Officials in Alaska say they are working to speed up investigations into police shootings

State officials say they are working to improve the speed of their investigations into police shootings – amid growing public pressure to release bodycam footage of the incidents.

So far this year, police officers have shot nine people during operations, killing six of them. Five of those shootings involved Anchorage police officers.

At a meeting with reporters on Wednesday, Deputy Attorney General John Skidmore said the release of the body camera footage should come only after an investigation by the state Office of Special Prosecutions to ensure due process, but he acknowledged that those state investigations take a long time.

“I’ll be the first to tell you that there were some problems with our process for reviewing these cases,” Skidmore said. “There are cases that we have reviewed that we took far too long to review at the Department of Justice.”

Currently, the state is still reviewing eight police shooting cases, including one from November of last year, to determine whether the use of force was justified. In some cases, Skidmore said, they are still waiting for ballistics and police reports and autopsies.

To reduce delays, Skidmore said the Office of Special Prosecutions has more than doubled the number of prosecutors from three to seven and is working with law enforcement agencies to receive their reports more quickly.

“I would always try to talk to them first and encourage them to develop processes to get information to us more quickly,” Skidmore said. “I think it will work. I’m very optimistic about that. But if it doesn’t work, are there other things that can be done? Yes, there are.”

Skidmore said the state has been investigating police shootings since 2009 and has records dating back to 2010. Since then, there have been 148 police shootings in the state, and Skidmore said none of them have resulted in charges against an officer. That includes two of the shootings this year that injured two men: 22-year-old Kaleb Bourdukofsky in Anchorage and 25-year-old Victor Jack in Wasilla.

“We’ve found that officers don’t fire their firearms unless they’re authorized to do so by law,” Skidmore said. “Now, this law, if it allows them to do that, that’s a pretty broad authorization. I make no secret of it; that’s a broad authorization. But those are the laws of the state of Alaska. And we haven’t found anyone violating them yet.”

State law allows officers to use deadly force if they have reasonable suspicion that a person has committed a serious crime, is attempting to flee while armed with a firearm, or “may otherwise endanger life or cause serious bodily harm if not promptly apprehended.”

Skidmore said that while he understands frustrated community members’ calls for transparency, they must be balanced with protecting people’s individual rights to due process.