Alaska town left without police force after all officers quit
Sand Point Alaska Aug 2 2017 An Alaskan city was left without a police force after its entire four-person department quit, according to local media.
Within days, the members of the police department of Sand Point – located on Popof Island east of the Alaska Peninsula – resigned one by one, the Alaska Dispatch News reported.
The resignations started last month during the height of the summer commercial fishing season in Sand Point, which is home to the largest fleet of commercial fishing vessels in the Aleutian region.
The first officer called it quits July 10 when his military wife was transferred out of state, city manager Andy Varner told the news outlet.
Shortly after that, the department’s two other police officers, who are married, threw in the towel to “take care of some personal family issues,” according to the report.
This left the department only with Police Chief Roger Bacon who was booked to take a month-long vacation to Scotland.
“There was sort of a mutual understanding that if he left to go for a month-long journey — leaving the community with no law enforcement — that if he came back, he would not be an employee of the city,” Varner said, according to KAKM-TV. “Within a day or two, he had turned in his resignation.”
The city of Sand Point had issued a message for its residents after being left without any law enforcement, saying that the police force was “in transition” and that citizens should “rest assured that the community will NOT be in a lawless state,” the Alaska Dispatch News reported.
Sand Point had no police department for just five days before the city hired an interim police chief – and officials insisted it wasn’t all that bad.
“It’s not like the movie ‘The Purge,’ ” said Megan Peters, a spokeswoman for the Alaska State Troopers, which was on-call to descend on Sand Point if a police emergency were to happen.
“Just like any other community, if we need to respond, we do,” Peters told the newspaper. “We’re not going to go man their police force for them, though.”
According to Varner, none of the members of the force had been on the job for more than five months.
