After four police shootings in Alaska’s largest city so far in 2026, the Anchorage Police Department is calling for broader support and conversations around behavioral health and substance misuse.
Those issues are at the heart of the high number of police shootings, Police Chief Sean Case said at a press conference Friday, during which Case released new details about the latest shooting.
Officers shot and killed Emil McCord, 33, early the morning of May 19 in East Anchorage.
The call started with reports of gunfire, Case said.
“When the officers arrived on scene, the individual was still sitting on the ground on the side of the road,” he said.
Body camera footage showed McCord getting up, walking into the road and raising his right arm up toward the sky, Case said.
“One of the commands is, ‘Drop it, I don't want to shoot you, drop it,’ and the officer at this point in time could clearly observe that he was holding a weapon, a handgun, in his right hand,” Case said.
McCord slowly lowered the handgun and pointed it at the officers, who then shot him, Case said.
While the whole thing played out in less than 20 seconds, it’s part of a long-running problem in Anchorage. The city has some of the highest rates of police shootings per capita in the country. There have been 17 in the last two years, 10 of them resulting in fatalities.
After McCord’s death, Case called for a broader conversation about gun violence in the city. The police department wants to involve medical and behavioral health professionals, as well as other organizations like schools and churches, he said.
Case said he spends time with the family members of people shot by police, and they often tell him there were warning signs.
“There's only so much we can do in a two-second call,” he said. “What are we doing as a community that's broader? Who are we going to sit down at the table with and have a real discussion?”
The city has created several crisis response teams within various departments. The police department’s Mobile Intervention Team is made up of officers paired with social workers and other healthcare professionals.
But MIT didn’t respond on May 19. The intervention teams are limited in what they can do, and they don’t work at night, Case said. That’s despite the fact that two-thirds of Anchorage police shootings occur at night, according to police department data.
Even if MIT had been on duty, Case said the May 19 incident unfolded too quickly. Plus, there was a gun involved.
“This is an individual that's walking out into a roadway with a gun, and at that point the communication really is addressing that immediate threat, which is, ‘Drop the gun, put the gun down, let's get the threat away from us so that nothing bad happens,’” he said.
The officers responded exactly as they were trained to, Case said.
Still, one of the officers in the May 19 shooting has shot four people in the last two years, including McCord.
Case said there’s a good explanation: Officer Jacob Jones works the night shift, and he’s a K-9 officer. That means he’s not tied to a specific area. K-9 officers are often the first to respond to high-risk calls, because they have the freedom to move about the city. So, Case said, it’s actually Jones’ position that tees him up for multiple incidents.
“I understand the frustration when we have these shootings,” he said. “We're with you. The officer that's been involved in four of these, I can promise you, where he's at is not in a great place himself.”
The state Office of Special Prosecutions reviews every police shooting in Alaska and has ruled that all of 17 that have happened in Anchorage in the past two years were legally justified.
Case said he’d be surprised if the shootings were found to not be justified.
“We train them better than that,” he said. “We expect better than that, and so I don't think that's a statistical anomaly at all. I think that's just the type of people we have.”
The police department is looking at increasing its use of what it calls “less-lethal” options. Case said he’s excited about a soon-to-be released update that will make tasers effective at three times the current distance.
The Office of Special Prosecutions has until early July to determine whether the shooting that killed Emil McCord was legally justified. As per department policy, Anchorage police are set to release video of the incident after that determination is made.
