The Futility of the Refund/Defund Cycle

This episode of Beyond the Bandaids is brought to you by Project PACT (Police And Community Together).

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Connect with the co-hosts of Beyond the Bandaids:

Chief Mike Butler on LinkedIn
Dr. Carol Engel-Enright on LinkedIn
Kristin Daley on LinkedIn

The following three organizations—each committed to enhancing community well-being and policing integrity—joined forces to create Project PACT.

Law Enforcement Action Partnership (LEAP)
New Blue
The School of Statesmanship, Stewardship & Service (SOSSAS)

Beyond the Bandaids is dedicated to exploring how police officers, public safety professionals, community leaders, and community members can reconnect with their sense of purpose and inspire positive change in their local community.

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[Speaker 4] (0:02 – 0:58)
Welcome to Beyond the Band-Aids with Project PACT, the podcast where police, public safety experts, city leaders, and engaged community members explore how to create real, meaningful change in our communities. Each week host Dr. Carol Engle Enright and Chief Mike Butler have conversations with experts and visionaries who are transforming public service. Discover how innovative leadership, compassion, and restorative practices can bridge gaps and build stronger connections between community stakeholders and police officials.

If you’re ready to rediscover your purpose within your community, enhance your leadership, and make a lasting impact, Beyond the Band-Aids is the podcast for you. Whether you’re a police officer, city leader, or committed community member, join us to unlock new possibilities for a safer, more connected future. Subscribe now to Beyond the Band-Aids and be part of the movement for change.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (0:59 – 2:02)
Good morning. Welcome to Beyond the Band-Aids. I hope it’s morning somewhere where you are.

I’m Carol Engle Enright, Dr. Carol Engle Enright, and we’re here with Mike Butler and Kristen Daly. This is our third session of Beyond the Band-Aids. We’re super excited and very grateful to have you listening to us today.

Gratitude goes a long way in shifting the brain to open up and consider new ideas, possibilities, and so I’m just gonna I’m gonna do a little roundtable today and make sure everyone is is keying in. This session we’re going to talk about the kind of the cycle that we’re going through of people asking for defund and refund, the police things that we’ve heard in the news. We’re going to touch on that a little bit, but first I want to introduce Mike.

Mike, can you give a few sentences about, you know, your past, what you do, and why you’re on this podcast?

[Mike Butler] (2:03 – 2:38)
Sorry for my voice today, folks, but I’m Mike Butler. I am a former public safety chief. I oversaw police and fire in Longmont, Colorado, a community of about 100,000 people for 25 plus years, and I’m very excited to be part of Project PACT and to be part of this podcast, Beyond the Band-Aids, and I have some comments to initially make in a few minutes, but thank you for joining us and look forward to conversation and questions that you might have.

Kristen?

[Kristin Daley] (2:39 – 3:10)
I’m Kristen Daly. I’m the executive director of an organization called New Blue, which is a fellowship program for forward-thinking police officers collaborating with their communities and creating projects that change agency policy or practice in ways that build community trust. I’ve worked in police policy for about 18 years now.

I’m also a credentialed victim advocate and I do a lot of training with police on trauma-informed best practices, mostly for sexual assault and domestic violence investigations.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (3:12 – 4:58)
Okay, so I’m the layperson. I spend a lot of time around policing and this subject. I’m also a social scientist with a very big interest in neuroscience, and I think that affects every human being around here.

I want to talk about Beyond the Band-Aids and how we came up with that phrase, and I want to give a little bit of it to Mike, but I do want to say when you get a wound you have the physical appearances on the outside of your skin about a wound. What your mommy, caretaker, babysitter will do is put a band-aid on that. The real healing is happening on the inside.

It’s still a miracle. No one knows how skin heals. They don’t know how skin regrows itself over the wound, but there is this inner essence of healing that happens, and I think what we’re going to talk about a lot on this podcast today and next one and the next one and the next one is the healing that can happen within community.

As we look at public safety and how it works with community and neighborhood, that sense of feeling like I’m safe, feeling belonged, I own this neighborhood, I own this community, and I work in partnership with police. So, Mike, talk to us a little bit about your philosophy around policing and the lens of goodness. I know you talk about the lens of goodness a lot and how that can expand, and take it away.

