ALCOHOL WAS A FACTOR: Weekly Newspapering in Rural Alaska

The Cops Are Boozers

I was getting coffee one morning at the Mountain Market, a hipster caffeine pit stop and organic food store that was transformed from a gas and service station that thrived when Alaska was young and when real mountain men plied these carved-out streets — not the tree-huggers and characters from New York with attitude and advanced degrees whom can’t get Starbucks in Haines so they come here.
(Am I starting to sound like someone who belongs in Haines?)
I ran into Heath Scott, the police chief. We said hello in the gruff kind of way you greet cops. I’d gone in to his office to introduce myself when I’d first arrived.
I like small-town cops in general. They’re basically just overgrown kids, the kind of young fellas who played on the football team and pulled pranks on the weaker boys in the locker room. Some of them were truly mean kids, little psychopaths in the making who got joy out of preying on the vulnerable, the outsiders.
Some just went along for the ride.
Later in life, they became the detectives.
It seems to me that the mind-sets of most cops are stuck in the 10th grade. It’s a sort of arrested development that follows them into adulthood.
They don’t socialize well with people outside their own social groups, which really means other cops. They’re still pretty fit, most anyway, and if they’re in uniform they kind of get a kick out of intimidating people with their squeaky leather holsters and loaded weapons.
And nowhere, it seemed, more so than in Haines.
The word around town was that Heath, who before this job guarded monuments in the nation’s capital, liked to drink, really booze it up.
A woman from the chamber stormed into the newspaper office one day all aghast because she was out at a bar and Heath was there and suddenly ordered a round of Fireballs for everyone there.
She told him she didn’t drink hard stuff, let alone Fireballs.
“Drink it!” he supposedly said. “I bought it. Now you gotta drink it!”
Like I say; pure locker room antics.

