Small Towns In Alaska Are Staffing Their Police Departments With Convicted Criminals

from the replacing-bad-cops-with-worse-cops dept

Hiring cops is hard work. That's probably why we're not exactly blessed with the best of the best. Over the past few years, police officer morale has been in a nosedive. As the public's awareness of police misconduct has increased (along with third-party footage of said misconduct), cops have discovered the job is no longer quite as fun as it used to be. Lots of power and zero accountability is a hell of a drug, but even that wears off eventually.

But cop shops still need cops, so hiring continues. Law enforcement agencies endlessly recycle fired officers, giving them unearned shots at redemption. Other agencies have just given up, hiring whoever walks through the door expressing interest in the position.

When the openings exceed the hiring pool, you get the mess being inflicted on the residents of Stebbins, Alaska. This horrifying report by Kyle Hopkins for ProPublica demonstrates just how low the bar can be set for new hires if your agency is desperate enough.

In Stebbins alone, all seven of the police officers working as of July 1 have pleaded guilty to domestic violence charges within the past decade. Only one has received formal law enforcement training of any kind.

The current police chief pleaded guilty to throwing a teenage relative to the ground and threatening to kill her after drinking homebrew liquor in 2017. (Alcohol is illegal in the village.) He was hired a year later. He declined to answer questions in person and blocked a reporter on Facebook.

Two men who until recently were Stebbins police officers pleaded guilty to spitting in the faces of police officers; one was the subject of a 2017 sexual assault restraining order in which a mother said he exposed himself to her 12-year-old daughter.

Convicts are the new cops in Stebbins. But it's not just a Stebbins problem. All across Alaska, law enforcement agencies are understaffed. A third of Alaskan towns have no local cops at all. No cops might be the better choice. The ProPublica investigation found that at least 14 Alaskan cities employ officers with criminal records -- something that violates Department of Public Safety regulations. (It also violates common sense, but only the former can levy fines and enforce compliance.)

The most common convictions are for domestic violence. This is a problem that's inherent to law enforcement. Studies performed in the 1990s found that 40% of police officer families experienced domestic violence as compared to 10% of the rest of the population. There's very little reason to believe this has improved over the past 20 years. Law enforcement agencies simply do not punish officers who engage in domestic violence.

In many departments, an officer will automatically be fired for a positive marijuana test, but can stay on the job after abusing or battering a spouse…

[...]

[W]hile most officials say they treat domestic abuse by officers as they would any other form of misconduct, interviews and disciplinary records indicate that, in fact, punishment is often light and job loss uncommon.

Given this permissive environment, the situation may have gotten worse since these studies were performed. The most pessimistic take on ProPublica's investigation is that the only difference between the Stebbins police force and other law enforcement agencies is the number of domestic violence convictions.

Odds are, it's not going to get any better. The state's Department of Public Safety has basically given up on policing the state's police officers. It's also ceding its position, since zero oversight definitely won't improve the public's safety. This means vulnerable Alaskan communities will be all the more vulnerable for the foreseeable future.

In Mountain Village, population 864, one recent VPO [Village Police Officer] awaits trial on charges of stealing from a murder scene. Court records show five other recent VPOs in the same Yukon River community are awaiting hearings or have admitted to criminal charges including four counts of disorderly conduct, three counts of assault, two cases of neglect, two cases of drunken driving, two charges of harassment and three cases of domestic violence.

Along the Norton Sound coast, the city of Shaktoolik in May hired a VPO who has pleaded guilty to five assault charges within the past 10 years. “He was our only applicant so we had no other choice,” a city employee said.

Among those hired as TPOs in the fishing villages of Kasigluk and Tuntutuliak, located among the vast web of river-fed lakes in western Alaska, are registered sex offenders who admitted to abuse of a minor or attempted sexual abuse of a minor.

There's nothing in these jobs that attracts good people, much less great people. It mainly attracts people who can't find work elsewhere because of their criminal records. But police departments are willing to overlook this just to keep the positions filled. This isn't an acceptable compromise. The entity standing between the Alaskan public and the police has failed to hold the line and the state's taxpayers will continue to pay for a problem the state's not willing to fix.