[Mike Butler] (4:58 – 8:57)
Yeah, thanks, Carol. Hopefully, I don’t think we’re in the mode with Project PAC that we’re going to need miracles and that we’re going to need unknown forces to try to help fix or to try to help bring about a new kind of way of doing policing in our country or any country, but I also want to start real quickly by saying, you know, as a former cop for 41 years, a former public safety and police chief for over a quarter of a century, I fell in love with the policing profession and I’m still very much in love with the policing profession, and I believe in its possibilities.

Project PAC isn’t coming from the perspective of we’re trying to fix what’s wrong. As we’ve said before in a former podcast, we don’t believe policing is broken. We believe it might be stuck, and we also believe that there’s a lot of forces that go beyond the police, whether it’s through elected officials or the communities or legislative bodies that are also very much, they have very much a lot to say about what goes on in policing and what happens to police and what the police do.

And so, but we’re not here, Project PAC is not necessarily here to try to fix police departments or fix policing. We’re not going to come at it from the lens of seeing things through its deficiencies or what’s wrong or what we need to be afraid of. We’re coming at it from the perspective of what’s good, what do we want to see more of, what do we want to see expanded, what’s working well that we want to see a lot more of, and so that’s where we’re coming from.

And we’re also coming at it from the perspective of here’s what’s good, here’s the goodness that exists. And by the way, not just in our police departments, but in our communities. I think sometimes our communities kind of suffer from this perspective that they’re a problem to be fixed, and they’ve been told that by a lot of leaders and maybe sometimes by police departments.

And so, and there’s been a lot of attempts to try to fix our communities. We believe there’s an entirely different way to go about creating communities and neighborhoods that are thriving and healthy, and we’re going to be talking quite a bit about that. And so anyway, I just want people to know that that’s where we’re coming from.

And so this lens of goodness that Carol mentioned is powerful, very powerful. It’s a force that exists in our midst that sometimes we don’t give enough credit to in terms of how to leverage it, how to use it as a fulcrum to bring about the kind of change we want to see. And as we work with Project PAC, works with police departments across America, again, we’re not going to be coming at those police departments or working with those police departments and seeing them as issues or deficits.

We’re going to come at it from seeing that here’s what’s working well, here’s what’s good, here’s what they want to see more of. How can we expand that in a way that crowds out the things that we don’t want to see? I think that’s, for those of us who are parents, we know that’s how things we want to see happen with our children.

We don’t see our children as problems to be solved. We see our children as possibilities. And so that’s the nature of what we think are healthy relationships.

It could be in an intimate relationship, it could be in a friendship, it could be amongst friends, but that we see each other’s possibilities and we see what’s good and we do our best to try to expand what’s good so that it eventually does crowd out. And that’s been my own life experience, that once the good is more pervasive, it seems like almost naturally the things that we don’t want to see happen disappear.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (8:59 – 9:16)
Kristen, so you’re working one-on-one with officers and and heads of departments. Talk about some of the things that you’ve seen in the last maybe calendar year of how police are starting to work differently with communities.

[Kristin Daley] (9:17 – 11:43)
So I think police really do want to work together and collaborate with communities and I think we need to put structures in place that give them the opportunity to do that. And that’s essentially what New Blue is doing, is getting these officers who have the right mindset and who want to make an impact and pairing them with community organizations or community activists to work together on projects. And some of those projects might look like a restorative justice court or a recidivism reduction program.

We have a really amazing program from a 2022 group of fellows in Evanston, Illinois called Care Card. It’s communities all in recidivism. So essentially when an officer at Evanston Police Department encounters someone who they may need to arrest, they walk that person through a form, the Care Card, which figures out exactly what that person needs in terms of services and resources and, you know, things that go beyond the immediate issue of the police needing to arrest this person.

What do they need that could help them to break a cycle? And that has actually been an incredibly successful program. It’s been fully embraced by the entire Evanston Police Department.

It’s also been approved by their City Council and it’s moving forward in some really incredible ways. It’s changing the way that police relate to a community member. It’s changing the way that the community member thinks of the police.

