A spate of officer-involved shootings has made Anchorage, Alaska, the latest in a long list of American cities to wrestle with how police use force.

Easter Leafa was sitting under a blanket on her balcony with a knife when Anchorage police arrived, responding to a call for help from her family. Instead of showing her hands as told, they said, the 16-year-old girl stood and approached them with the blade.

Two officers opened fire simultaneously, one with a less-lethal foam projectile and the other with real bullets, killing her two days before Leafa was to start her junior year of high school. She had recently moved from American Samoa to get a better education and was still learning English, her family said.

Leafa was among seven people shot by Anchorage police since May, the most recent a homicide suspect critically injured after officers said he opened fire on them Friday afternoon. That is more than twice as many as the department typically shoots in a year. Four of the subjects were killed.

The spate has made Anchorage the latest in a long list of American cities to wrestle with how police use force and prompted an apology to Leafa’s family along with promises of reform from the city’s new mayor.

“This cannot be our new normal,” Mayor Suzanne LaFrance told a news conference after Leafa’s death.

  • @some_guy
    2•4 months ago

    The police department has tried to increase its diversity over the past decade, but still 7 in 10 officers are white, far more than the city’s population of 291,000, which is a little over half white, according to Census data.

    I’m not a math or statistics person. On its face, I would think “7 in 10” would be close to “a little over half,” which would be 6 in 10 (to me). Can someone please ELI5 how this is “far more”?

    Police initially said officers shot Handy, who was severely intoxicated, when he raised a long gun toward them in an apartment complex parking lot. But the shooting was the first since Anchorage police began wearing body cameras, and video taken by those cameras and by a neighbor’s security camera appeared to show Handy kept the gun down before police started shooting.

    This is the primary issue, I think. If they only just got bodycams, they haven’t adjusted their behavior. I watch bodycam vids from YT because they’re like reality TV but real and not scripted. People often say they’re recording and the cops say, “I’m recording too,” very comfortable with the cams. I remember how much the cams were hated by cops a decade ago and now they seem fully-adopted. I think this dept hasn’t learned to live with them yet. The amount of abuse that still occurs with the cams makes me shudder to think about how police behaved before they were common.