Since 2000, Anchorage police have killed 34 people. Here’s what we know about the fatal encounters, and why the department is doing its own analysis.

On June 19, Lisa Fordyce-Blair’s East Anchorage neighbors mowed her lawn. The family had been extending this small neighborly act for years — ever since her husband, a Navy officer, died unexpectedly.

But the day took an inexplicable turn: The 58-year-old emerged from her home with a hunting rifle, seeming not to know the familiar figures trimming her grass. The neighbors called 911 to report an armed woman acting erratically, according to a review by the state’s Office of Special Prosecutions.

Officers from the Anchorage Police Department arrived, and an hourslong SWAT standoff ensued. By midnight, Fordyce-Blair was dead in her garage, the first woman in at least 25 years shot to death by Anchorage police.

Her death left a raft of questions her family is still trying to answer. Fordyce-Blair’s father said he was astonished by his daughter’s sudden and violent death, more so when he looked online and learned it had been the third fatal encounter between Anchorage police and citizens in a span of six weeks.

“I was stunned,” Ed Fordyce said from his home in California.

Soon, there would be a fourth: a 16-year-old high school student who recently immigrated to Alaska from American Samoa, shot dead at her apartment. Easter Leafa had been brandishing a knife, police said.

In total, police have shot seven people in the city this year, including three who were injured but did not die.

The rapid succession of police shootings, without precedent in recent Anchorage history, combined with body camera footage that captured the deaths, led Anchorage to a singular moment of anguish and reflection over policing. It triggered community protests and promises of change from the city administration and the police chief himself.

The head of the Anchorage police union said the toll — not just seven officer-involved shootings, but 14 homicides in the city over a period of months — “reveal the chaos our city is facing” and that police officers operate in.

The questions asked over and over again: How did we get here? Why does this keep happening?

In order to independently answer questions about the history, frequency and circumstances of police shootings in the city, the Anchorage Daily News used media reports and information from police to compile every known encounter where a civilian was killed by a city police officer since 2000.

We found that Anchorage police have killed 34 people since the start of 2000, a figure the department confirmed is accurate. The analysis covers only fatal incidents.

The department said it had been undertaking what the chief of police described as an exhaustive analysis of its own history of fatal encounters between officers and citizens.

The review is meant to look beyond the questions that state Office of Special Prosecutions and internal department reviews ask after each fatal shooting: Was the shooting a violation of criminal law? Did officers follow departmental policies and procedures?

That’s not enough, Chief Sean Case acknowledged in a recent interview with the Daily News.

“I recognize that there is a difference between ‘Did an officer commit a criminal violation?’ or ‘Did the officer commit an administrative violation?’ versus ‘Can we do something in our preparation, in our training, that could have prevented this from happening?’” he said.

Alaska law gives officers authority to use deadly force if they believe their life or the life of another person is in danger, or if the officer “believes the person committed a violent felony, if the person has escaped or is attempting to escape while in possession of a firearm or the felon’s conduct may otherwise endanger life or inflict serious physical injury unless arrested without delay.”

What we learned

In the early 2000s, fatal shootings by Anchorage police were rare.

The first of the decade was in April 2000, when Gregory Garness, 31, climbed on top of a patrol car in a crowded fast-food parking lot on Northern Lights Boulevard and pointed a gun at police. He was shot to death in front of a lunchtime crowd of dozens.

His family described him as impulsive, socially isolated and prone to eccentric behavior. After his death, they donated their son’s brain tissue to the Autism Tissue Program to help scientists probe the neurological underpinnings of autism.

His death and the deaths of several other people were preceded by what news accounts described as a sudden crisis, erratic behavior or a history of mental illness.

Police don’t have reliable data on exactly the role mental illness has played in fatal encounters, in part because the causes and manifestations can vary so widely, from an acute psychiatric crisis to a substance-induced behavioral episode, Case said.

“Mental health — it’s a wide window that we’re talking about,” Case said.

In the future, reforms could change the way such data is collected for a more accurate picture, he said.

After Garness, the next fatal police-civilian encounter in Anchorage didn’t happen for more than two years.

Officers shot and killed just six people between 2000 and the end of 2009. In contrast, officers shot and killed 19 people between 2010 and the end of 2019.

In 2016, police shot and killed four people — the highest number of deaths in a year until now.

Since the beginning of 2020, eight people have died in fatal use-of-force incidents. Half of those have happened since May.

Of the incidents that occurred between 2000 and the present:

• In 19, or 55%, of the cases, the person killed was armed with a gun.

• In seven, or 20%, of the cases, the person killed had a bladed weapon like a knife or sword.

• Three involved a person with an air pistol or a BB gun.

• Two involved a person using a vehicle as a weapon.

• One involved a person who was unarmed at the time they were shot.

• All but two of the people killed — Fordyce-Blair and Leafa — were men.

The circumstances varied widely, according to police accounts. In one 2012 case, police shot a man brandishing a long stick who police said moved “aggressively” toward officers. In another, in 2002, police fatally shot a man who had shot two people and pointed a gun at officers. In 2019, a man acting erratically waved what appeared to be a gun at people in Midtown and was shot by officers. The weapon turned out to be a BB gun.

We found that most often, police were called to the scene of the ultimately fatal encounter by a 911 call for service, rather than initiating it themselves through a traffic stop or warrant service. That’s in line with what researchers looking nationally at thousands of use-of-force deaths have found too, said Julie Ward, a researcher with Vanderbilt University who studies police use of force. It’s not clear why 911-dispatched calls more often turn fatal, but one reason may be the buildup to the arrival itself.