I also think, you know, we task police with roles that they haven’t necessarily been prepared for and which in some cases would be better handled by those social services providers or other community stakeholders. So that’s what Care Card is looking to do. Another great example is restorative justice court.

A lot of times officers aren’t very directly involved in that process. And so there has been a past New Blue Project also from the 2022 class, where it really focused on getting officers more engaged and involved in participating in restorative justice courts. So we’re moving people from the very straightforward system of I’ve encountered a police officer, they’re going to arrest me, I’m going into the system and changing the way that we relate to people under those circumstances.

Right.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (11:43 – 12:08)
So, and for those of you listening, we’re going to go into more depth on both restorative practices and diversion, kind of philosophy around using the criminal justice system less and really being of assistance to getting people. The criminal justice system, Mike always likes to talk about it. Mike, you want to talk about the recidivism rate that happens right now?

[Mike Butler] (12:09 – 15:07)
Yeah, I think a lot of people know that recidivism, which by the way is a recidivism is defined as when someone goes through the criminal justice system and comes back out in a certain period of time, one to three years, commits another crime. That’s in essence recidivism. Well, that recidivism rate is somewhere between 50 and 70%, depending on where you’re at in this country.

And I know that we did a study in Law of Mt. Watts where we looked at several hundred people that we arrested one year for felony property crimes. And it turned out that on average, each of those people that we arrested had been arrested prior to that year, nine times on average, each of those people have been arrested nine times.

Each of those people had had 16 charges filed against them. And yet here we are arresting them on average the 10th time. Now, I hope, I’m kind of going to presume that none of us want to live our lives that way.

We don’t take our car to a mechanic and hope on the 10th time they finally fix the car. We would probably want to find another mechanic. Well, we haven’t asked that question.

We haven’t really delved into what’s happening in our criminal justice system that has that kind of futility rate, that kind of failure rate. And I’m not necessarily blaming it on the criminal justice system either. It’s just that that’s become the default system to kind of deal with a lot of the health and social issues that we have.

And so as we’ve talked about, we’ve tried to legislate our future. We try to believe that passing more laws and stiffening penalties and invoking the criminal justice system, that somehow we could fix these issues. That’s been kind of the default way of doing business for this country in terms of dealing with the woundedness in our communities.

Well, and so the criminal justice system is there. It’s an easy fix. It’s a one size fits all thing.

But as we know from a recidivism rate of 50 to 70 percent, or the numbers that came out of Alamo, Colorado in terms of all those people that we arrested that one year, it’s like, why do we want to do business that way? And so a big part of our Project PACT is to get communities and police departments to understand that they can maybe safely disassociate themselves somewhat with the hip of the criminal justice system as they associate more with the heart of their community. And so that’s how we’re going to move forward with Project PACT.

And as Carol said, we’re going to offer alternatives and options that police departments can utilize to deal with the messiness of the human condition in a way that’s much more effective. And so that’s in a future program. But we’re going to be talking about those things.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (15:08 – 17:20)
Yeah, thank you, Mike. So that’s a big bandaid, right? The criminal justice system, it’s expensive, takes a lot of resources, takes a lot of people.

It’s a very complex system. And we all pay for it. And so thinking about what might work better, you know, I was looking at some of our notes today as we first started into this project.

And Project PACT means police and community together. We think it’s not just one or the other. But we wrote down, here was a vision, a million police to help heal America.

Now imagine if you trained all the police, the providers, that they would have the social skills, the social connections, the emotional management, emotional intelligence skills, the communication skills, the understanding of how to deescalate a conflict before it happens, or it gets into a major thing. What’s interesting about the whole defund refund question is that I pulled up numbers, I’m not going to give you data numbers. Maybe in the future, we’ll start to put some blogs up around on the website.

And you can go to some of these. But there’s like a 10 from night from 2021 to 2024. There’s a 10% increase in Americans feeling like crime is increasing.

But the trends of crime, the actual crime per 100,000 people are decreasing. So Mike, I want I want to go back to you like talk about what’s happening with this narrative. How did we get to where we would even think about defunding police?