Filed Under: alaska, criminals, hiring, police

Energy Companies Trying To Abuse Intellectual Property Law To Hinder Research Into Impact Of Fracking

from the but-of-course dept

While fracking is quite controversial, you'd think it shouldn't be controversial to want to get data and study the impact of fracking. After all, if there really isn't that much harm to it, then wouldn't that be good for the companies involved in fracking? And if, as some argue, fracking has seriously dangerous consequences, shouldn't we want to find that out as well? Of course, that assumes that companies involved in fracking are actually interested in doing what makes the most sense, rather than what makes the most money (I know, I know... stop laughing). And, here's where intellectual property issues are getting involved. A group of top intellectual property lawyers are pointing out that fracking companies are actively resisting a plan in Alaska to study the potential environmental, health and safety risks of fracking by arguing that it would violate their trade secrets. The professors point out that this is ridiculous:

[W]e remain concerned that the fracking industry has opposed the reasonable efforts of regulators throughout the country to have access to information about the exact chemical composition of fracking fluids. Such access should not only be uncontroversial, as trade secret information is shared with regulators at all levels of government and in a range of industries, but should be standard operating procedure for any regulatory entity charged with stewarding our nation’s natural resources. To deny regulators and the public access to such information is to prevent an evidenced-based analysis of the EHS impacts, if any, of fracking. It is, in sum, an effort to render the regulation of fracking as a game based upon guesswork and supposition rather than hard data. Moreover, we believe that the alleged competitive harm associated with the possible disclosure of these trade secrets (if they qualify, in fact, as trade secrets) to the public is at best overstated, and at worst reflects a skewed placement of commercial interests over the broad interests of the public in transparency, accountability and safe environmental management.

We don't talk that much about trade secret issues around here, usually covering other areas that are often lumped together in the "intellectual property" bucket. However, there's been an increasing push by some big industry players to increasingly rely on and expand trade secret law in all sorts of dangerous ways -- not to actually "protect trade secrets," but to avoid regulations (such as here) and to limit and stifle innovation and competition. Unfortunately, it seems likely that issues around trade secrets are quickly going to be nearly as important as the fights over things like copyright, patents and trademarks in terms of how they're abused by companies.

Filed Under: alaska, environment, fracking, regulations, trade secrets

The Internet Wins Again! Writer Gets Rapper Pitbull 'Exiled' To Alaskan Walmart

from the because-what-could-possibly-go-wrong dept

Ah, the internet. Also: ah, social media. Powerful tools, which in the right hands, can turn unknowns into legends and overstepping entities into Wikipedia entries. However, in the fumbling hands of mega-corporations, these same tools become about as unwieldy as a screwdriver being used to hammer in nails. By a bear.

When these tools are put to "use" in amateurish ways, there's always the chance that they will be re-purposed for the amusement of internet natives, who know exactly how to turn these primitive tools into weapons of mass destruction/hilarity. Anyone remember Time Magazines' ill-fated effort to crowdsource the Most Influential in the World? Long story short: thanks to a combination of Time Mag's incompetence and No One's Personal Army suddenly cohering into one man's personal army, 4chan's moot ended up topping the list of names.

David Thorpe, writer for the Boston Phoenix and... wait for it... SomethingAwful, saw an opportunity too big to pass up when Wal-Mart announced (in conjunction with something called "Sheets Energy Strips") its plan to have Miami rapper Pitbull make a personal appearance at whichever Wal-Mart store could hoover up the most "Likes." Thorpe immediately mobilized his troops, (possibly with the help of Pitbull's Energy Strips) including other SomethingAwful contributors, in order to send the man of the hour to the most remote Walmart location in the US.'

Enter Boston Phoenix writer David Thorpe, a man so put off by celebrity marketing stunts that he rallied Web troops to"Help us help Wal-Mart exile Pitbull to Alaska."
"As of now, the Kodiak Walmart has over 22,000 new 'likes' on Facebook, putting it far ahead of any other Walmart in the nation - far ahead of Kodiak's actual population, in fact," Thorpe wrote.

By Pitbull's deadline, more than 70,000 users had liked the store, located on a southern isle of the Frontier State with a population of about 6,200.

To his credit, Pitbull has taken this all in stride, including tweeting about purchasing bear repellent and putting together a video explaining how he would "go anywhere for his fans." To top it all off, he invited Thorpe along for the promotional visit.


