Alaska State Troopers

The Alaska State Troopers, officially the Division of Alaska State Troopers (AST), is the state police agency of the U.S. state of Alaska. It is a division of the Alaska Department of Public Safety (DPS). The AST is a full-service law enforcement agency that handles both traffic and criminal law enforcement. The AST is also involved in apprehending fugitives as part of the Alaska Fugitive Task Force, an inter-agency collaborative of Alaska police departments that cooperates with police agencies throughout the United States and less commonly with Interpol in apprehending wanted men and women. Unlike many lower 48 states, the AST also serves as Alaska’s primary environmental law enforcement agency; troopers assigned to the AST’s Division of Alaska Wildlife Troopers are known as "Alaska Wildlife Troopers" and primarily serve as game wardens, although they retain the same powers as other Alaskan state troopers. Because Alaska has no counties, therefore no county police or sheriffs, in its constitution, the troopers also handle civil papers and mental health custody orders and serve as police through most of rural Alaska. Alaska does have boroughs, which have some similarities but with the lesser powers of lower-48 U.S. counties, but only the North Slope Borough Police Department truly functions similarly to a lower-48 county police agency, thus relieving AST of the need to be the primary police agency in this particular region. With jurisdiction across all 663,268 square miles (1,717,856 square kilometres) of Alaska, Alaskan state troopers are the most geographically extended law enforcement officers within the United States, apart from federal officers. They have little, if any,local backup. Within the entire State of Alaska, only about 1,300 full-time sworn law enforcement officers patrol a state 1/5th the size of the entire Lower 48. Other than troopers and state park rangers (peace officers employed by Alaska’s Division of Parks and Outdoor Recreation), local officers remain in their communities except in extreme emergencies.