And then let’s talk about the positive aspects of policing. What does that provide for a community?

[Mike Butler] (17:21 – 24:08)
Well, yeah, thanks, Cara. We kind of use that word that phrase defund and refund rather quickly without really explaining it. But the whole thing of defund, you know, it was a word that came up after the George Floyd incident in Minneapolis in 2020.

And there was kind of a phraseology around the country that said, let’s defund the police. And it became politicized to a great level. And so and so you had this kind of push at some level to defund the police.

And that came from this perspective that we didn’t necessarily trust the police. We thought the police were kind of causing more issues, and maybe we wanted them to, that they were part of the injustice, that they were part of the racial inequality, that they were not fair, that they were focused on people of color more so than they should be. And that all this disparate impact between what happened with one race versus what happened in another race.

And so we don’t want that. Well, no one wants those things, by the way. But so anyway, we got into that defund mode.

Well, then, it didn’t take long, unfortunately, or fortunately, but this is the way the ebb and flow of policing has gone for decades, to get back into kind of a refund mode. Because local elected officials, in some cases, very liberal communities like San Francisco, and New York began to say, we need more police aggressiveness. We need more police.

We need more enforcement. And we got into this other mode of, we need more cops. Well, I think many of you know, and are watching this, that defund the police was a factor in a lot of people, a lot of police officers leaving police departments, thinking that society and their communities didn’t appreciate the work they had to do, the tough, the difficult, complex work that police have to do.

And so there were a lot of police officers who either retired early, or decided they were going to go in an entirely different career. And then the recruitment aspect of policing kind of fell off the table. I mean, it was a dramatic decrease in a police department, almost every police department in America, to recruit new police officers.

And so to this day, we have a tremendous number of openings for police officers throughout the country. And we’ll talk more about what we believe Project PAC can offer to help any police department be able to recruit and retain at a much higher level than they are right now. Without all the clever gimmicks, or without more Band-Aids, there are some police departments offering $50,000 as a bonus, just to sign up to be a police officer.

That’s where it’s gotten to. So this kind of defund refund thing, these cycles, this isn’t the first cycle. In policing for four decades, I’ve seen these cycles over and over again.

Some are a little bit more pronounced than others. This one may be a little bit more pronounced. But on the other hand, it’s tied to the crime.

And it’s a lot of, I’m just going to say, as a police chief, I never really tried to tie the absolute number of police officers we had with the crime rate that we had. I think there’s a tough correlation to make there in terms of cause and effect. We’ll talk more about what we think is behind crime.

But I also want to kind of talk a little bit about, there’s other aspects to this defund refund. What goes on with that too is, there’s these dynamics that happen, these yo-yo effects that occur. From minimal police intervention to aggressive police intervention, there’s that dynamic, there’s that sentiment that shifts and changes for police departments.

It’s for utilizing extensively to fix our social health, to utilize the police extensively to fix our social health issues, to get a minimal use to address the wounds of our community. And then there’s the highly sought after to react to crime, disorder, and traffic, to use the police to do those things, to being almost an afterthought, not wanting to use them at all. And then from being seen as disdained or part of a larger societal construct that minimizes equality, justice, and fairness, to being needed and loved and praised.

Every police officer in America that’s been in the business has gone through all those cycles, all those dynamics, all those sentiments, and they’re all kind of a push-pull kind of force behind it. Many of them are politicized. And the media is behind that as well in terms of what’s happening, in terms of what’s going on between the Democrats and Republicans with this particular issue, in this particular election.

So the police are kind of caught in the middle of this yo-yo effect, these almost vicious cycles. And so you have the defund and refund kind of dynamics that are going right along with that. And so here we are.

And so what we want to make clear to everybody, though, is that Project PACT has some really solid answers and responses on how to mitigate, minimize any one police department’s kind of yo-yo effect. And as I said before, to help it with its recruiting and to help with its retention, but to also help with a number of other things. And so this defund, refund, refund is just one aspect of what we’re going to be talking about.

But just know that police departments are in the middle of this. And sometimes there’s this yin and yang kind of effect that they don’t know where to be. And you take the issue of homelessness.

