There have been four fatal homicides and a noticeable spike of shootings in Anchorage during January.
Anchorage Police Chief Mark Mew said the department has investigated but that takes more than just comparing data.
Mew: “With all those limitations we checked this month with the previous two Januarys and see what it looked like. I’m not sure how much you can draw from that but we did that. The next thing that we did was make sure that we had an apples to apples comparison: what do we mean by a shooting.”
Ultimately he ordered the department to crack down on drug activity, saying that many of the cases where shots were involved seem to be drug related.
He said all four homicides this month were connected to drugs including marijuana, and wondered if dealers may be jockeying for position before the drug becomes legal next month.
Mew: “If the folks out there are looking at the potential for a change in landscape and wondering how they fit into it and trying to manuever, I wonder if that’s not what is going on I don’t know that it is.”
The crack-down involves combining three of their units to become an in house task force to pressure the “drug world and criminal element that moves around at night.”
