Following fatal officer-involved shooting, advocates continue call for civilian review board

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (KTUU) - Following Monday’s fatal Anchorage officer-involved shooting, advocates continued their call for the Anchorage Police Department to implement a citizen police review board — one week after APD Chief Sean Case told Alaska’s News Source Investigates a citizen’s board was not necessary.

“What we need is some kind of transparency,” Alaska Black Caucus Justice Committee Chair Rich Curtner said. “We need some kind of a civilian oversight community involvement in these incidents.”

During a Tuesday news conference, Case said the man fatally shot — who both family members, and now police have identified as 41-year-old Utuva Alaelua — was pulled over near the 300 block of Bragaw Street in Mountain View for a broken headlight when officers said they observed a gun in his lap.

After that, Case said verbal commands were made before an officer on the vehicle’s passenger side fatally shot Alaeula.

Members of The Alaska Black Caucus and Party for Socialism and Liberation used Case’s statements, including about body camera footage, to continue making their case urging APD to create a citizen review board to improve what they feel is a lack of transparency and accountability within the department.

“During an officer-involved shooting, [Chief Case] generally is very vague and kind of keeps it that way until he absolutely has to divulge the information to the public,” PSL member Cynthia Gachupin said. “It’s sad that this is the state of our city.”

During Tuesday’s news conference, Case said poor lighting during the incident meant details surrounding the fatal shooting would be “slightly less than we normally give.”

“The lighting condition, the movement in the video, makes the video a little bit less clear than some of the previous videos,” Case explained. “We’ll need to wait until we interview the officers that are involved to get a little clearer picture of what they actually saw versus what the video shows or doesn’t show.”

“If we do have cameras that don’t work in the evening hours, why would we purchase those, knowing where we live?” Gachupin said. “If that is true … We need to be looking at how we can fix that problem.”

Alaska Black Caucus Justice Committee Chair Rich Curtner said the community’s law enforcement relationship continues to be “damaged,” following multiple fatal officer-involved shootings, including 16-year-old Easter Leafa.

“Until we see [the body camera footage], there’s going to be a lot of questions asked,” he said. “There’s so much lack of confidence now, he’s going to have to go a long way to replace that, to build that confidence back in the community.”

Case previously told Alaska’s News Source Investigates he did not think a citizens review board was necessary.

“To have an outside entity come and do that high-level and quality of investigations and really understand that culture and that expectation, even though it’s not written down in a piece of paper in a form, they’re never going to meet that standard that we hold ourselves to,” Case said.

Gachupin disagrees.

“If that were true, then Chief Case would actually engage with the community on a real level, not a surface level,” she said.

APD’s policy states body camera footage will be released within 45 days of a “critical incident”. However, the Chief of Police has final discretion over when the video will be released. The release of the footage may be delayed to protect the integrity of ongoing investigations or to protect the constitutional rights of those being accused of a crime.

Chief Case is expected to address Monday’s officer-involved shooting at a May 21 press conference.

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