Colonel Glover describes Arizona DPS's push toward international intelligence partnerships—hosting liaison officers from Mexico, the UAE, and Liberia—to share unclassified crime-trend data before threats materialize locally. ✦ AI generated
Colonel Glover · a16z Podcast · 2026-05-18 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 6:47
“Do you want to talk a little bit real quickly about the intelligence gathering apparatus?”
We have a lot of partnerships with different groups, especially, you know, of course we are a border state, so we have the state of Sonora, Mexico that's right next to us. We're looking at being able to have the ability of having intelligence officers from Mexico, from the UAE, from Liberia, from different parts of the world because the world is getting a lot smaller.
verbatim transcript · starts at 6:47
6:30because that's the that's the the big event that's coming up as well as the Olympics. Um, but one of the things in Arizona that I'm doing is I'm leaning heavily into be making sure that we're having sort of an international presence as well. So we have a lot of partnerships, um, with different groups, especially, you know, of course we are a border state, so we have the state of
6:47Sonora, Mexico that's right next to us. We're looking at being able to have the ability of having intelligence officers from, uh, Mexico, from the UAE, from Liberia, from different, uh, parts of the world because the world is getting a lot smaller. Uh, we all know that crime is happening everywhere. Being able to condense that down and distill it to where we can have good information sharing that's unclassified be able to
7:11share with one another on trends and being able to back stop that with technology and AI helps us with being able to actually stop a lot of the trends before they start. Absolutely. We saw, you know, very sadly in Austin that global events have local repercussions. So I think, uh, we've seen in New York City that their, uh, counterterrorism work, the NYPD, uh, has been very successful. I'm excited to hear that
7:34you're bringing that kind of a program into into Arizona. Uh, Rahul, you, you You you started out as a policeman, as a as a paramedic. Uh now that you've seen all this technology, some of which you've brought to bear in public safety, uh you know, do you think there's still great opportunities in public safety? What would you What advice would you start to give to founders who are, you
7:56know, less interested in optimizing ad clicks and, you know, more interested in actually building something that that helps first responders and save lives? And uh what would you say? You know, I already know great founders uh that are working in public safety. It's funny. The Colonel was talking about uh tracking the performance of his uh you know, the the members of his department. In Burnout, there's a
8:17founder here, Ben Curley, in the audience said is uh the CEO of Chart Performance that does exactly that. You should I'm going to introduce you after this. You haven't met him already. We're already talking to >> All right, good. Good. Um but there's plenty of a great founders out there that are that are that are uh tackling public safety. My My advice to them is like, "Look,
8:34it comes off as very intimidating. I'm sure the Colonel's heard this saying, but it's There's two things cops hate. For things to change and for things to stay the same." And so it feels like a a very narrow thread that you have to hit. But the reality is that if you can picture something that feels like an inevitability, in the same way that, you know, we talk about drones, AI, some of