Property crime is up across the board in Juneau, but according to Juneau Police Chief Bryce Johnson, the biggest increases are in burglaries.
“So in 2015 we saw a significant increase in burglaries. We have seen that continue,” he said. “So during 2016 up until November, which is the last month I have numbers for, there’s been a 75 percent increase in burglaries over the 2015 numbers.”
Johnson believes the city’s property crime spike is a result of flaws in a criminal justice reform law passed by the Legislature last year and steep budget cuts.
He was sipping a Diet Coke Tuesday night, after leading a discussion on crime for about 40 people at City Hall.
He explained that last year’s Senate Bill 91 reduced the punishments for nonviolent crimes like burglary with hopes of putting more people in treatment and fewer people in prison.
State officials envisioned the law would help people struggling with drug addiction and mental illness, so fewer would break the law again after their release.
Johnson took a swig of Coke and said the problem is those rehabilitation tools haven’t been developed yet.
“Our traditional tools for working on this problem, they’ve been taken away by law,” he said. “The new tools that are supposed to come are not here yet, so we’re kind of in a limbo stage.”
On top of that, he said state prosecutors were hit with budget cuts, and the court system adopted new guidelines that made more arrestees eligible for release without a cash bail.
“Even if Senate Bill 91 said we could incarcerate someone, the bail schedule has them incarcerated for less time pre-trial,” Johnson said. “You layer on top of that the reductions in the District Attorney’s office where they’re declining more and more cases and cases that are perfectly good cases they just can’t take.”
Simply put, Johnson said thieves’ risk of punishment has gone down and as a result, police are seeing a “cascading effect” of increased property crime.
Attorney General Jahna Lindemuth raised some of those same concerns in a December news release. She called the problem facing the criminal justice system a “perfect storm.”
Johnson is part of the Alaska Association of Chiefs of Police and based on what he has learned from other law enforcement agencies, he believes crime is increasing around the state.
He was careful to say he doesn’t believe SB91 was a bad idea.
“Getting people diverted out of jail into treatment is a sound principle,” Johnson said. “I think you need to have the treatment available before you do that and I think you need to have a sanction in place if people choose not to go to that treatment as well.”
In other words, he said the criminal justice system needs its “sticks” and its “carrots.”
Johnson said Juneau has seen about a 5 percent drop in violent crime and he predicted that property crime will continue to go up until there are some structural changes.
He told the audience that he believes the Legislature will reevaluate some of SB91’s provisions this year.
Clarification: An earlier version of this story suggested changes in the bail schedule were a result of Senate Bill 91. While SB 91 does revise the bail statutes, those changes don’t go into effect until Jan. 1, 2018. The Alaska Court System independently promulgated a new statewide bail schedule last year. The bail changes in SB91 were the result of the Alaska Criminal Justice Commission’s work studying and recommending reforms; the court’s changes were also related to the commission’s research and the legislature’s adoption of SB91.