“Someone is calling 911, driving concern, the dispatcher then takes the call and relays it to police,” she said. “So there may be several layers of compounded concern and potential for threat ... that leads police to come in more prepared for, or anticipating it.”

It’s hard to say with certainty whether the trajectory in Anchorage over the past 25 years — relatively few fatal encounters in the 2000s and then an upturn around 2010 — is reflected nationally, and if so, why, said Ward.

There’s no federal mandate that compels police agencies to report data about shootings involving officers. In the past, information on fatalities was pulled from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data using the death certificate code for “legal intervention” — and that likely represents a major undercount, she said.

More recently, researchers have begun to turn to media account repositories as the most accurate measure.

In the mid-2010s, several independent groups and media sources began tracking all such shootings, using media reports, Ward said. Those sources, including the nonprofit Gun Violence Archive and The Washington Post’s police shootings database, have become the go-to sources for researchers looking for national-level data, she said.

“The assumption behind all this is that these events are newsworthy as they happen,” she said.

Much of the focus has rested on fatal police shootings — not all shootings. That’s missing a lot, Ward said. Her research found that about 55% of shootings by police were fatal, nationally. “We’ve really only been looking at about half of the picture, when we’ve limited our attention to death. Physiologically, the difference between a fatal shooting and a nonfatal shooting might be a question of centimeters.”

An FBI use-of-force data effort that began in 2019 has remained voluntary, with so few police departments participating that the data hasn’t yet met the threshold for release. The Anchorage Police Department was a pilot participant in the federal reporting program and continues to report, according to Case.

A reason not to look closely

The department is currently reviewing the past 15 years of fatal use of force, police chief Case said in an interview.

The analysis, being led by a commander in the special operations division, will look at many aspects of each incident — including what kind of call initiated the incident, what time of the day and day of the week it happened, and how long the officers involved had been on duty, according to Case.

“This will by far be the most exhaustive approach that we’ve taken,” he said.

That’s a worthy step, said Troy Payne, a former professor at the University of Alaska Anchorage’s Justice Center who now works as a consultant in Ohio and who has conducted research on police use of force in Alaska. Payne is working on a paid research contract with Anchorage police, but not related to fatal police encounters, he said.

Ideally, every fatal use of force by police should be studied in the same way the National Transportation Safety Board investigates plane crashes, Payne said.

“The gold standard would be to look at lethal uses of force like the NTSB treats plane crashes. What was the causal chain of events that led to this outcome and was there something that could have gone differently?” he said.

One problem, Payne said, is that police departments face a powerful disincentive to know more about what went wrong than the bare minimum: exposure to lawsuits. The more police — or any government agency — learn about subtle factors that could have influenced a death, the more potential liability they face for what happened.

“Everything ends up on the record, and it ends up being something that can be used against them in litigation,” Payne said.

There is some truth to that, Case said.

“There are definitely agencies that avoid looking at some of these instances in great detail, because there’s a concern that it’s going to open the agency up to liability,” he said. But “you can’t really face the public and say you value human life and that you want to reduce officer-involved shootings ... without taking some of that risk on and looking at these shootings in very fine detail.”

Case says the department is still analyzing its data and won’t release conclusions for several weeks at least.

But a few broad themes have emerged, he said:

• Overwhelmingly, the fatal encounters started with a 911 call about a person with a gun, a scenario police call a “misconduct involving weapons” investigation, he said.

• Initial analyses show “more officers and more rounds fired” at fatal incidents in recent years.

• Officers who fired their weapon in a fatal incident tend to leave the department at a higher rate than other officers, potentially a sign of the mental toll such incidents can place on officers, Case said.

• Few incidents, compared to other departments, involved mistaken guns — scenarios where the person was believed to have a deadly weapon but didn’t.

The review has identified incidents where police officers didn’t completely follow policies and procedures, Case said. He would not say whether anyone had faced disciplinary measures.

The analysis will likely lead to new policies and training, according to Case. But he wouldn’t say what those might look like, yet.

Why did this happen?

Fordyce-Blair grew up in Southern California and as an adult met and married a U.S. Navy officer from Anchorage, her father said. They traveled the world together during his long career, he said, before they settled in Anchorage.

Her husband died suddenly in 2017 after an accidental head injury. Her family members say they don’t have much to say about her life in Alaska — she lived with her dog, Cascade. She kept in touch a little. On Facebook, she posted pictures of her rescue dogs, a rainbow over the Chugach, the vegetables she grew in her garden, a frosty morning from her porch, memes about positivity and honoring veterans.

There were no signs of the catastrophe to come, her father said. Fordyce-Blair and her dad had been in touch as recently as the day before the shooting — she had sent him an engraved watch for Father’s Day, and had called to chat about the weather and Alaska.

When an officer called to say a SWAT standoff was unfolding and to ask him to record a gentle message to coax his daughter out of her home, he reacted with disbelief — even more so when officers later told him she was dead, Fordyce said.

Four months have passed since Lisa Fordyce-Blair was killed by Anchorage police. Her father says he’s waiting for a toxicology report. The police department is working through years of data. Both, in their own ways, are looking for the answer to the same question: Why did this happen?

Meanwhile, Fordyce-Blair’s home and her Anchorage neighborhood still bear the scars of June 19. The green house’s windows, broken in the SWAT standoff, are still covered in plywood. The baskets of flowers and the U.S. Navy flag that hung out front have been hauled away. Her truck is still parked in the driveway, license plate WIDOW9. The grass, unmowed, has grown long.