Police Chief Mercer on how JPD prevents use of excessive force

“We don’t condone excessive use of force among our other brothers and sisters in law enforcement,” Juneau Police Department Chief Ed Mercer said during a recent interview on KTOO’s Juneau Afternoon. Chief Mercer elaborated on what JPD is doing to prevent local officers from committing acts of violence against community members.

“You have to have a really sound hiring process to be able to vet individuals, to be able to make sure they have the right personality, the right traits to go out and do the job. Not only to act within split seconds and make life and death decisions, but also have the empathy and understanding to deal with people. And I think that’s one thing we do really well… Our officers also receive crisis intervention training and part of that is de-escalation training. Any time they use force on somebody they go through a review process, and that goes up through the chain of command to make sure that 1) are they following the policy when they used that force, and 2) to see whether or not there is a trend – do we need to change our training tactics?”

In 2019, JPD made 1,850 arrests. Of those arrests, force was used 3 percent of the time. Force may include physically having to restrain somebody to using mace or a Taser. Listen to the whole interview here.

(Photo by Juneau Empire’s Peter Segall)