At this point, it looks as if Thorpe will have to pay his own way, but he intends on making the trip.

In an email to The Associated Press, Thorpe said it's "very likely" he'll be in Kodiak. Thorpe said he had to "raise the funds to get to Kodiak on my own, since Pitbull's invitation doesn't include actually getting me there."

Thorpe said he doesn't really have anything against Pitbull, and instead saw this as a way "to disrupt a corporate social media campaign, since they really set themselves up for it."

Thorpe's only regret seems to be that Walmart will somehow spin his prank into a social media "win" for the company, something he deems to be "gross." And in a way, it is a win for Wal-Mart, albeit one it scored without lifting a finger. Thousands saw its Facebook pages and thousands more are watching Pitbull's promo spot. And now both Pitbull and Thorpe are off to a destination best known for being way the hell away from anything else... and being home to Walmart store #2711.

Filed Under: alaska, david thorpe, internet, kodiak, pitbull, social media
Companies: walmart

DailyDirt: Trains, Trains, Trains. I've Got a Thing About Trains...

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Trains are an often over-looked form of transportation in the US. But trains are actually one of the most fuel-efficient ways to travel -- able to move a ton of freight over 400 miles on just one gallon of fuel. Here are just a few quick links on some cool train projects.

• German trains will be powered by renewable energy (and no cheating by using nuclear power...!) by 2050. "That’s not just a declaration of intent. It’s a concrete business target." [url]
• This video demonstrates the 'Moving Platforms' concept -- which lets train riders get on/off a moving train via a small transfer train. Prior art from the movies: riding up on a horse and jumping onto a moving train. [url]
• Russia is seriously thinking about building an underground rail line between Siberia and Alaska. If completed, this $65 billion project would create the longest underwater tunnel in the world. [url]
• To discover other interesting transportation-related content, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

Filed Under: alaska, moving platforms, renewable energy, russia, trains

Alaska Officials Using Copyright To Try To Stifle Images Of Killed Wolves

from the free-speech? dept

So, we just had the story of police in the UK trying to abuse copyright to prevent the showing of speed camera photos. Now we've got a somewhat similar story in the US, pointed to us by Michael Scott, involving officials in Alaska using copyright to try to force offline photos of "aerial wolf kills." Apparently, the Alaskan gov't goes around and shoots wolves from helicopters to control the wolf population. Not surprisingly, some find this rather distasteful. One wildlife protection group obtained the government's photos of killed wolves from March of this year using a public records request, and put them online... at which point the gov't claimed that it was a copyright violation.

This seems questionable on a variety of fronts. In the US, we tend to have problems with the idea that gov't should copyright things. The federal gov't can't, though state gov'ts often have more leeway and often do claim copyright over documents (though, it can be controversial). More importantly, though, once again, this is clearly not the intention of copyright. It's quite obviously copyright law being used (yet again) to stifle free expression from protesters -- a form of free speech which should trump copyright law absolutely. Of course, in the end, like so many attempts to stifle speech, this is backfiring. The effort to suppress the photos is only serving to draw much more attention to them.

Filed Under: alaska, copyright, free speech, wolves

State Of Alaska Threatens CrackHo After Confusing Redirect With Hijacking...

from the why-lawyers-should-have-some-tech-knowlege dept

It's always bad news when the technically illiterate start filing lawsuits over technology issues. A few folks have sent in the news that the state of Alaska, under Sarah Palin's governorship, has (we're not making this up) sent a cease and desist letter to the website CrackHo.com supposedly for hijacking a page from the state's website and using the official seal of Alaska without permission -- which the state claims violates both state laws (fines up to $500 or six months in prison) and federal copyright laws.

So what did the site CrackHo.com do to deserve this? Well, it simply redirected anyone who went to Crackho.com to Sarah Palin's website on the state webpage. Yes. A simple redirect. And the state claims that this is hijacking the website, a misuse of the seal of the state and a violation of federal copyright laws. Based on that logic, with a few simple magic tricks, I've just made TinyUrl, Bitly and Is.gd guilty of the same things.

I mean... I'm sure the lawyers working for the state of Alaska have some free time on their hands right now... but... seriously? Did no one bother to actually investigate what they were threatening?

Filed Under: alaska, copyright, crackho, hijacking, redirects, sarah palin