Village Public Safety Officer Program
The Alaska State Troopers also manage the Village Public Safety Officer program, which provides a peace officer presence in remote villages with no police departments and that are too small for a trooper post. VPSOs are state trained peace officers but not fully credentialed Alaska police officers. They carry no firearms, however, do carry all other typical tools of a peace officer, such as a TASER, pepper spray, and baton. The VPSO 9-week training course at the DPS Academy mirrors several aspects of the ALET program except that VPSOs do not receive basic emergency vehicle operation course (EVOC) and firearms training. If a VPSO should later opt to join a police department after completion of VPSO training, they would be required to attend the dull DPS Law Enforcement Training Program.
VPSOs are supervised by designated area Troopers and carry out only basic police tasks such as emergency call response, juvenile offense investigations, protective custody holds of inebriates, assistance to social workers and medical providers, crime scene preservation, issuance of citations for misdemeanor and non-criminal violation offenses, misdemeanor arrests and detention of felony suspects for surrender to troopers, wildlife protection through the Division of Fish and Wildlife Enforcement, engage in search and rescue of missing persons and perform services usually performed by county sheriff's departments in other states, such as prisoner transport. Because VPSO's do not carry firearms, they are trained with non lethal weapons, such as pepper spray and expandable batons. VPSOs usually receive Alaska Firefighter-I training and either Alaska Emergency Medical Technician-I (EMT-I) or Alaska Emergency Trauma Technician (ETT) in addition to the basic training.
The Village Public Safety Officer Program began in the late 1970s as a means of providing rural Alaskan communities with needed public safety services at the local level. The program was created to reduce the loss of life due to fires, drowning, lost person, and the lack of immediate emergency medical assistance in rural communities. The Village Public Safety Officer Program was designed to train and employ individuals residing in the village as first responders to public safety emergencies such as search and rescue, fire protection, emergency medical assistance, crime prevention and basic law enforcement. Recent pay raises and expanded training have improved the retention and recruitment of VPSOs though some rural residents continue to resent that they are not afforded full police officer protection and some have tried to challenge reduced police powers of the VPSOs by legal means.
Read more about this topic: Alaska State Troopers
Famous quotes containing the words village, public, safety, officer and/or program:
“Let us have a good many maples and hickories and scarlet oaks, then, I say. Blaze away! Shall that dirty roll of bunting in the gun-house be all the colors a village can display? A village is not complete, unless it have these trees to mark the season in it. They are important, like the town clock. A village that has them not will not be found to work well. It has a screw loose, an essential part is wanting.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Private faces in public places
Are wiser and nicer
Than public faces in private places.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)
“There is no calamity which a great nation can invite which equals that which follows a supine submission to wrong and injustice and the consequent loss of national self-respect and honor, beneath which are shielded and defended a people’s safety and greatness.”
—Grover Cleveland (1837–1908)
“When Prince William [later King William IV] was at Cork in 1787, an old officer ... dined with him, and happened to say he had been forty years in the service. The Prince with a sneer asked what he had learnt in those forty years. The old gentleman justly offended, said, “Sir, I have learnt, when I am no longer fit to fight, to make as good a retreat as I can” —and walked out of the room.”
—Horace Walpole (1717–1797)
“Reporters for tabloid newspapers beat a path to the park entrance each summer when the national convention of nudists is held, but the cult’s requirement that visitors disrobe is an obstacle to complete coverage of nudist news. Local residents interested in the nudist movement but as yet unwilling to affiliate make observations from rowboats in Great Egg Harbor River.”
—For the State of New Jersey, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)