The State of Alaska is actively recruiting for the Spring Trooper academy, and as of last week has six new recruits who have competed all testing, and 18 who have completed all testing and passed the polygraph testing. Those 18 still need to pass the psychological and medical exams.
For the “B cycle” for the Spring academy, which included the $20,000 hiring bonus offer, the Alaska Department of Public Safety now has 28 recruits who have qualified for testing in January, with over 50 that are still working through the background investigation process and if passed will be invited to test in January.
“Our recruitment team is confident that we will have at least 30 Alaska State Trooper recruits in the Spring academy in February, the most significant number of trooper recruits entering the academy in many years,” a source in the department said today.
The department’s recruitment team is also recruiting for the Fall 2022 academy. The $20,000 hiring bonus that the governor authorized in August 2021 is drawing in more potential applicants.
The recruitment team has especially focused on areas of the Northwest where anti-police attitudes have driven away officers. The team had a two-day recruitment event in Seattle-Tacoma in early November, and the governor sent a letter to potential applicants to let them know that he supports law enforcement professionals. Some from Seattle and Portland are now taking a look north, as those states are mandating vaccines. The Washington State Patrol lost 127 professionals due to the Gov. Inslee’s vaccine mandate.
“Our recruiters are constantly asked by potential lateral recruits about the attitude towards law enforcement in Alaska, and they are able to report that our governor, many legislators and other state leaders, and the public in general, proudly support law enforcement in the state,” the DPS source told Must Read Alaska.
Gov. Mike Dunleavy has been working to rebuild the public safety workforce, which has seen many retirements in the past few years. There were about 60 unfilled positions for Troopers around the state earlier this year, but in November, 25 men and women graduated from academy in Sitka.
AST has had very poor luck with these Outside hires. Many of them act like the “cops” they used to be and often alienate their communities. They also often bail when faced with their first rural transfer. Hopefully the recruitment section didn’t hire too many former cops, that’s usually just adopting another agency’s headache.
Truer words. The staff at Sitka are very efficient at breeding an attitude of “Us vs. Them” in new officers. The Governor himself refers to graduating LEO’s as “Alaska’s warriors” and obviously has zero notion of what the definition of a true Peace Officer is. They are public servants with an enormous amount of responsibility and authority hired to serve the community through ethical policing. New LEO’s if not checked, feel endowed with a sense of superiority over the citizenry they are hired to police. That shows itself to be true during otherwise fairly benign public contacts with cocky officers and unfortunately often breeds distrust and disdain from the public being policed. It’s a self-destructive cycle. Towards achieving the goal of community policing through cooperation and trust, I suggest DPS reinstate the use of on-body cameras by all on-duty LE and less pressure on officers to achieve monthly “stats” as the gauge of their effectiveness. Monthly stats are often filled toward the end of the month by officers aggressively working traffic = revenue enhancement and no reprimand for not achieving set administrative goals . On-body camera usage was supposedly discontinued because of FOIA and evidentiary requests which supposedly took up too much staff time dealing with redaction of non-essential information contained in the videos. Total nonsense. A ten year old could run AXON’s initiative and simple auto-redaction software program. On- body cameras serve to keep officers and the public they interact with fully accountable. As a side note, anyone besides me notice how often our elected officials and unelected bureaucrats routinely referred to themselves as our “leaders”? I didn’t vote for a leader. I voted for representative elected officials and expect public service, accountability and representative governance.
It is sad that we live in such strange times that our Governor and legislators have to reassure trooper recruits that they fully support law enforcement and police. Kudos to Governor Dunleavy for working hard to fill out our trooper ranks.
And yet, ADN does a hit piece on Dunleavy this morning claiming he has reneged on his promise of more troopers. Go figure!
I hope all of them are from outside and come in gung-ho and guns-a-blazing!
“In California/Maine/Massachusetts/South Dakota we do it the RIGHT way!”
Comments are closed.