Police Alcohol-Related Services Study (PASS)

Many in Alaska view alcohol as the root cause of a wide range of social ills, many of which necessitate the involvement of the criminal justice system. Alcohol is at least implicated in a wide variety of criminal and other undesirable conduct. Less clear is the impact of alcohol use on criminal justice agencies responsible for handling the problems associated with it. The direct influence of alcohol use alone, excluding other factors, is nearly impossible to estimate—especially for the court and correctional systems, where alcohol involvement is so ubiquitous across cases as to be nearly constant. For police agencies, the task of measuring organizational impact is made difficult by the broad scope of their institutional mandate, which goes far beyond mere law enforcement.

The objective of the Police Alcohol-related Services Study (PASS) is to study the impact of alcohol involvement on police work by examining the nature, consequences, and causes of alcohol-related encounters and incidents experienced by the patrol division of the Anchorage Police Department (APD). Data will be collected through direct field observations of routine patrol operations of Anchorage police officers by professionally trained and certified interviewers.