Achee case mostly saddens

Oftentimes when we write about a person’s criminal charges we get letters from readers upset with how the person was treated.

A common sentiment seeks to compare similar criminal cases. Why is one drunken driving case highlighted in a front-page story and another left buried in Police Beat?

One of the age-old conventions of what we in the business call “news judgment” is that if a person accused of a pedestrian crime is a public official, that crime is news.

And while Jean Achee wasn’t a mayor or a councilman or a state senator, he was a police officer. We agree with his former boss, Wasilla Police Chief Gene Belden, who said, “we’re kind of held to a higher standard, which it should be.”

If any police officer is arrested for DUI, we believe that is news. But while we feel writing about Achee’s arrest was the right thing to do, that doesn’t mean we took pleasure from writing this story.

By all accounts we could find, Achee was a model officer. There is zero history of untoward behavior on his part in Alaska court records. By contrast, the archives of this newspaper are replete with criminals he has taken off the streets.

He was with the Wasilla Police Department from its founding in 1993 and was apparently held in high enough esteem to have risen to the rank of lieutenant, the highest an officer can get before he’s the chief.

Drunken driving is a serious crime that endangers the public. Achee is, of course, innocent unless found guilty. But whether he is ultimately found to be guilty in a court of law, we don’t believe that his service to Wasilla should somehow excuse his drunken driving arrest in Anchorage.

An Anchorage Police Department spokeswoman said in today’s story that her department takes a zero tolerance policy toward drunken driving and that it didn’t matter that Achee was a brother in blue.

That is, of course, how it should be and how Chief Belden said he expects it to be both in his squad room and for other departments.

It’s not hard to imagine a scenario wherein a column like this would contain denunciations and calls for action, where we believe we encountered a cover-up or preferential treatment or misconduct in office.

Here, though, we think that everyone handled the criminal portion of this matter correctly, from the Anchorage officer who charged Achee, to the Wasilla chief who followed disciplinary procedures, to Achee himself who chose to quietly retire rather than start a noisy, costly, rancorous legal fight.

Though we would prefer this issue contained a story — and editorial — sounding Achee’s praise for 20 years of untarnished service, there is value, too, in this as a cautionary tale: one poor choice made while drunk may strike a permanent blemish across what seems otherwise to have been a good man’s sterling career of public service.

We wish him well.