Well, be gentle with the homeless, a lot of police officers are told. And then six months later, go out and arrest the heck out of the homeless and remove their encampments. And so there’s all this going on, and it’s all driven by other forces.

And so before anyone gets upset with the cops and the police in their community, know that there’s other forces at play that these police departments are subject to. And that’s what we’re going to talk about in terms of how to minimize and minimize those, mitigate those forces, and how to pull your community and police department together so that you can’t transcend that yo-yo effect.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (24:08 – 25:55)
Right. So, and just a reminder, I as a layperson had to learn that city managers or mayors are in charge of the police department and the police chief. They have to report directly to them.

And then they are also influenced by elected officials at the city level. Now that exists with state as well. So, and Kristen, you have worked your entire adult life in this field of kind of bringing the social goodness of policing with community, especially in terms of how people might get, I don’t want to use the word victimized.

I think it’s an overused word. But I do want to talk about transcending. I looked it up today, the definition of transcend, because I’m like, could I give that?

It said to go beyond the range or the limits. And I loved that definition, because I think that’s what we’re trying to do with Project PACT. We’re trying to say, okay, we’ve got training, we’ve got advising, we’ve got some literature, we’ve got a newsletter, we can send out some messages, you know, contact us and we can help you build community or build into your police department.

That’s our vision of how to make this happen. Talk about this transcending culture and what you’ve seen happen, both from your work with LEAP, your work with New Blue, and how policing is already changing for the good.

[Kristin Daley] (25:56 – 28:23)
Yeah, I mean, I think Mike made some great points about finding a balance. And I don’t think most people want or expect to live in a lawless society. So we want to reimagine policing and we want to reallocate resources.

We want to reinvest in communities, so we can all find a better way forward. And I think that really comes into play with the word transcend. I think we need to recognize and fully acknowledge that our communities are and have been for a very long time over-policed and under-supported.

And they have also, as Mike said, been really reliant on police for some things that maybe would be better handled elsewhere or in a different way. And for me, I think that’s where Defund the Police spoke to some communities who were frustrated with the status quo and wanted a message that pushed forward. But, you know, a law and order approach doesn’t really make sense if we are enforcing the law in a way that doesn’t make our communities safer or creates fear or unrest or displaces people who are part of the community.

You know, as you mentioned, struggling with poverty or being unhoused or struggling with substance use or mental health crisis. It doesn’t make sense to fall deeper into this law and order mindset. And if it means, you know, people, it’s harder to recruit and retain good police officers.

All of those things kind of point us in the direction of we need to look at the things that we’re doing right and pivot towards doing more of that. So getting people more resources and transcending this mindset of police need to be out there just enforcing the law and not being public servants, which is what many of them get into this profession to do. So I think we want to think of the way forward for the justice system as meeting communities where they’re at and getting us all on the same page with envisioning the way that we want public safety to be.

And to do that, we need to transcend that law and order mindset. And we also need to have frank and pretty likely uncomfortable conversations in some cases, like the way that that we’re doing it here today, that include all of the voices within our community and give community members, including police, the opportunity to say what they need and what they envision for the future. And how do we all get on that same page and transcend the things that aren’t working?

[Carol Engel-Enright] (28:26 – 30:16)
Beautiful, beautiful. I just want to say Saturday, we were at a parade in Longmont, Colorado, Mike’s hometown. And of course, the officers all know him and come up to him.

And one officer named Christy came up and I noticed and I felt as a citizen relieved that the police were there, they were connecting with community. There were thousands of young children and families and everyone had smiles on and so you see this beauty of connection and conversation between police and healthy communities. And Mike, many years ago, brought in Dr. Bruce Perry, a neuroscientist and author. And at the time, I was like, why would you bring him in? Now, he also did many years ago, he brought the whole community together for conferences and brought in speakers and made those conferences free. So, there were people maybe in the fringes or marginalized that could attend, could be a part of the community.

It’s always been a big philosophy of his. But Mike, I want you to talk about Dr. Bruce Perry and the neuroscience of connection as it relates to public safety and how that also transcends the culture of policing.

