by Bea Lueck
When Mark McCrory was hired as Casa Grande’s police chief in 2016, he already had 33 years of experience under his law enforcement badge. He knew the Tulsa Police Department inside and out, working his way up to captain, going undercover for the narcotics squad and rising to deputy chief of operations, guiding it through the budget turmoil of the Great Recession. He is a graduate of the FBI National Academy and the Senior Management Institute of Policing.
McCrory and his wife Shelly were drawn to the warmth they received from Casa Grandeans as he applied for the chief’s job. Since then he’s been steering the department as it keeps up with the City’s rapid growth. The McCrorys share a home with their “doodle” dogs, Cane and Stella, and are frequently visited by their sons, who live in Tulsa and Kansas City.
Golden Corridor: I’m here with Chief Mark McCrory with the Casa Grande Police Department. Can you give me a little bit of background? Where did you grow up and what brought you into law enforcement?
Chief McCrory: I was born and raised in central Pennsylvania, in Lewistown to be exact. I went to college in Pennsylvania at Shippensburg State and took administration of justice as my major. I wasn’t sure if I was going to go into the military or go into law enforcement. Once I got out of college, I decided just to move to Tulsa, Oklahoma, sight unseen. Didn’t have a job there or anything. My first wife and I moved there, she was my girlfriend at the time, and I joined the Tulsa Police Department in July of 1982 and stayed there until December of 2015.
Golden Corridor: You started as an officer. How did you move up in rank and services in Tulsa?
Chief McCrory: Well, I hit every rank in Tulsa. I worked every division, either worked it or oversaw it. The ranks in Tulsa are just like anywhere else. It’s a competitive process, so I ended up leaving Tulsa as a deputy chief and retired in 2015.
Golden Corridor: OK. Where did you go from ‘15?
Chief McCrory: Well, in December of 2015 I retired and moved here and took this job. I started Feb. 16, 2016.
Golden Corridor: And why Casa Grande?
Chief McCrory: I came from a city and a large department, and my last couple years there, I was miserable, so I started looking different places across the country, and I saw Casa Grande, Arizona, which I’d never heard of. I worked with a guy who went to high school with an officer who worked here, believe it or not. I called him up and started talking to him about it, heard what he had to say, so I put in for it. And I was in the finals of a couple other ones in Texas, one was Corpus Christi and the other was Addison. And I was already set to go there to interview. So, we get this interview, and my wife and I come down.
We get here, following one another because she had to leave earlier, and we got out of the car and we’re just not really sure about this place. And then we started meeting people that live here. And I went back to the hotel and I told my wife, “I’m withdrawing from the other ones.” And she’s like, “Really?” And I said, “If I don’t get this, we’re going to start over,” which kind of surprised her.
But it took her about a day, getting around and meeting people, and she understood it. And it was the people here that was the big draw to me. I mean, I found everybody here to be genuine, friendly. Didn’t matter where you were in the social economic scale, they were just all friendly and very genuine people. I withdrew from the other two before I had this job because I found a place that felt good. And if I didn’t get this, I was going to try to find another place that felt just like this.
It’s definitely a smaller police force here. Tulsa, I think when I left, we had 840 sworn personnel, something like that, and we came here to 80, counting me.
Golden Corridor: How many today?
Chief McCrory: We’re authorized to have 90 sworn personnel right now. We’re at 86, and four of those just graduated from the academy up in Gilbert.
Golden Corridor: Is recruiting still a challenge? It’s been a challenge for law enforcement nationwide for years.
Chief McCrory: Well, we actually have a lot of applicants. We like to think we’re a little selective about who we pick, so we turn down people. We don’t just take them to fill up a slot. We recruit a little bit differently than some other departments may.
We bring them in, talk to them, invite their spouse or significant other to come in and tour the police station and get a look at us. I usually tell most of them that we’re going to hire or that we’re putting them through the process, just myself for a little bit just to get to know them. Then we really stress hiring locals if they’re available. We want people who know the Casa Grande culture, who know our police department, who have roots here. That’s been pretty effective for us. We really haven’t had a lot of problems recruiting people.
