newsminer.com

Gov. Sean Parnell’s promise to put an Alaska State Trooper or Village Public Safety Officer in every village that wants a law enforcement presence is a laudable goal. For too long, villages have been too poorly served by the structure of the state’s law enforcement system.

Parnell made the pledge at the Alaska Federation of Natives convention Thursday as part of his broader initiative to reduce domestic violence and sexual assaults.

The promise won’t be easy or cheap to accomplish, but he should stick with it.

The state clearly needs to hire more village officers. They aren’t troopers, but they can provide a trained, objective and authoritative presence when needed. If they live in a community, they are immediately available when something happens. They tend to have a better rapport with locals than a drop-in trooper would. They also are much less expensive to employ than troopers.

The lack of a law enforcement figure in many villages is not solely the state’s fault. Often, the jobs are available but go unfilled. Of the 71 funded positions, 58 are filled today, according to a news release from the governor’s office. That’s because the village officer’s job can be extremely difficult work.

The Legislature helped improve the likelihood of the jobs being filled last year when it boosted the starting pay rate to $21 per hour. The increased pay seems to have helped, but not dramatically enough. The number of village officers is up by only about a dozen from 18 months ago.

That number is inadequate. In the 1980s, there were about twice as many village officers as we have today.

“We can stop the epidemic of domestic violence and sexual assault by shedding silence and passivity,” Parnell told the AFN convention Thursday. “We can speak up and proclaim these acts to be unacceptable. Together, we can begin the change toward greater respect for one another.”

To help shed the silence and passivity, the state needs to have people in the villages who have the legal authority to speak up and take action, and do both immediately. Those are the safety officers, and we need them more than ever.