BleedGopher
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per the Anchorage Daily News:
When Nimeron Mike applied to be a city police officer here last New Year’s Eve, he didn’t really expect to get the job.
Mike was a registered sex offender and had served six years behind bars in Alaska jails and prisons. He’d been convicted of assault, domestic violence, vehicle theft, groping a woman, hindering prosecution, reckless driving, drunken driving and choking a woman unconscious in an attempted sexual assault. Among other crimes.
“My record, I thought I had no chance of being a cop,” Mike, 43, said on a recent weekday evening, standing at his doorway in this Bering Strait village of 646 people.
He was wrong.
On the same day Mike filled out the application, the city of Stebbins hired him, handing him a policeman’s cellphone to answer calls for help.
“Am I a cop now?” he remembers thinking. “It’s like, that easy?”
The short answer is yes. With low pay and few people wanting the jobs, it is that easy in some small Alaska communities for a convicted felon, even someone who has admitted to a sex crime or who was recently released from prison, to be hired with public money to work as a city police officer.
It’s also a violation of state public safety regulations, yet it happens all the time.
In Stebbins alone, all seven of the police officers working as of July 1 have pleaded guilty to domestic violence charges within the past decade. Only one has received formal law enforcement training of any kind.
https://www.adn.com/lawless/2019/07...-cop-has-been-convicted-of-domestic-violence/
Go Gophers!!
When Nimeron Mike applied to be a city police officer here last New Year’s Eve, he didn’t really expect to get the job.
Mike was a registered sex offender and had served six years behind bars in Alaska jails and prisons. He’d been convicted of assault, domestic violence, vehicle theft, groping a woman, hindering prosecution, reckless driving, drunken driving and choking a woman unconscious in an attempted sexual assault. Among other crimes.
“My record, I thought I had no chance of being a cop,” Mike, 43, said on a recent weekday evening, standing at his doorway in this Bering Strait village of 646 people.
He was wrong.
On the same day Mike filled out the application, the city of Stebbins hired him, handing him a policeman’s cellphone to answer calls for help.
“Am I a cop now?” he remembers thinking. “It’s like, that easy?”
The short answer is yes. With low pay and few people wanting the jobs, it is that easy in some small Alaska communities for a convicted felon, even someone who has admitted to a sex crime or who was recently released from prison, to be hired with public money to work as a city police officer.
It’s also a violation of state public safety regulations, yet it happens all the time.
In Stebbins alone, all seven of the police officers working as of July 1 have pleaded guilty to domestic violence charges within the past decade. Only one has received formal law enforcement training of any kind.
https://www.adn.com/lawless/2019/07...-cop-has-been-convicted-of-domestic-violence/
Go Gophers!!