Case Explained: State and city create task force to prosecute retail crime in Anchorage – Legal Perspective

Lawyers with the state’s Department of Law are working with prosecutors at the Municipality of Anchorage to more aggressively go after serious shoplifters. Retail theft is the focus of what leaders with the city and state say is a partnership dedicated to “quality of life” crimes in Anchorage.

In his final State of the State address last month, Gov. Mike Dunleavy spoke about what he and others have taken to calling the “Quality of Life Initiative.”

“The goal is to put the resources where the data says the resources are needed. The data says the focus needs to be in Anchorage, and that’s why we’ve partnered with the municipality on these initiatives,” Dunleavy said.

A memorandum of understanding was signed by Attorney General Stephen Cox and Municipal Attorney Eva Gardner on Jan. 8. It lays out an agreement to improve public safety by establishing a joint task force focused on crimes impacting residents’ quality of life.

Though shoplifting is the current focus, officials say it will be a template applied in the future to other public safety issues.

“Our new partnership will focus our collective resources on specific public safety priorities, including retail theft, drug interdiction, domestic violence and sexual assault,” Mayor Suzanne LaFrance said in a written statement emailed last week.

The new Quality of Life Initiative is a small personnel adjustment between the two entities: The Alaska Department of Law will supply two prosecutors along with a supervisor, and two lawyers from the municipal prosecutor’s office are attached. The lawyers are supposed to coordinate with one another on serious retail theft cases, along with partners in law enforcement, civil attorneys and other government entities, according to the terms of the memorandum.

‘More with less’

During a state House Judiciary Committee hearing on Jan. 26, Cox said the initiative was a way of doing “more with less” by adding a “force multiplier” to broad public safety issues like retail theft and public disorder. One important tool outlined in the MOU is “cross designation” between the two legal departments, meaning lawyers for the city can charge state offenses, and state lawyers could potentially use city statutes to issue charges.

Under normal circumstances, only the state can issue more serious felony-level theft charges for shoplifting crimes. City prosecutors can charge lower-level misdemeanors, but rely on attorneys with the state’s Department of Law to take evidence of repeat violations or brazen theft of high-value items and turn it into felony charges that can result in incarceration or major legal consequences.

But for several years now, the state has not been charging those sorts of felonies.

“It generally kind of withered,” said Anchorage Police Department Chief Sean Case, referring to the legal system’s capacity for handling felonious retail theft, during an interview last Thursday.

The Alaska Court System buckled and backlogged after pandemic-related disruptions in 2020 and 2021, he said. The tail of that interruption was years long. Locally, one way that manifested was a steep rise in the number of “speedy trial dismissals” of low-level cases that the municipal prosecutor’s office was too short-staffed to handle.

Municipal Prosecutor Dennis Wheeler told the Daily News in December that lower-level theft laws in the city went nearly unenforced due to short staffing. For a stretch in 2024, the city dismissed hundreds of theft-related charges because of resource limitations in the city’s law department.

Focus on retail theft

Prior to the pandemic-era disruptions to policing and Alaska’s court system, there were regular meetings among representatives from big box retailers, police and prosecutors. They would gather to share information on “repeat offenders” targeting various stores around town, and used the forum to help forward evidence to state prosecutors.

But in recent years, Case said, there were fewer district attorneys willing to take on felony shoplifting cases.

“Turning that all back on was way more difficult than it needed to be, kind of embarrassingly so,” Case said.

Even before the new initiative was launched, APD had reestablished its retail theft unit, resulting in more arrests and more charges, according to the department.

“Those cases just wouldn’t have existed without that unit,” Case said. “We’re seeing measurable results.”

[Previous coverage: ‘Locked down’: Crime at Anchorage big box stores prompts new strategies]

While APD can gather evidence and make arrests for shoplifting, neither they nor the city have much of a say in bringing charges beyond misdemeanors, so even egregious examples can only go up so high in the legal system, said Gardner.

“Felonies carry the potential for more meaningful sentences,” she said.

Retail theft, she said, has broad ramifications: residents’ diminished experience of shopping, the inconvenience of summoning help to retrieve locked-up items, and higher prices to cover more “shrinkage,” retailers’ term for pilfered goods.

“It really affects the viability of businesses and their ability to operate,” Gardner said.

The new initiative is intended to extend the city’s greater shoplifting enforcement into higher-level felony charges in court. When it comes to criminal offenses, the state has more powerful tools than their municipal counterparts. Principally, state attorneys can combine multiple shoplifting offenses that take place over a six-month period, and if the stolen items surpass $750 in value, they can charge a class C felony, punishable by up to five years in prison. Similarly, state prosecutors can take prior shoplifting convictions into account in charging a felony.

“We’re targeting these repeated retail theft cases,” said John Skidmore, the senior litigation counsel within the state law department’s Office of Special Prosecutions heading up the new initiative. “I think the vast majority of the conduct is done by a very small percentage of people.”

Skidmore is a veteran prosecutor who worked for years as a deputy attorney general in charge of the criminal division, overseeing many of the state’s most serious crimes. He said that in recent years, there were areas of criminal justice where resources had “drifted away from some of these low-level offenses,” which had created downstream effects. Now, Skidmore said, he and the two prosecutors tasked with handling quality of life crimes under the initiative will be more aggressive.

“We’re gonna target the top offenders. … Those are cases that are assigned to me, and I’m not issuing plea negotiations,” he said. “If you get charged, we’re going to trial.”

One of Skidmore’s assistant district attorneys will be based in Anchorage, and another in Palmer, in the Matanuska-Susitna Borough.

“We recognize that some of the individuals engaged in this conduct are probably moving between Anchorage and the Valley,” Skidmore said.

The task force is the latest example of a more collaborative approach that the city and state have taken on public safety issues. The LaFrance administration, for example, developed a separate memorandum of understanding with counterparts in state departments when it hit statutory roadblocks abating homeless camps from state-owned property.

“The city has done a lot of good work in the last six months to a year on this front. They’ve closed a lot of camps, cleared a lot of camps,” Cox said during his testimony.

For her part, LaFrance said she hopes her administration can leverage progress rebuilding the municipal prosecutor’s office and increasing APD staffing to drug-related crime. The Quality of Life Initiative, she said, could help those efforts.

“I look forward to partnering with the state — which is responsible for prosecuting felony level crimes and holds the airport, playing an important role in drug interdiction. This collaboration will bring more state resources to the table to keep all Anchorage residents safe and will continue to make Anchorage a great place to live,” LaFrance wrote.

The MOU outlines the legal process for cross-designating attorneys, resource obligations, and reporting requirements for members of the task force.