What's it like having an entire town in one building? Crime? Illness? Religious events? Births? Deaths?
When I was there, some Alaskan religious group would rotate some "nondenominational" preacher through for a year or three and serve up basic Sunday School type Christianity out of an ugly room in the big building pictured.
There seemed to be a high-ish suicide rate, and working in the fishing industry is fairly dangerous.
Sorry for the barrage of questions, but I found these points very interesting.
The population has varied considerably over the years. It looks like it's somewhat lower than when I lived there. In a lot of ways, Whittier is not a nice place to live, so people where always moving away, but it had certain appeals that always drew new people in as well.
> The brief article mentions a Sheriff and I assume there may or may not be a deputy also. It also mentions a pot bust. What happens to people arreste?
This is a bit of a change from when I lived there. Back then, there was a separate building that housed the police department (not sheriffs), the fire department and a court room. A judge would come through once a month or so. That building is gone from Google Maps now though, so it must have burned down or collapsed under a heavy snow load or something (that happens). Any serious crimes would be sent off to Anchorage. I would imagine that is how it still works.
> I imagine since everyone knows everyone, the police would know anyone they arrest (and their family) quite well.
Probably? We all pretty much knew who was an alcoholic, or who beat their wife. There seemed to be plenty of petty theft and vandalism to go around. I still wanna know who stole my Big Wheel!
Like what?
Dave Schofield is the chief of police in Whittier. He is also the only officer who lives in town. Alaska’s laws often reflect the needs of a sparsely populated state, which presents challenges for policing within Begich Towers. For example, the state constitution has written into it a right to privacy; if something is occurring in your own home, you have the right to keep it private. This means that although there is a pervasive smell of marijuana in Begich Towers, the police can do little about it. “The law says you can’t have drugs within 500 feet of a school; there’s not a unit in this building that’s 500 feet from the school, but we have the right-to-privacy issue.”
The pot bust itself appears to have stemmed from this event:
A few years ago, a pot grower on the 10th floor had just finished a harvest and decided to get rid of some of the evidence by flushing it down the toilet. In the process he stopped up the plumbing on the floors below him—a neighbor called city management to complain that someone had flushed large amounts of dog food down the toilets, but it turned out to be pellets of grow medium.
http://reedyoung.com/project/whittier-alaska/r-young-whittie...