Golden Corridor: What are some of the challenges the officers face each patrol?
Chief McCrory: Policing has changed so much since I started. They’re being called on to do everything. They’re expected to be masters of many different things, not just enforcing the state laws or the city ordinances. They’re called on to be marriage counselors. They’re called on to be psychologists. They’re called on to be addiction specialists. At times they’re called on to be medics.
The responsibilities they have are huge. There’s a lot of issues that come up that are really society’s issues, but our officers face the task of solving them, if you will. Mental health issues, homelessness, things like that, so it puts a lot of stress on them. They stay busy.
I think we’re fortunate in Casa Grande that we really do have a lot of good community support, and we have a lot of support from our city leadership. I think that makes it better for us. I remember when they were saying “defund the police” and everybody seemed like they wanted to take a shot, verbally, at the police.
We had people coming in all the time, dropping off cards, cookies, pizzas, things like that to just show us that they supported us. That’s the one thing about working here that has been very pleasant, is the amount of support this department gets. These men and women earn it.
Golden Corridor: What about crime in general? Social media has made awareness instantaneous. If something happens at the corner of X and Y, everybody knows about it within seconds. Is the frequency of incidents increasing or does it appear to be increasing because our population is increasing but the percentages are actually decreasing?
Chief McCrory: The thing about social media and reporting on crime is that less than half the time it’s accurate and it spreads like wildfire. They can write what they want, they can make assumptions, and nobody ever really challenges them. I would say Casa Grande is a very safe city. Of course we’re in business to try to make it safer.
But nor do we respond to social media even when they’re wrong. Crime is certainly not out of hand here, for a city growing this size. We do have some crimes that are of high public interest. Recently, we had that shooting where one person died and five people were shot. But they knew each other. It wasn’t a stranger-on-stranger crime.
I think our people do a pretty good job of keeping our community safe. I think that people do speculate on social media and they run with it, and we really don’t pay a whole lot of attention to that.
Golden Corridor: But sometimes social media does good. Example, Silent Witness postings. Here’s a photo of someone who just robbed this store. Do you know this person?
Chief McCrory: I would venture to say, and I’m 99.9% sure, that our website and our social media platforms are hit more than any in the city combined. People are interested in what’s going on around them. They’re interested in crime and policing, which can be a good thing.
Golden Corridor: How has law enforcement changed from when you first started in Tulsa to today?
Chief McCrory: It’s become more complex, obviously technology has changed dramatically. When I was in Tulsa, I can remember when I was working narcotics as a sergeant getting my first cellphone.
Golden Corridor: The size of a brick?
Chief McCrory: It was a bag phone. It was actually in a bag. But the technology aspect of policing has changed and honestly made it better. Transparent is a word that’s thrown around all the time, but it’s made our job more transparent. It’s made us more efficient. We get things accomplished quicker, we’re more detail-oriented. When I started in Tulsa, I wouldn’t even have known what a drone was. Today, our department has four of them that we utilize.
I can remember using a floppy drive or disks or whatever. I can remember typing on an actual typewriter. That was years into my job until we got computers. I think it always had the tendency to be a stressful profession, but I think there’s a lot more stress on these younger guys. I think the expectations are greater. I think the scrutiny that they’re under is greater.
I think if you did your job well, you were always accountable, but I think there’s more people questioning now what these guys and gals are doing. That could be a good thing, but I just think it adds to the stress level.
Golden Corridor: What are some of the programs available or programs, services, mentorship, assistance, whatever you’d term it, for the officers to deal with this additional stress?
Chief McCrory: We have a chaplain who’s on site that works with us, so they have that ability to talk to them. We also have Casa Grande Public Safety that is a nonprofit. This group not only supports programs for community members but they also aid police families in need. There is also the Casa Grande Peace Officer Memorial Foundation, another nonprofit that does community projects as well as assist police families in need. Both of these programs were started and are run by members of our agency.
A program that we brought in was Vitanya. That program is almost science fictionlike, but it worked. I went through it too. You had a commitment, I believe it was three months or a little bit longer than that, that you had to commit to this program. And you talk to somebody twice a week at the start, and then you would go once a week after that, and then they have their supplements that you take while you’re on this. And then there’s a headset that covers your eyes and headphones in a dark room that we have back here that you went in for 15 minutes and it plays this music.
