While arming Village Public Safety Officers became legal in Alaska in 2014, none of them carried a firearm on the job since 2015. This changed when the Northwest Arctic Borough decided to arm their VPSO, first making their vetting and training process more rigorous.
For the first time in nearly a decade, a Village Public Safety Officer has started carrying a firearm on the job in rural Alaska.
Ultimately, the main goal of arming the officers is to make their job safer and help them better protect communities. The idea seems to sit well with many of the residents. That was the case for Hoelscher, who is Yup’ik and used to be a VPSO in his home village of Hooper Bay in Western Alaska from 2009 to 2015.
The estimated cost in the 2014 bill for providing firearms, training and liability insurance for 20 officers was $62,000 annually. A current exact cost is difficult to estimate because officers might need different levels of training, travel expenses and frequency of training sessions, Hoelscher said. But for the Northwest Arctic Borough, the cost should not exceed $20,000 for arming six VPSOs this year, Hatch said.
The fact that it’s so rare to have an armed VPSO makes people hesitant to want to move forward with it, Hoelscher said. Northwest Arctic Borough VPSO coordinator Joshua Harville said that recruiting candidates to work in the region has been a challenge, in part because it is rare for aofficers to such assignments as domestic violence calls by themselves unarmed.
Hoelscher said that historically, it’s rare for VPSOs to be sued for excessive use of force, in part because they’re usually unarmed and have to respond to incidents using the limited tools available to them. Drawing on that experience can help VPSOs respond with ethics and care, without necessarily using a weapon, even after they become armed, he said.“They already understand situations that can be de-escalated without using a firearm,” Hoelscher said. “You can’t outdo experience.
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