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Alaska troopers star in reality show
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Published: October 16, 2009
The call, a request for a "subject removal," comes to Sgt. Odean Hall on a cold Fairbanks night. "He's reporting a female," the dispatcher says. "She's extremely 10-56."
On the evidence of Alaska State Troopers, a new reality series Wednesdays at 10 p.m. on the National Geographic Channel, Alaska as a whole is extremely 10-56 (police code for publicly intoxicated).
People ride their snow machines while drunk. Men put chokeholds on their wives while drunk. A drunk refuses to leave his friend's house when asked, leading to this suggestion from a trooper: "You can go to jail in your underwear or you can go to jail in your pants. I'd like to take you in your pants."
The drunks we see in Troopers appear to be less belligerent, but perhaps more stubborn, than their Florida or Arizona counterparts. There is definitely a higher percentage of blurred faces on screen: Apparently, signed release forms are harder to come by up north.
On the other hand, public nudity is somewhat less common. That may be because of the cold, of course, but in general the show focuses less on the pixelated humiliation of miscreants than on the celebration of the men and women who patiently administer sobriety tests and suggest that a night might best be spent in a hospital or a shelter. Hall is so friendly that the extremely 10-56 woman is soon calling him "my trooper friend."
For the most part, the show avoids cliches of rugged individualism and frontier justice, though a trooper matter-of-factly notes that most of the civilians the officers encounter will be armed. Two segments in the premiere episode deal with illegal shooting or trapping of moose; in each case the trooper involved notes that the real tragedy is that the animal will not be providing food or sport for a law-abiding Alaskan.
The most famous Alaska state trooper did not make an appearance in the premiere last Wednesday, and he will not show up during the five-episode run, according to the producers. That would be Trooper Michael Wooten, Sarah Palin's former brother-in-law, the one who her family and associates tried to have fired while she was governor.
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