huffman/O'Malley Community Council. Stencel said it's been great having a police officer present at her council's meetings.
"We're able to tell her what our concerns are," Stencel said. "For instance, our area of town is the highest in burglaries in Anchorage, and we want to know why. People want to know what they can do to make their houses less appealing. That's what we sent her away with this last month for homework."
Stencel said the administration's new community policing unit sounds like a great idea. "It's exactly what Anchorage is needing," she said.
Fairview Community Council board member Noel Rea was "cautiously optimistic" about the new model. "As an individual living in Fairview, I support any move to community policing as a model." But, he said, the chief's plan "does seem to make it pretty dependent on one individual, which could go either way."
Rea said he'd have to see the plan in action to really know if it would work. "The devil's in the details with any of these things," he said.
Sharon Chamard, public safety chair for the Fairview council and an assistant justice professor at the University of Alaska Anchorage, said she attended the meeting at St. Anthony's and was impressed the mayor and chief made a public commitment to the principles of community policing.
Chamard said that in her neighborhood, "people express concern that they give information to police and it falls into a black hole. People want to know if they acted on the information."
Having an officer assigned to the neighborhood might allow residents to get answers to questions like those, she said. Still, Chamard said she did have concerns that officers assigned to be a neighborhood's go-to person could get bogged down with complaints that aren't really police related, such as disputes over junky yards, which wouldn't be a good use of resources.
Daily News reporter Tataboline Brant can be reached at tbrant@adn.com or 257-4321.
