Another of Bethel's finest departs

DUSTIN SOLBERG

December 27, 2007 at 10:49AM AKST

It's 8 p.m., the beginning of police officer Dustin Stonecipher's 12-hour patrol of Bethel's dark, snowy streets.

His patrols will lead him past the hotel where he's seen bad things happen, through the parking lot favored by bootleggers in this dry town, and through a neighborhood where police cars often go speeding with lights flashing.

But it's all quiet, so far. His radio is quiet, too.

So in the final days of his three-year career in Bethel, he took a moment to explain why he chose to leave the police department. As he spoke, he steered his patrol SUV on Bethel's short network of streets.

"I don't know if the public is grasping that they're so close to losing the police department," he said. "Especially in Bethel, where we have the highest sexual assault rate in the state."

His departure this month leaves Bethel, pop. 5,800, with three cops. The police department's long decline is a grim realization for anyone who expects local government to supply a police officer at a moment's notice.

It's disappointing for Stonecipher, too: a young, ambitious officer who returned to his home town to begin a law enforcement career. But now, with the police force just a shadow of its former self, he, too, chose to leave.

Overworked Bethel police are stuck with just basic, rent-a-cop duties – they routinely hand over investigations to Alaska State Troopers.

"When I first started, I didn't imagine it was possible," he said.

Stonecipher moved to Bethel at the age of 13, when his father took a job with the Bethel Police Department. He grew to like Bethel, where he hunted and fished the hinterlands and wrestled at better than 180 pounds for the high school wrestling team.

After earning a degree in criminal justice at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and going through the police academy, he knew just where he'd go.

"I knew, coming out here, that this was a great place to work," he said. "When I started, I thought it was a phenomenal place to work."

Now, it's different.

"There's just no upside here right now."

Patrolling Bethel

One hour and 40 minutes into his shift, he spots a Ford sedan with a single headlight. He flicks on his flashing police lights for the first time on this night's shift.

The car in question pulls to the side of the road across from the A.C. store, and Stonecipher steps up to the driver's window.

After asking for the driver's license, he checks its status back at the department with dispatcher Melanie Barniskis, who has just finished a take-out cheeseburger at the bank of computers that make for one of the busiest dispatch desks in the state.

This year, the Bethel Police Department will field 15,000 calls – about 3,000 of them after-hours calls destined for Alaska State Troopers.

Barniskis calls him back

"That license is revoked," he hears over his radio.

With that, Stonecipher returns to the sedan and instructs the driver to step out of the car. He's under arrest, and Stonecipher handcuffs the man's hands behind his back and leads him to the back seat of the patrol car.

The man had a good story: He said he'd been told his license was valid. It sounded convincing enough, but Stonecipher drove him to the Yukon-Kuskokwim Correctional Center anyway. As Stonecipher led him up the jail steps, he was instructing the man how to clear his driver's license of its tarnished status.

Stonecipher said he doesn't arrest people enthusiastically. "Sometimes, it does pull on the heartstrings."

Later, back at the police department, Stonecipher learns the arrested driver has a string of offenses, revealing a history of driving without a license.

Tough work

This quiet Bethel night marks the one-year anniversary of the brutal murder of cab driver Joung Ju Young on Dec. 10, 2006. The gunman reportedly sped away by snowmachine, and the murder remains unsolved.

It's a horrible example of the big-city crime plaguing Alaska's 10th-largest town.

But it's not the nature of Bethel's crime or the department's heavy workload that led Stonecipher to join two Bethel officers who left for Fairbanks over the last two years.

After growing up in a policeman's family, Stonecipher said he knew what to expect at the Bethel Police Department. He'd met the police brass when he was still a teenager and says he enjoyed working with them once he joined the force. It was a real police department that offered a young officer a chance to do all kinds of police work – instead of spending the first year on more mundane duties such as traffic patrol, as is common at larger departments, he was assisting in investigations soon after he was commissioned with the Bethel Police Department.

But the department has lost its ability to perform its own investigations. Instead, it leans on an already overworked Alaska State Troopers to investigate its serious crimes.

Trooper commander Audie Holloway has pledged to assist the Bethel Police Department with investigations and responding to emergencies – to a point.

"I do need to get the message out that we are already maxed to beyond what we should be doing," Holloway said. "We will do everything we can, because we don't want members of the public suffering from this."

New duties

On his first day at the Fairbanks Police Department, Stonecipher will earn $2 more per hour than he did after three years on the Bethel force.

The extra money is welcome, but Stonecipher said it's not what he wanted. He'd rather stay in Bethel, as he'd planned.

"I've got a lot of really close friends out here. It's really tough leaving," he said.

But as the police department crumbles all around him, he said he had no choice but to seek out a full-fledged police department. They do police work the way he was taught at UAF and the police academy – just as Bethel Police Department did when he first joined the force. He trained to be a cop – not a rent-a-cop with token duties.

"We don't respond to things that I would respond to when I first started," he said.

On the upside, this has helped lighten the police load: So-called "subject removals," or pulling drunk people from places where they weren't wanted, used to take a lot of police time. There are no more car accident investigations when nobody is injured, either – drivers fill out their own paperwork at the station.

In the fall, one new Bethel officer packed his bags and flew back home without a word after less than two months. Stonecipher says the fresh hire had hoped to escape the big-city crime on his beat in urban Florida, from where he had moved to Bethel.

Stonecipher said he knows police work has perils.

"Pretty much it's assumed that there's a gun in every house. They're everywhere. When you go into a house, that's on my mind," he said.

Cocaine busts have occurred; the street value of one 5-gram package was about $1,000, he said. And the perennial crime of smuggling alcohol – a fifth of R & R whiskey fetches about $70 in Bethel – is one of many ever-present enforcement challenges.

"I've responded quite a few times to children huffing on gas tanks. Those are usually pretty bad," he said.

Many officers have complained that the police department building is inadequate. It is small, officers and city officials have said, and there is little space for important functions such as storing crime-scene evidence.

The police department has argued for a new building and higher wages to draw more applicants, and a citizens' commission is drawing up a new compensation package, but Stonecipher said any city efforts to bolster the force have fallen short.

"The City Council, in my opinion, isn't making any effort to try and save this department," he said.