[Mike Butler] (30:17 – 36:21)
Thank you. I really enjoyed listening to you, Kristen. That was a great, great perspective that you offer.

Thank you. But Dr. Bruce Perry, the book that kind of put him on people’s radar screens was a book entitled, The Boy That Was Raised as a Dog. And I read that book many, many years ago.

And in that book, Dr. Perry talks about being able to image the brains of especially younger people who had been through trauma and then being able to follow them throughout their lives for a certain period of time. And they kept constant imaging of those brains. And eventually, these kids kind of moved through their trauma, we’ll use the word transcend, transcended their trauma and found environments, sometimes serendipitously, that were more loving.

And he noticed that the image changed dramatically. And that the image on trauma, and I think it was red, the brain looked red, and the image, the brain that was kind of immersed in love was yellow. And he saw that transition in many of those people that he had been working with over the years.

And then he went back and looked and found out what happened to their brains. And he found out that many of these younger people, as I said, serendipitously, or in some cases, by kind of planned efforts, found themselves immersed in loving, healthy relationships. And so he’s not the only neuroscientist that has come up with the conclusion that one of the greatest potent forces and one of the most great, the greatest healing forces we have on our planet is that of healthy, loving relationships.

And so we ended up taking that research that he did in Lawmont, and kind of applying it to the things that we did, in terms of how police officers responded in the community. And we ended up also kind of surfacing, activating, coordinating a lot of the social capital, which we’ll call healthy, loving relationships of people in our community. We ended up surrounding people who were either struggling with chemical substance addiction, and or a serious struggling with their mental health, some cases homelessness, with healthy, loving people.

And people could be, could help them, folks, either with transportation to and from treatment, as a social network. We had dozens of employers that agreed to give employment to people who were in recovery for either their mental health struggles or their addiction. And so we had lots of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people that signed up for this, and ended up creating these kind of circles of accountability and support for each of these people.

And I have stories with names attached to them. But instead of arresting these people over and over again, as we’ve done that we see doesn’t work, we ended up doing something different. And it was incredibly much more effective to see people that we had actually contacted.

I got three names right off the top of my head, Asubio, Ruben, and Anson, that we contacted over 1000 times each, basically kicked out of the emergency department in our local hospital. And no one wanted to see them. And often we would find them in the wintertime, you know, frozen, in some cases frozen to the ground with their own urine, who basically went through this process of these circles of accountability and support.

And all three of them found a different path in life. I won’t go through all of what happened with all of those with all these cases, but there’s hundreds more like this, that eventually found a healthier path in their life, away from addiction, away from many of their mental health concerns, and found housing, found jobs, in some cases able to reconnect with their families, and became part of our community. And so we could have arrested these people, we could have probably arrested those three guys I mentioned 1000 more times, but where would we have been?

And where would they have been? And where would our community have been? And so that’s in essence, Carol, part of the story.

But we ended up utilizing that thinking in terms of surrounding people who were struggling in our community, committing crimes, sometimes through our restorative practices, part of a disorder related issue, or just acting out in ways that were harmful to others. We ended up doing, taking that research that Dr. Bruce Perry provided, and putting it in practice in a big way in our community. Again, we’re going to talk more and more about that as we move forward.

But that’s one of those examples where we don’t have to necessarily always default to the criminal justice system, that we can use the care and the compassion and the love in our community to be able to help heal a community’s woundedness, or to respond more effectively to our health issues or social issues, which many people define sometimes as homelessness or addiction or mental health.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (36:22 – 37:47)
Yeah, I met, I got to meet Anson one time at a police ceremony, where his friends who’d become his circle of support were being honored and he was invited. And I also have met, you know, just the everyday citizens that Mike talks about in terms of social capital, who wanted to, you know, there’s a benefit to giving, to helping somebody in, to a healthier place in their life, that the benefit is to the self. I want to talk about the benefit also, and Kristen, I think you do a lot of work in this area, to police.

