Every two weeks for the past three years, a police officer has boarded a plane near his home in Sydney, Australia to commute to work – in Bethel, Alaska.
“When I hit turbulence, in my mind I say, ‘That's it. I'm done now. I'm going to get a job where I don't commute so much,’” said Lt. Jesse Poole. The 40-year-old is deathly afraid of flying, but has made the two-day journey nearly 30 times a year from coastal Sydney to the wide-open tundra town of Bethel.
“The flight time is 20 plus hours, but it usually takes two days because since [COVID-19] there hasn't been enough stewardesses or pilots. So there's always a 12-hour layover, either in [Los Angeles] or Honolulu,” Poole said.
Poole has spent $1,500 of his own money every fortnight to spend two full days traveling more than 7,000 miles home from work. We did the math. That’s about 50 days of travel a year, costing more than a third of the base salary for Poole’s position.
Poole did live in Bethel full-time when he was first hired in the early days of the pandemic when international travel was restricted. He said that the two weeks on, two weeks off schedule has worked better for him and his personal life. Poole is a romantic, and the love of his life lives in Sydney.
“My partner is not a citizen here in the [United States]. She can't work here. She can't live here. And my relationship with her is more important than my career here at the Bethel Police Department,” Poole said.
His relationship is winning out. Poole is leaving the Bethel Police Department to take a job in Sydney to, as Bethel's police chief jokingly put it, “arrest kangaroos, I guess.”
And while Poole's rotational schedule has been the most extreme of the 19 officers on the Bethel police force, most of the police officers in Bethel travel to and from the community on a rotating schedule.
Coming and going
Current and former officers at the Bethel Police Department have commuted from Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia, Arkansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, Utah, California, Louisiana, and all across Alaska.
Dylan Floyd is an investigator with the Bethel Police Department. In a 2024 interview, she called herself “tri-coastal,” traveling between Hawaii, California, and Washington, D.C in her off-time. She said that she stays connected by answering her phone.
“You sort of get this attachment to your case, and you want to see it through,” Floyd said. “You know you want to find that resolution, but you want to do it objectively.”
Floyd, Poole, and other officers said that they didn’t think the biweekly schedule was a detriment to their work. But Poole said that the system could benefit from an in-person handoff between shifts.
“At this point we don't overlap. We simply do two and two, somebody comes on and nobody's overlapping. We have the two rotations, and we share that information with a pass down, and we share that information with good communication via phone calls and emails, trying to make sure that it's still fluid,” said Poole.
The two on, two off system isn’t unique to Bethel. According to the Alaska Association of Chiefs of Police, more than a dozen police departments in the state of Alaska work some kind of on-and-off schedule. The two weeks on, two weeks off model isn’t unique to policing either. Throughout the state, healthcare providers, oilfield workers, and pilots work similar schedules.
But whether it works well with policing is up for debate. Bethel’s chief public safety officer, James Harris, said as much at a public safety town hall meeting back in February.
“I can tell you that having a two week on, two week off schedule for the police department comes with a lot of challenges,” Harris said.
Harris said that it’s a matter of continuity.
“It is very difficult for a detective to be able to – especially a detective, especially in criminal investigations – it's very difficult for them to be able to work a case consistently from beginning to end when they have a two week break in there,” Harris said.
Bethel resident Diane McEachearn made a connection between the two weeks on, two weeks off system and what she sees as complacency from officers.
“It means that their two weeks is just relentless taking calls, going to bed, get up, taking calls,” McEachearn said. “So their vision of Bethel becomes myopic, and very particular to those kinds of calls.”
Early in 2024, someone shot 15 bullets into McEachearn's house and car. McEachearn – who volunteers for KYUK – said that the officer who came, hours later, didn’t request security camera footage from the vicinity or even want to collect the bullet casings. Maybe, she wondered, if they were more invested in the community they’d have made different decisions. She believes that when an officer’s view of Bethel is mostly police work, they miss out on the joys of living fully in a rural community.
“They're not enjoying the salmon auction and enjoying Saturday Market. And we don't see them just in the store shopping, you know, like just community people,” McEachearn said. “I feel bad for them because they don't get all that Bethel really is because they're here for that two weeks and then they leave. And so they're not part of the flow.”
"A necessary evil"
Former Acting Police Chief Amy Davis said that the Bethel Police Department didn’t choose this system because it’s ideal. They chose it because they had to.
Davis works for the detectives’ unit in Fairbanks, but back in 2011 she’d just started her first full-time law enforcement job in Bethel.
“I'd never set foot in Alaska, and I got on an airplane by myself and flew up there, and my family joined me about three months later, in the middle of winter, and it was like 35 below [zero degrees Fahrenheit],” Davis recalled. It was a big shift for her, but she and the department worked hard to build relationships with community organizations like the Tundra Women’s Coalition and the hospital.
Davis said that she wanted to see the department staffed with full-timers – she saw the benefit of living in town full-time. But by 2016, recruiting had become near-impossible and officers weren’t getting days off.
“Bethel is one of those places where people don't stick around very long,” Davis said. “You're lucky to have them for two to three years.”
Facing fatigue, Davis said that the department and city decided to try out a rotational schedule to bring in recruits from out of town. They hoped it would fill a gap, but after about a year Davis said that the department put everyone on the same two weeks on, two weeks off schedule, even local officers. It’s been that way since.
“It's not an ideal schedule. I'm not a proponent of it,” Davis said. “But I also know that it's a necessary evil, if you will.”
The Bethel Police Department succeeded in adding three longtime residents of Bethel to their roster in recent years. These are people who could hypothetically work typical 40-hour weeks, but for now they’re doing two weeks on, two weeks off just like everybody else.
Evan Erickson and Samantha Watson contributed to this story.
This story was reported with APM Reports, an investigative reporting team with American Public Media.
Do you feel like there's something missing from this story, or have information you'd like to share? Let us know here. You can also call the newsroom at 907-543-0223 or email news@kyuk.org.
