History
The Troopers trace their heritage back more than a century, but there was no Alaska-wide police force until 1941, when the Territorial Legislature created the Alaska Highway Patrol. Territorial patrolmen only patrolled the main highways of Alaska and did not visit remote areas or regions. They were commissioned to only enforce traffic laws and were not police officers per se. They were eventually deputized as special deputy US Marshals to fill this void in jurisdiction. The legislature refused to make them police officers until the agency was changed to Territorial Police and additional personnel were hired from the ranks of the US Marshals. The new agency became the Alaska Territorial Police in 1953 after a number of titles. Other titles were the Alaska State Police after statehood in 1959, and ultimately the Alaska State Troopers in 1967. In a unique pilot program, AK Troopers even drove ambulances as patrol vehicles in the 1960s, serving as both ambulance and law enforcement service to remote areas.
Before the founding of the Troopers, law enforcement in Alaska was performed by a succession of federal agencies: first the United States Army, then the United States Navy and Revenue Cutter Service, the US Custom Service and finally the United States Marshals Service after a civil government was formed in 1884.
The need for law enforcement became critical in the late 1800s as gold was discovered in Alaska. Gold rush towns had crime rates per capita that dwarfed those of modern US cities. Prostitution, gambling, murder, rape, robbery, arson, kidnapping, aggravated assault, and claim jumping incidents were rampant. Frightened citizens desperately cabled Washington for help. As a result, scores of Deputy US Marshals were deployed to Alaska. The Alaska Peace Officer Memorial chronicles the many brave Deputy US Marshals who died in the line of duty in early Alaska. The deputy marshals continued to be the main force of law in rural Alaska until the advent of the Alaska Troopers and many early-era troopers were former deputy US Marshals. Some cities began to charter police departments in the early 1900s.
Read more about this topic: Alaska State Troopers
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“I cannot be much pleased without an appearance of truth; at least of possibility—I wish the history to be natural though the sentiments are refined; and the characters to be probable, though their behaviour is excelling.”
—Frances Burney (1752–1840)