Anchorage police have shot and killed 34 people in roughly the past quarter-century, with more than half of the fatal police encounters occurring in the last eight years.
That’s according to an analysis by the Anchorage Daily News that comes amid a spate of such police shootings so far this year, the tally currently at four fatalities, tied with 2016 as the most in recent memory.
The uptick has caused city and police department leaders to conduct their own review, in the hopes that they can make changes that lead to fewer shootings.
Anchorage Daily News reporter Michelle Theriault Boots recently wrote about the newspaper’s analysis. She says the spike in shootings this summer, and then the fatal police shooting of 16-year-old Easter Leafa in August, created a flashpoint around the issue.
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This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Michelle Theriault Boots: It really seemed like it was a moment in the city where the conversation was all about policing and how to prevent further fatal encounters between police and civilians. And so we thought, “Well, in order to know that, I think we need to know just what has happened in the past.”
Casey Grove: So you went back through media reports and put together this analysis of how many fatal police shootings there have been in Anchorage. And, you know, understanding that each one of those incidents is different, did you see any trends, I guess, overall, kind of broadly looking at that information?
MTB: Yeah, I mean, I think one thing that really stuck out to me is that in the early 2000s, fatal encounters between police and civilians were really rare. You know, maybe at most once or twice a year. And there were, we would go years without even having a single one of them. And then sometime around about 2010, 2012 they just increase. And again, it must be said that the overall numbers are very, very low. But what we did find is that sometime around 2010 and 2012 there just started to be more police shootings. There were 19 between 2010, the beginning of 2010, and the end of 2019, which is a real marked increase from what we were seeing in the previous decade. And then from 2020 on, we also saw that there have been eight encounters, or eight fatal encounters, and half of them, fully half of them, had happened since May of this year.
CG: So again, I mean, a reason to take a look at this now. But then you spoke with some experts that track these kind of things nationally. Was there any, I guess, connection between that trend that we saw here in Anchorage and elsewhere? I mean, did fatal police shootings increase in that time period as well?
MTB: They have a hard time answering that because of data issues. However, one thing that is kind of clear across the board is some of the reasons for, or the scenarios that end up leading to, these kinds of fatalities are somewhat consistent. We found that the majority of incidents started with a 911 call, that being distinct from (it) started with an officer-initiated encounter, such as a traffic stop or a warrant service. So 911 calls, and the chief of police, Sean Case, told me specifically calls about a what they call a misconduct involving a weapon, those were often the scenarios that ended in these fatal encounters. And so that is something that also, nationally, is true, that 911 calls tend to be the way that these start, which is interesting, and no one’s quite sure why that is. There’s some theories as to maybe police are arriving on scene with information that marks it as a very dangerous place or a very dangerous and highly volatile situation, but we don’t really know why. But that is one thing that we found kind of in common with the national trends.
CG: And then, I mean, again, we’re talking about a lot of different circumstances here for these different shootings, but there was one that happened in June, and that was Lisa Fordyce-Blair, who you wrote, was the first female shot and killed by the Anchorage Police in at least 25 years, right? And there were some new details there, and it fits with that situation of a 911 call happening. Could you just describe kind of what you learned about that particular one?
MTB: Yeah, each incident is unique, but there were some elements to this one that did fit with some larger trends. So Lisa Fordyce-Blair was a 58-year-old woman living in her own home in East Anchorage. She had lived there for at least 20 years. She had been married to a U.S. Navy officer, and by all accounts they led a pretty quiet life. And then one day in June, things just took a inexplicable turn when she walked out of her house carrying a hunting rifle. Her neighbors that she’d lived next door to for decades were mowing her lawn, and she didn’t seem to recognize them, and there she was armed with a gun. They were concerned. They called 911. So police responded with a SWAT team call out, and that kicked off a, you know, hours-long SWAT standoff in which the Anchorage Police Department used all kinds of tactics to try to get Lisa Fordyce-Blair to leave her home and, you know, to disarm and leave her home peacefully. Ultimately, she fired shots, they fired back at the house, and she was found dead in her garage. Her family has many questions. This seemed completely shocking and out of the blue to them, but I think that that case was interesting to me because it did illustrate a few of those different things.
CG: Now, what you described in that situation with Lisa Fordyce-Blair, you know, I don’t want to speculate, but it sounded like there may have been some kind of mental crisis or episode happening there. How does that fit in with the overall data that you saw?
MTB: That, to me, was one of the most urgent questions, and I think it remains almost completely unanswered. I think that we can look at the facts that become public about cases and make some assumptions, some conjectures, about the role that mental illness might have played, or mental health might have played. But I, you know, I posed that question to Chief Sean Case, and he said that’s really hard to answer, because we’re talking about a huge and undefined spectrum here when we’re talking about mental health. And that could be anything from a person in a state of acute psychosis — you know, reality is altered for them — or that could be a person who is under the influence of drugs or alcohol, who is not thinking clearly, or it could be a person with a history of some kind of diagnosed mental illness. There’s a lot of things at play, and the data on that is, you know, as the chief said, pretty poor. There’s not clear definitions about what are we talking about here when we say that a case is affected by mental illness. Now, I think that the police department also really would like to know more about that. They would like to understand more about the role that mental illness plays in these encounters, and I think that that’s one of the many data points that they, too, are analyzing in their own analysis.
CG: What else did they tell you? I mean, you spoke with Police Chief Sean Case. They’re doing their own analysis. I’m assuming that a lot of those takeaways are going to be the same in their look at this. What do they hope to do with that?
MTB: I think the first thing that struck me about their analysis is that they are going beyond the questions that are asked every time there is a fatal police shooting, which really revolve around, “Was this legal, and did this break a policy or procedure?” And those are really narrow questions, right? Just because a shooting was perfectly legal and the officer won’t be charged does not mean that something couldn’t have been done differently to possibly prevent it. You know, Case acknowledged that those questions aren’t necessarily enough, and that they are seeking to go beyond that, to look deeper into the data. They’re going back (through) 15 years of data to learn everything they can about about, you know, the past incidents. And he even told me that the spreadsheet they’re making, there’s 21 different columns, 21 different data points that they’re going to be analyzing for each of the last 15 years of shootings, which I’m really eager to see what their conclusions are, and moreover, to see how that will influence policies and training for APD in the future.
CG: Yeah, no doubt. I guess, I mean, there’s this issue also of fatal versus nonfatal police shootings, and one of the experts that you spoke with this, this researcher at Vanderbilt University, Julie Ward, made this point that it could go either way, basically, in a lot of these situations, right?
MTB: Yeah, that’s a really important point. And what she had to say was, you know, when we focus, there’s so much focus on the fatal incidents, for good reason, but when we look at only fatal incidents, we’re really looking at only half the picture, because her research shows that just a little over half of the times that police shoot civilians in the U.S., that we know about, end in fatal incidents. So that leaves out almost half of the incidents, right? Almost half of the times that police and civilians are in these encounters, and so there’s just not as much known about those incidents. The nonfatal shootings are, it’s much more questionable whether those are going to be in media reports, and we just know less about those and the outcomes. And so I think that that is something that we at the ADN, and I don’t know if the police department is doing much analysis on that area, but I think we would like to know a lot more about because, yeah, it’s a matter of centimeters or millimeters, right? Whether a shooting is fatal or non fatal.
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.
