EDITORIAL: Can Anchorage’s staggering outdoor death toll point the way to solutions?

This year so far, at least 43 people have died outside in the Anchorage area. Last year, which itself broke a record for outdoor deaths, saw two dozen people die outdoors — this year, the 24th death came before the year was even half over. Now we’re approaching double that total, with two of the coldest months of the year still to come. If last year was a failure, as city leaders correctly assessed it, this year is something worse — a collapse, an implosion.

The magnitude of 43 deaths in our community cannot be overstated. That’s equivalent to one-third of the worldwide death toll of the Good Friday earthquake of 1964, the worst natural disaster in Anchorage’s history. Regardless of political views or personal philosophy, we should all be able to agree that so many deaths, many of which were likely preventable, together depict a tragedy of increasing scale that illustrates our need to confront, study and effectively respond to the causes of this unnatural disaster.

So how should we respond? One of the biggest problems standing in the way of more effective solutions — other than the high cost of dealing with social problems — is the tendency of policymakers to let their politics dictate their view of the optimal response, and to oppose those whose own politics lead them to a different solution. But letting politics guide our view of the data is putting the cart ahead of the horse: Instead, we should let the data help us focus from a big, multifaceted problem — the deaths of a huge number of our neighbors — to the specific causes where targeted action might help keep others alive.

And that’s the bottom line: data. We need as much information as possible about how each person who died outside came to the situation where they met their end. Right now, much of that data isn’t made public and it’s unclear how much is even collected by anyone. We have to infer from circumstantial evidence — the use of naloxone by emergency responders, for instance, could be an indication that a death was related to a drug overdose, but even that isn’t conclusive without supporting information such as a toxicology report. If a person was found unresponsive on a park bench in single-digit weather, was the culprit exposure? Underlying health conditions? Addiction? Without more information (which is rarely made publicly available), we’re unable to say for sure — and that uncertainty means we don’t know whether shelter, medical care or a drug-treatment program would have been most effective in helping them.

Better information about the root causes of Anchorage’s outdoor deaths is essential for policymakers to make informed decisions about how to address the problem, and those policymakers should by all means let the data guide them to solutions rather than use their politics to try to make the issue conform to a Procrustean, one-size-fits-all standard. But the public should also be kept better informed about deaths and their causes, too. We all share the responsibility for making sure our representatives make a good-faith effort to do better and to hold them accountable for their actions (or lack thereof), and we can’t do that job effectively without being able to independently assess the data and make sure that government’s proposed solutions are aimed at the right problems.

Without this information, we risk the worst outcome — far worse than throwing money at uncertain solutions and having little sense of what effect it’s making. If we don’t know why our neighbors are dying and are too incurious to find out, we risk slipping into a situation where this unimaginable toll becomes the status quo. And if we exhaust our capacity to be distressed, appalled and outraged at this unacceptable state of affairs, there is little hope we’ll ever escape it.