The principal for one of Alaska’s largest rural elementary schools, in a region with some of the highest sex crime rates in the country and a state with a history of failing to protect students, was allowed to remain on the job until the FBI got involved.
by Kyle Hopkins, Anchorage Daily News, and Greg Kim, KYUK
Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s proposed law comes after Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica found that dozens of rural Alaskan police officers had been hired despite criminal convictions.
A big part of Alaska’s law enforcement crisis is a program that recruits residents of remote villages and trains them to work as police. Now, a group of state legislators is proposing nine ideas to rescue the program.
He read our story about Alaska’s policing problems and began raising money to send supplies to the small Police Department in Savoonga. His efforts may save his fellow officers’ lives.
More than a third of Alaska communities have no local police of any kind. Criminals have been hired as cops in some remote villages. A federal emergency has been declared and millions of dollars are promised, but here’s what else experts recommend.
The Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica found small Alaska cities have employed police whose criminal records should have prevented them from being hired. Now, the state board is working to ensure they meet basic hiring standards.
Many remote Alaska Native villages have no law enforcement at all. But state troopers can be found in wealthier, and mainly non-Native, suburbs, where growing communities have resisted paying for their own police department.
A tiny Alaskan village got a police officer. He’s never had to make an arrest. Meanwhile, larger communities with more crime have often been left behind as the state’s two-tiered policing crisis gets worse.
Days before his death in 2005, Simeon Askoak told officials how an Alaskan rural policing program was broken. His village hasn’t had another permanent cop since.
