Haines Borough Police Chief Gary Lowe this week defended the actions of an officer who shot a brown bear near the Haines School early Monday morning that then escaped into the woods there.
The bear became dangerously habituated to town, Lowe said. “We normally have pre-approval before an officer takes any action like that, and this particular bear was one that we’ve been discussing amongst ourselves and with the state fish and game for at least a couple of weeks.”
Some residents, however, said police may have made a bear hazard more dangerous and one veteran hunter questioned the way police went about the kill.
Lowe declined to name the shooter, who has been reported as officer Simon Ford.
“It’s not an unusual thing,” Lowe said. “We don’t like to do it, but it does happen. This is the second one this year that we’ve had to dispatch.”
Lowe said the bear was shot around 2:30 a.m. from “probably about 30 feet” with a 12-gauge slug “right in the lungs.”
“It had been called in the night before, problems with that bear, and, in fact, the officers have been tracking that bear for the last week or so, and have shot it several times with rubber bullets and flashbangs,” he said. “They were keeping a close watch on it Saturday night because of the school dance, but the bear had just returned to the school area, the trash dumpster.”
A few officers later attempted to find the bear, but were unsuccessful, Lowe said.
“The third shift officer was the one who was alone at the time (of the shooting), and then it was about 8 o’clock in the morning when there were three officers that went out into the woods and searched the wooded area for it,” he said.
The bear had not been located as of Tuesday.
“I think it’s a fairly safe assumption that the bear crawled off someplace and died,” Lowe said.
Hunter and longtime resident Craig Loomis said police were undermanned for shooting a bear at night, and used too small a gun. “If you’re going to shoot a bear, you need to kill it,” Loomis said.
Loomis described the 12-gauge as a “riot gun” effective on people, but not so good for a wild animal twice or three times the size of a person. “If it hits bone, it’s not going to do much,” Loomis said. A high-powered hunting rifle would have been more appropriate, used with caution that the bullet might exit the animal, he said.
Loomis also said it’s difficult for a night shooter to use a light and a gun at the same time, and that a second officer should have been involved. “I’d say this was unprofessional.”
Loomis said he supported killing such animals, and also supports relaxed limits for brown bear hunting in the valley. “There are so many bears downtown, we’re lucky no one’s gotten mauled yet. If that thing’s wounded out there and somebody stumbles on it, that could happen.”
Lowe said the bear “didn’t attack anybody, but he certainly wasn’t leaving.”
“That particular bear had just become habituated to town,” Lowe said. “He had his nightly routine that he would go from Deishu to Fort Seward, and then he’d hit the dumpsters in the downtown area. He was at the senior housing and several of the restaurants downtown.”
He blamed “access to easy food,” which is something the Haines Borough Assembly is trying to address through a bear attraction nuisance ordinance.
“If we’d had more secure dumpsters in town, this bear wouldn’t have gotten himself shot,” Lowe said.
He said the bear had reached the point where it was “beyond any hope that we can get him out of town, and the possibilities of something bad happening just rise incrementally.”
“If we made a mistake, we might have let this go on too long, with this particular bear,” Lowe said.