The city of Anchorage is hoping a series of upgrades to Town Square Park will make the area more vibrant and safe for the community.
Anchorage Police Chief Sean Case says in recent years, the park, which sits in the center of downtown, has had a lot of public safety concerns.
“Town Square Park is amongst the higher end of the parks, in terms of the crimes that are being committed there,” Case said. “Those numbers have been pretty stabilized over the last several months because we've had a lot of police presence in that park.
But, he said, he wants to eventually drive down crime enough in the area that the heightened police presence isn’t needed.
A way he hopes to deter more crime is by installing security cameras.
This month, the Anchorage Assembly approved a purchase order of roughly $57,000 to buy and install eight security cameras that police will use to monitor the park. While police have used traffic camera footage in the past, Case said these would be the first cameras the department has direct access to, outside of their main properties.
“We're hoping, first and foremost, that this will be a deterrent,” Case said. “That some of the activity that is taking place in Town Square Park that's impacting businesses or impacting those that want to use Town Square Park, that that activity will be reduced just by the fact that there's cameras that are operating.”
Case said the order is placed for the cameras but he doesn’t yet have a date for when they’ll be installed.
They’re not the only changes coming to the park. In the longer term, voters approved a bond in April for $2.9 million to pay for a series of upgrades. They include added lighting, making the walkways more accessible and making parts of the park more visible. In an interview, Mayor Suzanne LaFrance said she wants the area to be safe and inviting.
“We want to open it up,” LaFrance said. “We want to address public safety concerns around visibility. We want to make it a space where people feel comfortable being in it, where it's easy to activate.”
LaFrance said the city is currently in the design phase for the park upgrades, and construction is set to start in summer 2026.
