Amid increased scrutiny over police shootings in the city, the Anchorage Police Department has released an analysis of 45 such incidents that occurred between 2009 and 2023.
Police leadership say it’s an effort to understand why and how police shootings happen, and to inform potential changes to policy and training.
Police Chief Sean Case says he ordered the review when he took over leadership of the department in July. That was about midway through a spate of police shootings this year, during which officers have shot and killed five people, the most in a single year in at least two decades.
And while Case says the review did not include this year’s officer-involved shootings, it comes with a few recommendations, including that officers need better nonlethal tools.
Listen:
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This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Sean Case: We have a relatively low success rate with a taser, what we refer to as an electronic control weapon, and it’s a relatively close proximity. And so we want to solve both of those problems at the same time, and there are tools out there that increase the distance and increase the effectiveness.
Alaska gives kind of special circumstances with the weather that we’re currently having. So you put on thick clothing, and multiple layers of clothing makes those tools less effective. And so (we want to) have something that can be more effective at greater distances. We also talk about 40 millimeter, which is a projectile that is also relatively ineffective. And when you have those tools that are ineffective, there’s less confidence in them, along with the short distance. And so officers, you know, are hesitant to allow that second or two after we deploy to make sure it’s working, because it fails so frequently.
Casey Grove: Another word that you see in this report a lot is “de-escalation,” and that seems to kind of fit into what you’re talking about, too. How do you improve that with officers. I mean, it’s seems like that goes both ways. How do you promote deescalation?
SC: The element that we’re trying to add to de-escalation is, and you hear this sometimes when people watch the video, “Hey, it looks like the officers were escalating,” or the officers themselves are escalating. And when you look at de-escalation training across the country, it’s primarily how I engage with you to de-escalate the encounter. And I think the element that is forgotten or left out of that is that the officer’s going through a roller coaster at the same time, as well, as the risk goes up. And so we’re investing time and energy in the future (police) academy, which is in December, next month it starts, is in areas such as that.
How can we make sure that our officers are trained to properly de-escalate themselves before and during and after an encounter, so that the original de-escalation tools, the traditional de-escalation tactics that we give them, are going to be more effective? You know, if the officer is highly stressed out, they’re not going to perform, you know, what we think of a de-escalation in a manner that’s going to be effective.
CG: What does that actually look like, though, like in a, you know, just a random scenario? What does de escalation actually look like?
SC: So some of the things that most people probably don’t realize that we train into our officers is, for instance, if you have someone that’s agitated, traditional law enforcement indicates that we’re gonna completely control and limit that person’s movement, so not allow them to move at all. So we’re immediately going to go in and use hands-on (tactics), because if they’re escalated and agitated and they’re pacing back and forth, we want to control that movement, want to reduce the risk, because the more they move, the more hand movement and physical movement, potentially the higher the risk.
Well, our training now indicates that we can see a certain level of risk or a lack thereof, and if someone’s going to pace back three or four feet in a row to allow that behavior to take place, because we’re not allowing that communication to continue, as long as they’re not doing something that’s threatening and they’re continuing to communicate that can be an aspect of de escalation
CG: Another one of those key takeaways you notice in this report is the importance of on-scene leadership. Is that to say that there wasn’t enough supervision before that?
SC: Well, staffing is always an issue, and we typically like to have two supervisors out in the field at all times. We divide the city into into two halves, and there’s two different radio channels. So a supervisor is managing one half of of the town.
We added a third, so that if you have a supervisor that’s tied up in the north half of the town, instead of taking the supervisor from the south half of the town to cover the entire city, we now have an extra supervisor available, so that, you know, we always kind of have one supervisor roving and available to have more supervision, the more high-risk calls we have.
CG: You know, one thing I wanted to ask you about — and I understand, I mean, this review looks at a number of years up to 2023, and a lot of the attention about officer-involved shootings has come this year with, I think we can agree, a spike in fatal officer-involved shootings. That also coincided with body cameras being put on officers. And I wonder, what do you think about that?
SC: I think, you know, the first thing is, you would think that officers using force would be decreased when you add body worn cameras. There’re certainly conflicting studies out there about how body worn cameras influence both public behavior as well as officer behavior. I think it’s coincidental.
It is nice that we have that footage, because now our ability to analyze those incidents in more detail is a lot easier. And not only to have the video, but we obviously have the information that was provided to dispatch. We have the the investigations that follow, both the criminal and administrative interview. So we know what the officers were thinking and what they were planning, and so we can put that all together and really create a lot clearer picture of what happened. And it makes our decision-making in the future, with policy and training, a lot a lot easier and better.
CG: Well, speaking of that, I mean, now you’ve got this review, it’s 22 pages or something like that, I mean, what do you do with this going forward? Is that going to result in, you know, policy changes at the department?
SC: Yeah. So we’ve already started implementing some of the things that we see as takeaways. You know, I mentioned the scenario-based training and having supervisors become more involved in calls. We’ll start in quarter one of next year testing a couple of different less-lethal tools that will accomplish what we mention as a challenge in the report, with those two particular tools we talk about. So we’ll start working through those sorts of things. But this is one piece of a lot bigger picture. We’re really focusing on the broader effort that APD does and to change the way that we engage and communicate with the public.
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.
