Anchorage Police Department officers plan to take over patrolling the Seward Highway along Turnagain Arm on October 1, with help from a state grant.
The move comes after state budget cuts forced the Alaska State Troopers to close their Girdwood post in the area and scale back in the last year.
Featuring rocks on one side and water on the other, the patrol zone — from McHugh Creek to Ingram Creek — is a scenic stretch of highway and one of the most heavily trafficked and dangerous in Alaska.
“Clearly, that stretch of highway should have some law enforcement presence,” Anchorage Police Chief Justin Doll said.
Doll, a former traffic sergeant, said the police department has added officers to its ranks recently, enough so that he feels comfortable the highway patrols will not take away from officers’ ability to respond to calls in the city, which has seen an uptick in crime recently.
Officers will respond to specific calls in communities along the highway under an agreement with a newly created police service area. But Doll said Anchorage police vehicles will not be looking for traffic violations on the highway around the clock.
“It’s not going to be an every second of every day type of patrol,” Doll said. “It’s going to be something that we do when they have the staffing to do that and not impact service inside the city.”
While state budget cuts have left the gap for Anchorage police to fill, it is a state grant paying for the patrols. And the $200,000 grant is only set to last one year.
After that, the question of who provides traffic enforcement in the area will again be uncertain.
Casey Grove is host of Alaska News Nightly, a general assignment reporter and an editor at Alaska Public Media. Reach him atcgrove@alaskapublic.org. Read more about Caseyhere.