Golden Corridor: Kind of a meditation type thing?
Chief McCrory: Yeah. It’s just a very soothing… It’s hard to describe, but it worked. I didn’t hear anybody that went through this program that it didn’t help lower your stress. And it’s hard to explain it to somebody that hasn’t done it.
Golden Corridor: So are the officers saying, I’m having a bad day, it’s the end of my shift, I want to spend 15 minutes in the room?
Chief McCrory: Yeah, they have access to it. They let us keep the equipment. We have some who are still doing it actually that started late. I think people were a little apprehensive about it at first because it did sound so science-fiction, kind of. But once they started talking to their friends and stuff that were doing it’s like, I’m going to try that. So we have some people just now in the midst of doing that also.
Golden Corridor: What other ongoing training is available for the officers?
Chief McCrory: Well, you have mandatory training every year of certain types of skills, your shooting or Tasers, less lethal rounds, things like that. But we allow the officers, too, to find training areas of interest. I will say, our officers, I think anyway, and I would hope they would agree with me on that, they get a ton of training, both in-state and out-of-state training.
Obviously, the out-of-state ones, we need to be a little bit more selective. The type of training varies, and a lot of times different units will send their people to different types of training. But we encourage our officers if they find training or something pops up that they like, that they put in for it, if it’s in their interest or career building down a path they want, or something like that.
Golden Corridor: Let’s talk about what is really the backbone of a police department, your support staff.
Chief McCrory: I’ll start with not even people that are hired. Our volunteers at the police department really keep us moving. I think it was last year they donated something like, I’d like to get the exact figure, but I think it’s like 15,000 hours or something crazy. We have about a hundred volunteers, some sporadic, some are here every day. And they help us with traffic control on accidents, they shuttle our cars back and forth from the garage so we don’t have to do it, they do our senior phone patrol where they check in on elderly, they do neighborhood patrols, not for enforcement purposes but they check on alarms, they check on houses that people are away on vacation, things like that. They’re invaluable and they saved the city literally hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. They’re wonderful.
And our other support staff, our records and our admin. people and staff, obviously they are involved in the day-to-day operations of the police department that oftentimes go unnoticed until they’re not there and then you realize what a value they are. I think we try to show our appreciation to everybody in this building. I think they feel like they’re valued, and they know that they do an important job no matter what section they’re in to keep us moving in the right direction. They go unnoticed by the public for the most part.
Golden Corridor: And then your dispatchers?
Chief McCrory: They’re under the command of the fire department, but we deal with them more than anybody. The good dispatchers do more than just put out calls for service. They get concerned, they check on officers, they care about our safety. They get a lot of grief because they have to ask 50 questions when somebody calls in, but they’re doing that for a reason. They’re invaluable. And we’re fortunate here that our dispatchers are very good dispatchers.
Golden Corridor: Where do you see the police department evolving to in five years, 10 years, 20 years down the road?
Chief McCrory: Well, I think the technology part of that’s going to continue to grow. We’re currently looking into projects for a real-time information center. I think in five years, within five years, we will have drones as first responders. We’re already looking into that. Departments are doing it now where the drones automatically launch themselves and they go to calls and feed information real-time back before an officer even gets there. I see that happening here certainly within five years.
Hopefully within five years our numbers will grow because Casa Grande’s not a little secret anymore, and we’re growing. Industry’s coming here, and with industry, the housing is ticking back up and the population’s growing. So I think calls for service will naturally grow with it, and I would hope that our number of sworn personnel is above 90. I would certainly hope so for our department. I think we need to grow along with the population.
If a police department wants to hire somebody, when you take in the recruitment side, the background investigation, the process to get somebody to go to an academy, then you take in the academy time, then after that you take in the time they’re in training until they get kicked out on their own, when they’re actually out there helping us as an individual officer, it’s a year. So with the police department and fire departments too, you almost have to staff ahead of growth, which is hard sometimes for communities to buy into because there’s a cost associated with it.
