Anchorage city officials have ordered the occupants of some 41 cars, tents and other structures that people are using as shelter on two blocks in Midtown to leave by 2 p.m. Friday.
City workers posted notices Tuesday to clear out what they say is a dangerous encampment on Fairbanks Street from East 40th Avenue to East 42nd Avenue. Those living were given 72 hours to leave.
Reports about public safety and health issues at the site abound.
Midtown Community Council President Kris Stoehner told an Anchorage Assembly committee last week that she’s visited the camp and that conditions there have become “just intolerable for our area.”
“We have human waste on the roads. We have motorhomes who dump their waste underneath them,” Stoehner said. “We have needles – we have a lot of needles.”
Stoehner said she’s seen small children in the camp, as well as people with weapons – “guns, knives, machetes,” she said – and that she’s seen people overdose on drugs.
There was also a deadly shooting. In June, more than a dozen shots were fired in the camp, killing one man and wounding another. One of the men arrested on murder charges in the incident told police the gunfire stemmed from a fentanyl deal.
Mayor Suzanne LaFrance’s chief of staff, Katie Scovic, told the committee the camp had become an administrative priority.
“This is a camp that has existed for over 60 days at this point, and the trendlines that we’re seeing suggest that it’s only getting more dangerous, and not less dangerous,” she said. “And so, we see this as an area that’s not safe for campers, it’s not safe for the neighborhood.”
Officials on the new mayor’s team have been discussing how to formalize the way the city handles various unsanctioned encampments in the city.
“One thing we are excited to do,” Municipal Attorney Eva Gardner said to the committee, “is to work with you to bring those two things – the administration’s policy and code – into alignment, with a more nuanced, informed, humanitarian, practical approach to these problems.”
The Anchorage Assembly passed a code change in May that makes sites with more than 25 tents or similar structures a high priority for the city to clear out.
One potential “tipping point,” Scovic said, is when outreach workers and service providers no longer feel safe enough to go into a camp to make the connections that help people get out of homelessness.
LaFrance said clearing camps won’t solve homelessness, but that her administration will respond when there is a public safety threat.
“We will respond when there is dangerous activity that threatens the safety of our community,” she said in a statement. “At the same time, we need to think about how we get out of crisis response and become a safer community with less crime and more options for people to sleep off of streets and trails.”
Work continues on winter and year-round shelter plans, LaFrance said.
On Tuesday, the city also announced results of the Anchorage Police Department’s most recent crime suppression detail.
The details are a quarterly effort that involve multiple law enforcement agencies, typically targeting a combination of drugs, dangerous traffic zones and warrants, often in response to community reports, said Police Chief Sean Case.
“It’s one way of concentrating our efforts in spite of the fact that we have staffing issues so that we can still be very responsive,” Case said. “In the past, we’ve even done crime suppression details at retailers where we know there’s excessive theft.”
In last week’s detail, Case said there were about 125 law enforcement officers from about 15 different agencies involved. He said the detail worked across the city, which did include some undercover work on Fairbanks Street.
The detail led to at least 90 arrests, with 19 felony warrants served, 21 misdemeanor warrants served, 16 people charged with felonies and 47 people charged with misdemeanors.
The detail also led to significant drug seizures:
- 21 grams of cocaine,
- 8 grams of heroin,
- 1.2 pounds of psychedelic mushrooms,
- 3.9 pounds or 17,690 fentanyl pills,
- 1 gram of fentanyl powder, and
- 3.5 pounds of meth.
The department also seized 13 firearms, some of which were stolen.
Jeremy Hsieh covers Anchorage with an emphasis on housing, homelessness, infrastructure and development. Reach him atjhsieh@alaskapublic.orgor 907-550-8428. Read more about Jeremyhere.
