Anchorage police force falls hardest on Alaska Native residents

Alaska Native residents make up 7% of Anchorage. They are 45% of the people Anchorage police use force on.

That gap is the starkest finding in an outside review the city released this week — a four-and-a-half-year audit of how the Anchorage Police Department uses force, commissioned by Mayor Suzanne LaFrance in August 2024, days after an officer shot and killed 16-year-old Easter Leafa.

Between January 2021 and June 2025, Anchorage police used force 5,719 times. American Indian and Alaska Native people were the subjects in 2,482 of those incidents — 45.4%, against 7.3% of the city's population in the 2020 census. Black residents were 12.9% of force subjects and 5% of the population; white residents were 30.3% of subjects and 56.8% of the population.

The reviewers, from the national firm 21CP Solutions, wrapped those numbers in qualifications, and the qualifications matter. Almost all the force used on Alaska Native people — 93% — was the lowest kind: a grab, a shove, a takedown. At the most serious level, the picture flips: Alaska Native people accounted for about 20% of the most severe force incidents, white people about 35%. The department and the census also sort race differently, which makes the comparison shakier than it looks. And measuring force against overall population is a blunt instrument; better methods exist, the reviewers wrote, and they didn't use them here. What the numbers can't say, they cautioned, is whether any single use of force was lawful, or whether the department is doing something to drive the pattern. They reported the gap and moved on without explaining it.

The review also placed Anchorage against other cities — and here it went out of its way to hedge. Anchorage police reported about 397 use-of-force incidents per 100,000 residents in 2024. Seattle, more than twice the size, reported 150. Portland reported 124, Boise 63, Spokane 37. New Orleans, the closest, still came in well below at 251. The comparison is rough, the reviewers stressed: Anchorage officers patrol far more ground than those cities, Alaska law forces an arrest on any probable cause of recent domestic violence — among the most force-prone calls police handle — and Anchorage counts some things as force that other departments don't. Even after all of that, they wrote, the rate is higher than comparable cities and worth understanding.

Two other patterns stood out. Officers marked the person as confirmed or possibly experiencing mental illness in more than half of all force incidents. And a small group did an outsized share of it — 20 of the department's 402 personnel accounted for about a fifth of all force used, a pattern the reviewers called common and no proof of wrongdoing on its own.

The report had good news, too. Force is falling — down 17% in 2024 from 2022 — and nine times out of ten it was the lowest level. The reviewers judged Anchorage's use-of-force policy better than most in the country and its internal investigations much improved since 2024.

Then there is the question of what the department has actually fixed.

The report carried more than 50 recommendations, and the city's press release said APD had "fully integrated" 49 of them. That number came from the police department itself. APD wrote up its own progress, marked 49 items complete, and sent it over; the reviewers say they received it in mid-August, attached it to the report so the public would have it, and evaluated none of it.

In places, the department's own notes undercut its check marks. The reviewers said officers should stop spinning fleeing cars at more than 35 mph; the city argued for 45 during the review, the reviewers held at 35, and APD wrote 45 into policy — and marked it done. The reviewers said only specialized, armored units should pin a moving car; APD lets regular patrol officers do it, calls that a departure in its own document, and marked it done.

The hardest example involves families. The reviewers heard from relatives of people police had shot who were brought to headquarters and left for hours, not told their family member had died. One woman was pulled from a car at a shooting scene and held 13 hours. Several families learned what happened from the news. The reviewers said APD should build a protocol for those families — someone to call, real information, a ride to the hospital. APD marked it done. The policy it points to covers officers and their own families; in a note beneath the check, the department says it should consider extending it to the families of the people its officers shoot. On a later page listing unfinished work, it calls the same item partial.

No outside body is checking any of this. And changing a policy, the reviewers noted, is only half the job — the other half is training officers to follow it. Nothing in the department's document says whether that training has happened.

The changes APD does describe are real ones: mandatory de-escalation whenever safe, a duty to intervene when a colleague uses improper force, limits on force during peaceful protests, a ban on roadblocks during chases, and a longer wait — from four days to seven — before an officer returns to the street after a shooting. The reviewers had pointed to Los Angeles, where the wait is at least 14 days, and San Francisco, at least 10.

21CP will present its findings Tuesday, Sept. 8, from 5:30 to 7 pm at the Fairview Community Recreation Center, with APD giving an update afterward. The Assembly's Public Health and Safety Committee takes up the report Wednesday, Sept. 9, at City Hall, with public testimony at the end.