Opposition of police brutality and misconduct needs a unified response

By Dave Stephenson

The recent alleged assault of an unarmed Alaska Native man by a Juneau police officer was committed amid myriad other instances of police brutality and a history of abuse of Alaskan citizens, both Native and non-Native.

Victims of police violence in Alaska are often poor, unhoused or Indigenous, and the more these incidents are ruled justifiable, the more emboldened police become, and the more readily the behavior is normalized by the department and by the community. 

Cops in Alaska, as in other states, can view badges as licenses to assault, an attitude often found in men who come to Alaska to work in mining, fishing, logging, and other labor-intensive and seasonal jobs. 

Alaska is a magnet for misfits who believe the fallacy that Alaska is the new Old West, a rugged, lawless place where a fortune can be made converting Alaska's resources to Lower 48 profit by expropriating the natural wealth of Alaska’s citizens.

Too often, directors, executives, and cops fit this description as much as any unskilled Lower 48 newcomer.

These men often find Alaska's law enforcement positions have low standards and are always desperate for new hires from the dominant culture, so they become cops. 

Furthermore, the police in Alaska are often transfers from Lower 48 departments who have been driven from their home states due to misconduct and find jobs in Alaska departments.

Moreover, as FBI investigations have demonstrated, the ranks of American law enforcement are riddled with white supremacists, a fact that Alaska’s people of color surely find disturbing.

We can assume this statistic is a factor in police disregard for the civil rights of Alaska Natives.

For cops and other adventure-seeking racial supremacists from the Lower 48, Alaska is a wild, undeveloped place, a place where there are still resources to be exploited and Natives to be colonized. 

For them, Alaska is a place where men have to be tough and make their own rules. 

Alaska is a place where men “rape squaws and ‘rassle polar bears,” as some can be overheard declaring at closing time, when intoxication supersedes discretion and people speak their minds. 

When white men do rape Native women, they can reasonably assume they’ll receive a “rape pass” from a local court, as the 2018 Justin Schneider case in Anchorage demonstrates, so the aforementioned indiscreet barroom utterances are based in fact. 

These sexual assaults are so common in Alaska and have occurred for so long that much of society has internalized them as an inevitable fact of Alaskan and American life.  

Indeed, white men in Alaska have even coined a neologism for the Native girls they rape.

This normalization also applies to courts and is present among the police, who often refuse to investigate or actually facilitate the rapes, as in the Schneider case.   

For many Indigenous Americans, the American police superseded the 19th-century U.S. Cavalry as a force of blue-uniformed white men whose mission is to control, monitor, dispossess or exterminate Indigenous people, long considered by Anglo-Alaskans to be an impediment to progress or as colonized people with no rights.

Many police believe it's their job to maintain this history and social hierarchy.

The same complacency and tacit approval of sex crimes against Natives and the poor apply to assault or murder as well. 

Cops quickly write off these incidents as non-crimes or as unsolvable, and have actually spearheaded the victimizations, as the recent alleged assault of the unarmed Native man, the killing of a young Native woman in Juneau earlier this year and the recent killing of Steve Kissack, an unarmed homeless man who had just awakened in a downtown Juneau doorway and was shot by police. 

Alaskans who support equality and oppose police brutality and misconduct — including those recent arrivals who come to respect and celebrate the land and its people — must band together to demand greater accountability and change.

• Dave Stephenson is a Tlingit resident from Juneau.