ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Easter Leafa was under a blanket on her balcony with a knife when Anchorage police arrived, responding to a call for help from her family. Instead of showing her hands as she was told, they said, the 16-year-old girl stood up and walked toward them with the knife.
Two officers opened fire simultaneously, one with a less-lethal foam projectile and the other with live bullets, killing her two days before Leafa was to start her junior year of high school. She had recently moved from American Samoa to pursue a better education and was still learning English, her family said.
Leafa was one of seven people shot by Anchorage police since May, the most recent a murder suspect who was seriously wounded after officers say he opened fire on them Friday afternoon. That’s more than twice as many as the department typically shoots in a year. Four of the topics were killed.
The flood has made Anchorage the latest in a long list of American cities to experience how the police use force and led to apologies to Leafa’s family and promises of reform from the city’s new mayor.
“This cannot be our new normal,” Mayor Suzanne LaFrance said at a news conference after Leafa’s death.
The other six shootings involved suspects who reportedly had firearms, shot at police or, in two cases, were armed murder suspects.
The leader of the city’s police union, Darrell Evans, suggested in a statement Friday that the unusual spike in officer-involved shootings reflects “the chaos our city is facing.” Anchorage has had 20 homicides this year, 14 of them in recent months.
While the total number of homicides is now nearly equal to last year’s 23 with about a third of the year left to go, it is roughly in line with Anchorage’s average homicide rate: 35 in 2019 and 28 in 2022.
At least four of those shot by police were people of color, a move that has particularly shocked Anchorage’s minority residents.
The city is one of the most diverse in the U.S., with large populations of Asians, Hispanics and Alaska Natives, including many who came and stayed for military service. More than 100 languages are spoken by students in Anchorage schools, and the U.S. Census said Anchorage had the four most racially and ethnically diverse neighborhoods in the country after the 2020 census.
The police have tried to increase its diversity in the past decade, but still, 7 in 10 officers are white. That’s far more than the city’s 291,000 residents, just over half of whom are white, according to census data.
Leafa’s killing on August 13 prompted several prayer vigils and a march past the Anchorage police station that drew hundreds of people. Participants expressed grief and anger, as well as dismay that one officer used live ammunition when another had a less-lethal option. Police have not released a statement.
Tammalivis Salanoa of the Polynesian Association of Alaska told The Associated Press that some people in the Pacific Islander community are thinking twice before calling Anchorage police for help.
“They should be prepared for these kinds of circumstances,” she said. “They knew what they were signing up for, whereas we as a community are just sitting in our living rooms, just trying to live our lives. We don’t expect to ask for help and have that be the last phone call we ever make.”
LaFrance and Police Chief Sean Case, who both took office in July, said they would have an outside entity investigate the Leafa shooting. They also said they would create an advisory committee and have an outside party review the department’s policies and procedures and recommend practices to reduce the use of force.
Case said that when he became chief, he decided to have a review of all Anchorage police shootings over the past 15 years. On Monday, he plans to name a captain to oversee all aspects of the department’s training.
The department already trains in de-escalation techniquesBut Leafa’s family told Anchorage television station KTUU that one of the officers arrived with his gun. A sister had called police to report that Leafa had come at her with the knife. The officers locked the rest of the family in a bedroom before approaching the teen.
“She was a minor,” said Faialofa Dixon, another nurse. “They should have asked questions when they came in.”
Dallas attorney James Roberts is representing the family of Kristopher Handy, who in mid-May became the first person killed by officers in Anchorage this year.
Police initially said officers shot Handy, who was heavily intoxicated, when he pointed a long gun at them in an apartment complex parking lot. But the shooting was the first since Anchorage police began wearing body cameras, and video captured by those cameras and by a neighbor’s security camera It appears Handy held the gun down before police began shooting.
The state Office of Special Investigations ruled the shooting was justified, saying Handy walked toward officers and ignored commands to drop the weapon. His family filed a wrongful death lawsuit.
“It appears these officers are not going in with the mindset of de-escalating the situation, but with the mindset of immediately using their weapons,” Roberts said.
No video has been released of Leafa’s murder.
Evans, president of the Anchorage Police Department Employees Association, said he was shocked that the mayor apologized while the investigation into the shooting was just beginning.
“We’ve also heard the oversimplification that ‘six officer-involved shootings since May is far too many’ and how that somehow reflects a failure on the part of law enforcement alone,” he wrote. “That level of oversimplification does nothing to acknowledge the gravity of each of those incidents.”