When the Feltist heard this story, he gleefully hatched a plan. He’s mad at the cops because they won’t release the police reports that were once used to make up the newspaper’s very humorous police blotter.
The Feltist is all about free speech. He’s even filed a FOIA request for those reports.
Heath won’t play ball.
So the Feltist suggested a way to get to the truth about the town’s reportedly boozy police chief. Tom Morphet, who owns the Chilkat Valley News where I work, keeps a breathalyzer in the office. Apparently one of his reporters had run afoul of the police before and had one on hand to test himself before he drove anywhere.
The Feltist wanted to lay in wait outside a bar (as cops are often wont to do) and when Heath walked out to his car, ambush him with a question:
“How much have you had to drink tonight, Chief?”
“Well, do you mind blowing into this device here so we can see if you’re telling the truth?”
Then we make a citizen’s arrest and write about it.
Tom said we could do it, but he wasn’t sure he’d run the story. Still, we’re keeping an eye out for the chief’s personal vehicle near the town’s usual-suspect watering holes.
Anyway, Heath has only been here for a few months and is already at war with Tom, who also sits on the local town council and wants to cut the force from four men to a couple of part-timers.
Heath isn’t happy with that. So he cut off the access to the police reports. I was surprised he was even talking to me.
But he leaned in and gave me a news tip, or what amounted to a tip in Slowsville, Alaska.
A grandmother was being arraigned over at the courthouse in a few minutes. She’d gotten stopped by one of Heath’s officers a few months back.
That’s when she hit that unwavering truth in rural Alaska: Alcohol was involved.
Not only that, but drugs, too.
She was busted with a meth pipe. She got popped for DUI. There were beer cans in the car and a few baggies of white power. She was pretty toasted, both head-state wise and legally.
Because, here was the thing: Her six-year-old grandson was sitting there in the front seat.
So I hurried over to the courthouse for a Barnum and Bailey-type show that was pure rural Alaska.
Suppose they threw a courtroom case and nobody came?
When I took my seat in the visitor’s area, the chief was already there with his arresting officer at the prosecutor’s table. Apparently there was enough OJ Simpson-like moral outrage to this case he wanted to see things for himself.
Bonnie, the court clerk, who used to own the local newspaper before Tom bought it (There are, like zero degrees of separation in rural Alaska) sat in her clerk’s spot.
But there was no judge. No grandmother to be arraigned.
Finally, a disembodied voice came over the court loudspeaker.
“Is she there yet?”
It was the magistrate herself; Mary Kay Germain. But she wasn’t really here. I looked over to see a plastic sign with a microphone lit up in blue.
I guess that meant court was in session.
Talk about blind justice.
“No judge,” Bonnie said. “I called her yesterday to make sure she was coming and that she had a ride. But she’s not here yet.”
“Well, what time is it there?”
“It’s two minutes after nine, judge.”
“Well, I need a drink of water.”
Then you could hear her get up from her desk and come back to guzzle some fluids.
State budget cuts have killed Alaska, and they’re not about to stop anytime soon. Oil no longer is gold and the state coffers are emptying fast.
All aspects of life have been cut, including trooper coverage of small towns like Haines.
And even judges.
Now Haines has no resident judge. Instead, Germain flies down from the town of Yakutat some miles away and holds court here one week a month.
When cases fall on her off weeks, she does them by phone.
In Alaska, trial-by-telephone is just one oddity of an often-oddball rural life.
The existence of great distances, bad weather, frozen roads and short winter days, means that people can’t always get together, so they improvise.
Every public meeting I’ve attended here has included someone who has attended by phone — from Juneau, Anchorage or from their cell phone at the Seattle airport.
Last year, the Alaska Dispatch News in Anchorage did a story about villagers who attend church by phone. Apparently this is a thing — the Alaska Bush Branch of the LDS Church.
They meet each Sunday and never even have to look at each other.
A churchgoer explained how it all works.
“Call-ins begin with the priesthood class at 9 a.m.,” she said. “Only gentlemen call in to this. The preaching service begins at 10 a.m., called the sacrament meeting. All adults attend this service. Sunday School follows and the women end the day of worship with Relief Society, a Sunday School for the women. Children’s church follows.”
In Haines, I have gone to court hearings where the prosecutors call in from Ketchikan and the defense attorney’s call from Anchorage. One day, a defendant accused of taking an illegal moose called in from a local mine — with only once-a-week plane service.
I’m wondering if they could have a case if nobody actually came to court but everyone conduced business on some sort of wacked-out party line.
Her voice bouncing off the courtroom walls, Germain was getting impatient.
“We’ll give her a few more minutes.”
Bonnie spoke up.
“Wait, I see her son’s car pulling up in the parking lot.”
Pretty soon, the grandmother blew in. her son looked like a logger who’d gotten out of bed too early that morning. He looked at me, and obviously realizing I was a reporter, actually snarled in my direction.
There would be no Doug Llewelyn, People’s Court type post-case interviews going on outside this courtroom.
The grandmother looked, well, terrible.
Just 59, she looked twenty years older. He long graying hair fell onto the defendant’s table as she held her head low, like a pet who knows it’s done wrong.
She had the quick, jerky movements of a tweaker without her fix.
“So, let’s get started,” Germain said.
From there, the arraignment went pretty much pro-forma. The cop presented his evidence, whispering now and then with the chief at the prosecutor’s table.
No prosecutor came onto the phone — and no defense attorney.
The grandmother didn’t have one.
Later, Germain told me that she thinks that trial-by-phone actually makes sense: she doesn’t size people up by their looks; she listens to what they say.
As she set the next court date, Gemain paused to offer this unfortunate woman a bit of advice.
“Look, I’m worried about you,” she began, her voice soft, motherly, quite un-judicial.
“I know you love your grandson. You need to become a better role model so he can grow up to be a man of integrity.”
The grandmother kept her head low, as if afraid to look up.
It was a heartbreaking scene. But to appreciate it, you had to be there — even if you tuned in by telephone.