EDITORIAL: Anchorage police were called to help. What happened next is a tragedy.

Something disturbing is going on with Alaska law enforcement’s response to dangerous situations, and we need to find out why. During the span of just a few months, Anchorage police have shot six people while responding to calls, and four of those Alaskans have died. That’s a number far out of keeping with historical averages and violent crime trends. And recent incidents in other Alaska locales have demonstrated it’s not just a phenomenon affecting the state’s largest city. Alaskans need answers: Why are so many police calls turning into police shootings, and how do we stop it?

Let’s stipulate up front that law enforcement is a demanding, stressful and often thankless job, and that — especially lately — Alaska departments have struggled to attract and retain high-quality officers, and that’s also a problem that our state needs to solve. Our state and local officers simply have to be paid more, and that should be a top priority. Given that no issue occurs in a vacuum, it’s entirely likely that helping fix the hiring and recruitment issues would also have a beneficial effect on other problems within the department.

At the same time, it should be a baseline expectation that a call to police will not result in a worse outcome than if police had not been called. And the outcome for Easter Leafa, the 16-year-old girl who was the most recent subject of a fatal police shooting, certainly seems to have been worsened by the involvement of police. More so than perhaps any of the prior shootings this summer, Leafa’s case raises a host of disturbing questions that police have yet to fully answer:

• What did Leafa do to warrant a lethal response? According to police, she was agitated — seemingly in some form of mental distress — and holding a knife, and she moved toward officers. Were her actions so threatening to police that she deserved to die?

• What, if anything, did officers do to de-escalate the situation? Leafa’s family said they asked police to let them try to reason with her and were rebuffed; is that accurate, and if so, why was that the officers’ response? Having moved to Anchorage recently, Leafa’s grasp of English — and therefore her ability to understand and obey officers’ orders — was likely diminished, even without considering her mental state.

• If a violent response was ultimately necessary, why did police jump to the use of lethal force immediately? Bizarrely, police have said that one responding officer fired a less-lethal round at the same time as another was firing live bullets. Was there really no latitude to wait to use lethal force until other options had been exhausted?

To their credit, Anchorage Police Chief Sean Case and Mayor Suzanne LaFrance appear to recognize that Leafa’s death, and the spate of police shootings more broadly, must result in accountability measures to try and quell the violent escalation of police calls. On Thursday, they announced an external investigation into Leafa’s shooting, a citizens’ advisory council to provide for a formal public-police interface, and both internal and external reports on police shootings in Anchorage.

But it’s all too easy for high-minded efforts to come to naught unless the public sees to it that their government follows through. We have, after all, had a citizens’ advisory group for the police department before — and it came about for a very similar reason, after Cassell Williams, a young Black man with a weapon and in mental distress, was shot to death in Mountain View by Anchorage police in 1981. Williams’ death, and the racial tension between the community and police that ensued, led to the formation of the Anchorage Police Community Task Force. At first, the group appeared to be a promising interface between different law enforcement groups and the people they serve, but over time, the different stakeholders who made up the group, such as the FBI, the U.S. Attorney’s Office, the Anchorage district attorney, Alaska State Troopers and the Anchorage Equal Rights Commission, stopped participating, and it appears the group became permanently inactive during the COVID-19 pandemic. For such groups to matter, they need real input and impact on police procedures. If their input is ignored or the group’s contributions cease to be meaningful, community advisory panels are no longer useful to the public. The public must be afforded a meaningful voice in how police conduct their jobs.

Similarly, the fatal police shooting of Kristopher Handy, which marked the outset of the current spike in such incidents, has demonstrated that if police want body camera footage to help maintain public trust in the decisions they make on the scene of high-stakes calls, the public needs access to full, unedited footage — not just a selectively edited version that is used to reinforce the official narrative of events. This proved particularly problematic in Handy’s case when third-party footage captured at the scene undercut the initial police claim that Handy had raised a gun he was carrying toward officers. Chief Case has committed to releasing the (redacted) raw body camera footage from the Handy case this week; that should be the precedent going forward, as slickly edited videos that cut between perspectives and jump from one time to another often raise more questions than they answer — particularly, they make the public wonder what’s being left out. Still unclear to the public is whether the officers who killed 16-year-old Leafa were wearing body cameras, and if that footage will be released in its unedited entirety.

Law enforcement is a sacred trust in our society, and for it to function, that trust necessarily flows in both directions. We grant officers the exclusive right to use force — even deadly force — in service of maintaining our system of laws, and in return, the police must demonstrate to the community that their use of that power is not being abused. Appointing a panel to look into these incidents is fine, but there are concrete steps the mayor and chief of police could take today. They could draft a policy that all body camera footage will be released unedited, and reinforce training on non-lethal restraints and deterrence measures, which the public expects to be used before a person’s life is taken. The rash of shooting incidents has left our trust in law enforcement strained; we must endeavor to keep it from breaking. For the police, that means abiding by the accountability promises of Chief Case and Mayor LaFrance. For the rest of us, it means watching the watchmen — and speaking out when things go wrong.