The rural public safety overhaul Alaska needs

The Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica spent the year reporting on a public safety crisis in rural Alaska. Amid the coverage, U.S. Attorney General William Barr declared the problems to be a national emergency.

What comes next? We asked Alaska public officials, law enforcement and village residents for their specific suggestions for improving public safety. Read all the responses here.

Some recent information concerning the VPSO program, through news reports and public media comments, has not been entirely accurate. A recent opinion piece stated Village Public Safety Officers are supervised by the troopers; VPSOs are not supervised by the troopers. If you read the existing regulation manual for the program, you will see the supervisors are employees of the nonprofit regional corporations and tribes. The supervisors, known as VPSO Coordinators, are hired by and paid by the corporations or tribal groups with grant money provided by the state through the Department of Public Safety’s budget.

In the beginning of the program, Alaska State Troopers located in the rural areas supervised and worked closely with the VPSO officers, before the program plummeted to having less than half its positions filled. The Department of Public Safety has the authority to adopt regulations relative to corporate participation, including the role of supervising the program. For some reason supervision was relinquished to the corporations and abdicated by the department.

The VPSO manual designates corporation employees, with little or no law enforcement qualifications, to supervise this type of work. There is no evidence that the manual was approved or adopted by the DPS commissioner, as required by statue.

I also understand the regional corporation VPSO coordinator for the Tlingit Haida corporation in Southeast Alaska is advocating the program be taken away from the Department of Public Safety and placed within the corporations to manage on their own. Does he not realize private corporations are not government agencies, and have neither the responsibility, the power or duty to provide public law enforcement? Law enforcement is a function of government, not a private police department.

All the villages involved with the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) were required by the act to become incorporated municipalities. Those villages have the same power as every other municipality in the state. The city governments of those communities may, by ordinance, establish their own public safety services including police and fire protection. The biggest reason why they do not, in my opinion, is they do not have a tax base from which to raise revenue to support their public service needs.

The only municipality that does, and is operating as those who wrote our constitution envisioned, is the North Slope Borough. That is due to one reason only: They were fortunate enough to be sitting in the middle of the oil patch.

I recommend a repeal of the VPSO program statutes. The state should establish a law enforcement grant program within the Department of Commerce, Community and Economic Development. Then create a law enforcement grant program with grant money provided by the Department of Justice and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and contributions from the non-profit corporations. The ANSCA communities, which are municipalities of the state, can then pass ordinances creating their own police departments. They then can apply for grants to fund hiring and support for their police department and officers. The officers would report to the mayor and city council instead of a non-government, private corporation that now takes an unknown amount of revenue off the top for administrative purposes. This could go directly toward funding the program for public safety within the communities, without money coming off the top for the costs of administration of the VPSO program as it presently is.

For the population of most villages eligible for a VPSO, there is an existing position already established, the Village Police Officer, for which the Alaska Police Standards Commission has a classification. This would be a good starting point to meet today’s rural public safety needs. They would attend training and become certified by Alaska Police Standards Council. Grants could also be made available for infrastructure, equipment and supplies as needed. I would suggest the position be reclassified to that of “Rural Police Officer”(RPO) and not have Village Public Safety Officers, as there are some communities that have both. Once we get the RPO positions established, we can look at a public safety position for the communities with more need for a fire and/or EMS presence.

This would provide a career path and stability over the present high turnover and difficultly experienced in recruiting. The most critical issue is to remove the corporations from the grant process and get funding directly to the communities. This empowers the communities to exercise supervisory authority and have assistance from the Department of Public Safety as needed. Such action will remove political posturing (as it is experiencing now) from the process.

The changes I outlined addresses villages desires to have self-determination and local influence over their own community, instead of a regional corporation that is the primary beneficiary of the grants and has no real skin in the game. There are options, you just have to think outside the box. We can’t afford to keep doing the same thing over and over.

For those villages who have been unable to have a VPSO assigned to their communities due to a lack of qualified applicants, there is a legal way to be able to provide for emergency and legal action until troopers can get to their location. Alaska statutes provide for the Commissioner of Public Safety to issue special commissions to qualified persons who would have the authority of a police officer. You can find the law in AS 18.65.018. They do not have to work full-time, but have the authority to act in the event of an emergency.

Richard L. Burton is a retired Commissioner of Public Safety. He lives in Ketchikan.

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