The Haines Borough is discussing options for public safety outside the townsite in response to the elimination of Alaska State Trooper (blue-shirt) service in January, 2017.
(The troopers have maintained Haines wildlife trooper Trent Chwialkowski, who responds to local crimes as his time allows).
The borough’s options include lobbying candidates for state office for resumption of blue-shirt trooper service, pursuing a village public safety officer (VPSO) for the upper valley, seeking to piggy-back with Klukwan for trooper or tribal police service, or expanding city police service to the Canada border.
All options are based on the premise that immediate police service is needed in our rural areas. (The borough’s outlying neighborhoods already receive fire and ambulance service.)
Is that premise true?
Several longtime highway residents have said that even traditional trooper service was of limited effectiveness, as an officer in town couldn’t respond in time to crimes or emergencies 30 miles away to make much of a difference. And the state troopers’ themselves, in eliminating the blue-shirt post here, said there weren’t enough crimes in Haines to justify maintaining the position.
If crimes in outlying areas are few and mostly minor, might there be other ways of responding to them?
About 10 miles from Haines lies Gustavus, Alaska, a town of about 500 people in winter, maybe twice that in summer. Gustavus has no police force. When a serious crime occurs, a state trooper flies in from Juneau.
In 2012, by a margin of 196-54, Gustavus residents voted against placing a VPSO in their town.
“Most residents of this remote town are proud of their ability to live together peaceably without the need of police officers to keep order,” wrote Jim Lindblom, owner of the Glacier Bay Country Inn, on his inn’s blog.
Bill Uncle, a former Gustavus mayor, put it to me this way: With a small-town police department, you get a never-ending game of cat-and-mouse between cops and scofflaws. Without cops, a person commits a crime against the entire community and must answer to the whole town.
When I mentioned Uncle’s observation at a borough assembly meeting in July, one audience member said the idea smacked of “vigilantism.”
But I think Lindblom and Uncle more likely would describe such an approach as “life-boatism.” Lindblom said when it comes to public safety, people in Gustavus tend to look after one another. “When you have a police force, it’s somebody else’s job. You’re not responsible for looking after your neighbor.”
Gustavus’ approach is much more like indigenous forms of justice. Native people in Alaska and elsewhere lived for thousands of years with certain laws and mores, but without policemen. How did they do it?
Anthropologists tell us that us that shaming, ostracism and – in extreme cases – banishment were used as a check on aberrant behavior. Shaming and ostracism are effective because of the overpowering human need for social acceptance and social contact. Few people are able to live where they are not wanted or accepted or where others refuse to interact with them.
In order to have friends and family, we curb the extremes of our behavior.
In contrast, a problem with modern policing is that it glamorizes both the police and the criminals.
Bank robbers Bonnie and Clyde didn’t become nationally famous until the FBI brought the full force of the federal government after them. Then they became folk heroes. Even in little Haines, chronic petty criminals gain notoriety, giving them a stature – at least among a certain element of the community – they wouldn’t have if our collective response was to shame, ostracize and shun them for their behavior.
As practiced in our society, policing is a self-renewing industry. The more crime that police find, the greater the need for more police. The more police we have and the more crime we find, the more judges, jails and prisons we need. With our system, is it any wonder that our nation has the leading incarceration rate of any first-world nation?
We can’t retool our town as an indigenous culture, but we can learn from indigenous cultures and we can borrow ideas from other communities like Gustavus. Instead of expanding the Haines Police Department into outlying neighborhoods, we could begin by establishing a Neighborhood Watch program. After all, we’re all neighbors here.