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Smart Policing Initiative Podcast: Glendale, AZ Phase I
Lieutenant Frank Balkcom, Glendale Police Department
Dr. Michael White, Research Partner, Arizona State University
September 2011

[Beginning of transcript]
Lt. Frank Balkcom: Lt. Frank Balkcom, Glendale Police Department.
Dr. Michael White: I’m Mike White from Arizona State University.
Lt. Frank Balkcom: One of the many successes that we’ve had at our apartment complex is
that we’ve actually changed the culture of the complex by including the management and the
tenants in the apartment complex. They’ve become a vital component in our community
policing project. We’ve seen the calls for services have drastically decreased. We’ve also
created that safe environment, because it used to be that the residents would not come out
at night. As a result of our efforts, our teamwork and our coalition that we’ve created, we’ve
created a safer haven for them, as can be verified by the calls for services that have
drastically gone down. The occupancy rate is really high, and you can easily tell. We’ve got a
monitoring system that we communicate with them daily, we have an email system that we
talk to them daily, and most importantly it’s allowed us the opportunity to use some of these
new data driven techniques, intelligence-led policing strategies to help us work a little bit
smarter and more effectively.
Dr. Michael White: And with our other project with Circle-K, as we’ve continued to face
resistance from the corporation, one of the things we did is we reached out to other law
enforcement agencies in the valley, and we formed a working group. The idea was that if we
can bring a number of different agencies together we can, as a group, have more leverage
than any one agency could by themselves. So we formed a working group, we’ve been having
meetings with Mesa PD [Police Department], Glendale PD obviously, Peoria and Tempe PD,
and we’ve also asked for calls for service data from each of those agencies and we produced
a multi-city report which essentially showed that Glendale was not alone, that the
convenience store crime problem in all those other cities as well involved Circle-K. So
together we pulled the data together, we published that report, and we received some media
attention, which the other effect that it had was it got Circle-K back to our table and we’ve
continued to work in that regard.
[End of transcript]

This project was supported by Grant No. 2009-DG-BX-K021 awarded by the Bureau of Justice Assistance. The Bureau of Justice Assistance is a component of the Office of Justice Programs, which also includes the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the National Institute of Justice, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, and the Office for Victims of Crime. Points of view or opinions in this document are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. This podcast can be viewed on the Smart Policing Initiative website:

This project was supported by Grant No. 2009-DG-BX-K021 awarded by the Bureau of Justice Assistance. The Bureau of Justice Assistance is a component of the Office of Justice Programs, which also includes the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the National Institute of Justice, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, and the Office for Victims of Crime. Points of view or opinions in this document are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.

Source: http://www.smartpolicinginitiative.com/sites/all/files/video/Transcripts/SPI%20Glendale%20-AZ-I-Sept2011-Lt%20Frank%20Balkcom%20and%20Dr%20Michael%20White-Podcast%20Transcript%20Final.pdf