But where you can run into trouble in a police department is getting to a point in needing officers and not having any hired because you’re a year out, at least a year out. And we don’t have our own academy here. We send ours to Gilbert or to Tucson, and so it depends on when they actually hold an academy. And then you can only get so many seats in each academy because there’s other departments wanting the same thing, right? So if all of a sudden you decide you need five officers, you may not be able to get five officers into an academy, for instance.
Our city council has been very supportive of us, and our city manager Larry Rains has been very supportive of us. So I don’t have any doubts that we’ll grow as we need to grow, it’s just a matter of how quick we can accomplish that. We’re authorized for 90 now, but we’re only at 86. We plan on having those filled sometime early fall.
Golden Corridor: What would you tell someone who’s considering a career in law enforcement?
Chief McCrory: Well, No. 1, it’s not like on TV. You don’t catch a serial killer in an hour with eight commercials mixed in. I would tell somebody to take a hard look, do a ride-along, talk to people who are in that profession and think it over. I’m in my 42nd year, I couldn’t imagine doing anything else. I tell these younger people just starting out that it’s a fun job. It has a lot of rewards to it, you can actually go home every day and think you made a positive impact on where you work.
And you can say every day is different. I mean, you still go on the same type of calls, but every day is different. And I don’t know too many jobs when you’re on your own and you’re not on a call, you decide what you’re going to do.
I would tell somebody going into that or thinking about it, look at it hard, talk to some people doing that job, people who have been doing it for quite some time, or people new to it. Because if we put people through the academy and they get out here and they realize this isn’t what they thought it was, they quit. It’s not something everybody can do. You do have to have a desire to do it. But we’ve sent people to academies who quit in training because it wasn’t what they thought it was going to be, and they didn’t do their homework, and we probably didn’t do our homework on them by drilling down on it.
But that’s not all I’d tell them. I just tell them it’s fun. It’s rewarding. It can be very boring. It can be extremely exciting. But it’s one that I really truly believe that you can go home every day having done something that made the community you’re living in or working in better. And I don’t know many jobs that can say that.
Golden Corridor: How would people, if they wanted to be a volunteer, what would be their process?
Chief McCrory: If somebody would want to volunteer, they can call and we’ll put them in touch with Wendy Lloyd, and Wendy would get them through a process. We do a background check on our volunteers because they have access to everything. We’ve had a couple of people who actually got offended that we were going to do that, but they have access to everything, our software, computers, our building, and so you have to at least know who’s here.
Golden Corridor: What if I wanted to explore a career in law enforcement? What’s the process there?
Chief McCrory: They would have to get on the city website and go to Human Resources for jobs available and hit that link and fill out an application with the city, and there’s an online test that they take. And then the process starts with that application review. And we have a physical testing portion of it that they have to pass, and there’s an interview with our recruiting people. If you make it past that and the physical, then we have an oral board comprised of officers and a couple sergeants that ask standardized questions.
And then if you pass that, then they come to the command review where I and all the lieutenants and deputy chiefs interview them and it’s a more of an informal setting where we ask particular questions depending on the answers we get. And that’s why the whole process takes a while.
We’ve been fortunate that we’ve gotten some really good people, and we’ve gotten people who want to work here. And we’re just like anybody else, we lose people. We have people who go somewhere else for whatever reason they do. Or retire.
Golden Corridor: And what about you? What are your plans for retirement, or after retirement?
Chief McCrory: About, I don’t know, maybe three years ago or maybe four now, Shelly and I sat down one day and we were talking and we’re like, “We’re never going to leave here. Are we?” And she goes, “No, I don’t ever want to leave here.”
So when we bought our last house, and when I’m done here, I’m still going to live here. Like I said, I had no regrets on my career field or choice, I have absolutely no regrets of coming to Casa Grande. This has been probably one of the best things that’s happened to me and to my wife. And our two sons get it. They miss us. One lives in Kansas City, one lives in Tulsa, but they come here a lot and they understand we’re not coming home. Because that’s what we were going to do, go back and live closer to them, but it just felt right here.
