Crowd turns out for Public Safety Town Hall

WASILLA — Alaska State Troopers Sergeant Andy Gorn stood in front of a crowd of approximately 150 people gathered at the Public Safety Town Hall meeting in Wasilla on Wednesday. He asked everyone who had been a victim of a theft or burglary in the Mat-Su Valley to raise their hands.

About a sixth of the members in the audience raised their hands.

He asked them to keep their hands raised, and for everyone who knew someone who had been victim of theft or burglary in the Mat-Su to raise their hands.

“Look around the room,” he said. A little more than a third had their hands raised.

“We know there’s an issue.”

After giving a brief how-to talk on keeping personal property safe from thieves, Mat-Su Neighborhood Watch program coordinator Belinda Bohanan admitted that even she had recently been a victim of property crime.

Bohanan said her family didn’t even realize that they had been victimized, until a relative called to ask if they’d received a Christmas card from them yet, noting that the check inside had been cashed.

“The person had got into our mailbox, took the mail, and wrote their name over my name and cashed a check for $1,000,” Bohanan said, before adding a recommendation to have gifts of money direct deposited and to get a secure mail box.

“To think that you go out and talk about hwo to be safe, and you realize, ‘I’ve been a victim,’” Bohanan said. “We really need to watch out for eachother.”

Gorn said AST is stretched thin, and that it’s going to take action by concerned citizens to get adequate staffing for local law enforcement.

“To break it down to real simple terms and not sugar coat it, at any given time there’s six troopers working out here,” Gorn said. “There’s 100,000 people in the Mat-Su Valley. Take away the police departments, the areas the blue shirts don’t need to cover, there’s 85,000 people. There’s 34 troopers staffed out here. That’s under half a trooper per every 1,000 people -- .4. Find another department in the nation with those numbers. You won’t find one.”

Gorn said troopers respond to crimes against persons calls over requests for service regarding property crimes, and it may be hours or even days before a trooper responds to a property crime.

He said the criminal suppression unit has had some successes, including recovering more than half a million dollars in stolen property in 2016 and returning it to the owners. That included the recovery of 36 stolen vehicles.

But he also said there were a total of 181 stolen vehicles reported in the valley in 2016, and 1,100 criminal thefts reported.

He added there are likely unreported thefts troopers don’t know about, a concern echoed in public comments with one attendee questioning flat crime rate stats that don’t account for the fact that a frustrated public may have stopped calling troopers who aren’t responsive.

Gorn said burglaries were down 25 percent, coming in at 287, with the reduction attributable in part to the unit’s success in the previous year in getting serial burglars arrested and jailed.

Palmer District Attorney Roman Kalytiak said in his 20 years, he’s never seen a problem with hard drugs such as heroin and meth in the valley as he has in the last several years, calling it a serious problem that needs to be addressed.

Wasilla Mayor Bert Cottle pledged to provide support from Wasilla Police Department for additional staffing to aid troopers in a cooperative anti-drug unit. His brief speech raised a round of applause from the audience, as he added that he supports local law enforcement engaging in civil forfeiture, or taking the properties of drug dealers and using the value to support law enforcement.

“Take their houses, take the clothes off their backs,” he said, sounding clearly frustrated with the drug problems and thefts that have plagued the Valley. “I don’t have any sympathy for drug dealers.”

For more information about Mat-Su Valley Crime Watch, a community group dedicated to supporting crime suppression in the valley, go to www.Facebook.com/matvalleycrime. For information about how to set up a Neighborhood Watch program in your neighborhood, contact Belinda Bohanan by calling Palmer Trooper Post at 907-745-2131. The Public Safety Town Hall at the Menard Sports Center was hosted by House Representative Mark Neuman and Representative-Elect Colleen Sullivan-Leonard.