Welcome to Lost Anchorage,

Lost Anchorage, where crude investigates the mechanisms of crime and violence in Anchorage,

Alaska.

My name is Cody Liska, and I'll be your host.

Through research and interviews with professionals, law enforcement, and those affected by crime,

I hope to build a better understanding of whether or not Anchorage is in fact becoming more dangerous.

By the end of this series, I hope to create a portrait of crime in our city for better or for worse. You're going to be here. My name is Alan Barnes and I'm a professor of justice at the UAA Justice Center.

I've been here since 1984, got my PhD from Florida State University in 1983,

and I've been teaching justice students now for 35 years here in

Anchorage. And you had talked about before the podcast how the students you're teaching now they be the becoming judges here of course but when I first got here in the early 1980s I would

think about maybe a third to 40% of our students were planning on going into law enforcement and

back in those days you only had to work 15 years and you could retire so many of

my students from those early days have become APD officers and retired and moved on.

I'm still there of course. But many of them also went on to law school, became lawyers here in town, or judges around the country, etc.

And then the other group of people just kind of blended into the community and I see them in a wide variety of

places. So in your emails you told me that as a criminologist you have a greater focus

on why crime happens rather than how much crime happens. a greater

focus on why crime happens rather than how much crime happens.

I call myself a criminologist and it turned out that for many many years

and indeed again because the only other one she was on our faculty she left

but of all of the people in our state who purport to have PhDs in in this field

I'm the only one who graduated from a school of criminology and so we

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