A troubling picture about the surge in Anchorage violence was painted for the Senate Judiciary Committee on Friday. “It is unusual to focus on just one community. It’s the largest community in the state,” McGuire said, adding that Anchorage lawmakers have been flooded with email messages, phone calls and personal requests “from members of our community that are deeply concerned about their safety, their family’s safety.”
Jeff Bell, a veteran Anchorage police detective and vice president of the Anchorage Police Department Employees Association, told lawmakers there have been 33 shootings in Anchorage this year, with 10 homicides — all of them believed to be drug related.
Bell said seven of the homicides involved marijuana as well as other drugs — and four involved drug deals gone bad. He attributes the spike in crime to a shrinking department. “We’ve gone essentially from a very proactive drug enforcement to a very reactive department, only responding to calls that are called in by the public.”
Police are no longer responding to certain crimes, Bell told the committee, as part of a reallocation of resources. “In 2014, APD disbanded its theft unit, so there are no longer detectives assigned to thefts,” said Bell, unless the value of the property stolen is over $10,000.
McGuire said it was important to hear how the department’s priorities have shifted and the impact on the overall picture. “Often what we do as lawmakers and a society, we’ll focus on something, sex trafficking as an example, we’ll build up resources towards that, but we might cut or neglect other areas,” McGuire said.
Bell believes the property crime increase was in large part due to the ability of the department to control drug crimes.
Mayor Dan Sullivan testified via telephone from Anchorage and challenged some of the interpretation of the numbers. He blamed a huge budget shortfall at the beginning of his administration in 2009 for the reduction in the police force. But since then, Sullivan said, it’s been a priority to build the department.
“I think the good news in this story, that even with the smaller police department, our overall trend is lower than the trend five years before we came into office, when there was more officers,” Sullivan said. “We’re a results-oriented organization here in the municipality.”
He also said the police department’s budget has grown considerably. “In 2003, the budget for the department was $45 million. In 2014, the budget for the police department was $95 million,” Sullivan said. “So, in a period of time when inflation grew at about 30 percent, our police department budget more than doubled. So there’s been no lack of commitment monetarily to the police department.”
Via ktva.com
