James Hoelscher said that receiving an award for public service at the recent convention of the Association of Village Council Presidents (AVCP) in Bethel was a homecoming.
"People that I haven’t seen in a long time, people that I’ve trained over the years, it’s always good to see you and quyana cakneq," Hoelscher told attendees at the Yupiit Picaryarait Cultural Center.
Long before Hoelscher was picked to head the state’s Village Public Safety Officer (VPSO) Operations Division, he spent six years working for the regional tribal consortium as a VPSO himself.
In his home community of Hooper Bay, Hoelscher was what he refers to as a “one-stop shop for public safety.” He responded to fire, medical, search and rescue, and violent crime calls, all without carrying a gun.
That changed in 2015 when Hoelscher became one of the first VPSOs authorized by the state to carry a firearm on duty, thanks to a law passed in response to the killing of a VPSO in the Bristol Bay region two years earlier.
But the push by the state to arm VPSOs faltered. Hoelscher completed his firearm training in Sitka, but months later was told that AVCP was opting out of arming officers.
Other regional partners of the VPSO program across the state also balked at the idea of arming officers. Hoelscher said that he believes it was due in large part to training and liability concerns. Frustrated, he packed up and moved with his family to Anchorage to work as an investigator with the Alaska Alcohol and Marijuana Control Office.
"All the work that I had moved towards becoming armed as a VPSO would have been, in my mind, kind of negated," Hoelscher said.
In the years that followed, the number of VPSOs across the state dwindled. By 2019, the total had dropped to just 38 officers from more than 100 in 2012. In 2020, a state legislative task force found that the program lacked defined objectives, vision, and statutory law enforcement duties.
For Hoelscher, it was more than systemic issues with the VPSO program that led him to walk away from two decades working in public safety in Hooper Bay.
"It was the only time in my life that I felt like I needed to run away, that I was defeated," Hoelscher said. "That stress, no matter how strong you are, has its tolls."
Hoelscher said that those tolls hit especially close to home when it came to young people taking their lives.
"As a father, I've responded to dozens of suicides in my career in Hooper Bay, probably 1,000 attempts for suicide in Hooper Bay, and every single one of them took a little bit away from me," Hoelscher said.
But in 2023, Hoelscher said that he was approached by Alaska's public safety commissioner, James Cockrell, with a job opportunity. The state was creating a new division within public safety to administer grants to VPSO programs, and Hoelscher had the necessary experience.
Now at the helm, Hoelscher said that he thinks he made the right choice to step away from being a VPSO when he did, and that his work is having a positive impact.
"As of today, we have 85 VPSOs that are currently working, and they're serving a total of 63 communities. Our VPSO programs are bucking the trend from what's across the nation of police departments and public safety entities not being able to fully staff their officers," Hoelscher said.
On top of growing the programs, VPSOs in a handful of regions – from the Northwest Arctic Borough to Bristol Bay – are carrying firearms for the first time in roughly a decade.
On the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, however, none of the 13 current VSPOs carry firearms, and they remain spread thin across the region’s 47 villages.
For numerous rural communities, public safety remains a patchwork of tribal and village first responders, with state law ultimately enforced by the Alaska State Troopers. Hoelscher said that he’s heard too many accounts of people who find themselves in danger, but can't find help.
"We have too many of those stories across our regions, and we need to fix that somehow. Because the inequality of first responder response across rural Alaska is apparent," Hoelscher said.
Hoelscher said that rather than a milestone, his public service award from his former employer is a stark reminder that there is still plenty of work to be done.
