May 16, 2019: “An investigation by the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica has found one in three communities in Alaska have no local law enforcement. No state troopers to stop an active shooter, no village police officers to break up family fights, not even untrained city or tribal cops to patrol the streets. Almost all of the communities are primarily Alaska Native.”
Seventy of these unprotected villages are large enough to have both a school and a post office… Most can be reached only by plane, boat, all-terrain vehicle or snowmobile. That means, unlike most anywhere else in the United States, emergency help is hours or even days away.
“Lawless,” Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica
Alaska is a huge, sparsely populated landmass. That truth in unassailable. In reading the ADN/ProPublica Lawless article, I was immediately taken back to 1982, when the Investor murders happened in Craig, Alaska.
As a village that is nominally attached to Ketchikan, Craig did not suffer from a complete lack of law enforcement capabilities. They boasted a village police officer, Jerry Mackie, who was able to provide immediate on-scene assistance. They had a small, though newly formed, city police department. And they had one Alaska State Trooper.
One Alaska State Trooper with a beat that covered the entirety of Prince of Wales Island. A beat the size of the state of Delaware.
The first trooper investigators arrived from Juneau the day after the fire, on the eleven o’clock plane from Ketchikan. The trooper homicide and arson detectives, coming from Anchorage, didn’t arrive until 4:00 pm that same day. That was almost 24 hours from the time the Investor fire was reported.
That response, in most circumstances, was lightning quick, considering the logistics.
But troopers actually arrived in force on a Wednesday to address a crime committed on a Sunday night or Monday morning. So the first reinforcements arrived more than two days — approximately 56 hours — after the crime. And the professional investigators arrived even later.
That deficit proved difficult — some would say impossible — to overcome.
The lack of local police and public safety infrastructure routinely leaves residents to fend for themselves. The mayor of the Yukon River village of Russian Mission said that within the past couple years, residents duct-taped a man who had been firing a gun within the village and waited for troopers to arrive. In nearby Marshall, villagers locked their doors last year until a man who was threatening to shoot people had fallen asleep, then grabbed him and tied him up.
“Lawless,” Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica
Copyright Leland E. Hale (2019). All rights reserved.
Order “What Happened In Craig,” HERE and HERE. True crime from Epicenter Press about Alaska’s Worst Unsolved Mass Murder.