You know, they go through a lot of trauma themselves. It’s one thing to think about, you know, the trauma I’m going through when the police are there, but we rarely put ourselves in their shoes, and what must they deal with on a daily basis. So talk about some of the, I know you do some consulting around trauma and healing that trauma as well on the police side, and just the compassion that we all could care a little bit more about the police in our communities.

[Kristin Daley] (37:47 – 40:17)
Right. So what really jumped out at me as Mike was talking, two things. So one, thinking about looking at images of the brain as it’s going through trauma.

That’s something that I work very heavily with in terms of survivors of crime, but it also really relates to police seeing crime over and over and over in their daily lives and having that vicarious trauma. I think one really, really helpful thing in my work is to talk to police and get them to relate what the survivor of crime that they may be talking to is going through with their own experience, and to see that some of the reactions that they’re seeing that may not make sense are actually really making sense if they think of it in terms of their own personal experience. And I love the point of the brain looking very different when it’s experiencing love or care, because as a victim advocate, that’s a big part of what we do is survivors of crime and police and everyone who’s experiencing trauma, they need to feel supported.

They need to have their basic needs met. And what Mike’s talking about in offering people who are struggling the basic resources that they need, clearly that’s going to set them up to succeed where not providing those resources and instead putting them into the justice system is not going to help set them up for the future. So everyone does better when they’re having their basic needs met, and human connection and understanding is very much one of those basic needs.

So I loved everything you said about that, Mike. And I think we need to see more of that. I think my big question there would be, when your department was focusing on this very kind of holistic network of support in your communities, what was the reaction of your officers?

Were they fully invested in this right off the bat? Were there things that you did in terms of, you know, having a conversation with them and explaining why this is important and why this is your mindset? How did that play out?

Because my initial thought would be most police officers would be very excited to do a program like this, where it is very focused on getting people what they need. But I’d love to hear how that process played out in your department.

[Mike Butler] (40:17 – 44:42)
So that is a subject of a couple podcasts, frankly, because it had a lot to do with shifting and transcending the current culture. One that was kind of patriarchal, one that was very enforcement-oriented, one that was almost primitive in its nature in terms of how it looked at justice, to one that was the opposite of those things. And so when we started down that path and that road and people began to see over time, I just gave you one small example of the many shifts and changes we made programmatically or procedurally in terms of how we responded to the community.

That when we got to that point of saying, here’s how we want to be able to respond to those people who are struggling with addiction or struggling with their mental health or struggling with homelessness, there was kind of a, we get it from the officer’s perspective around, because they also confront the same futility of seeing these people over and over again. The Rubens, the Esuvios, and the Ansons, and hundreds, thousands more in many communities. They all know who these folks are.

The police all know who these people are. And they know that on any given, they can almost tell you the day of the week and the hour of the day that they’re going to be seeing these people again. And yet they continue with the old model of utilizing the criminal justice system because they don’t know another way.

And frankly, I think there’s a lot of, I think the vast majority of police officers would welcome a more effective way because if there’s two things, one thing that the officer knows is that they know who the repeat folks are. And secondly, they also know maybe more than anybody else, the plight of the victim. They see victims in their rawest forms.

And so if they could see that they could have an effect where people aren’t victimizing other people, that feels good to them. And so they were wide open to this kind of alternative and braced it in a big way. But I skipped a lot of steps in terms of what it means to shift and change a culture that operates in a very traditional kind of authoritative, aggressive mindset to one that operates and says, hey, we want to be effective in dealing with the messiness of the human condition.

We want to be effective. And we know that we’re 24-7, 365 gig. No one else is open that long during the year.

The cops are open 24-7. Their shop is open 365. They know they’re going to get called.

And so being able to kind of shift their role. And by the way, that plays into, I think, people who don’t necessarily want to be police officers because of how they have been portrayed and characterized. All the way back to Ferguson, but definitely Minneapolis and Memphis and New York and Cleveland and Rochester and all those other departments that have come up.

They know that if their culture shifted in a way that supported this kind of effort, I think people would flock to the police profession by the tens of thousands because they’re doing something now that they know can make a difference in their community that has long lasting effect. And it doesn’t necessarily require an adrenaline fix, or it doesn’t require lights and sirens, or it doesn’t require being heavy handed or authoritative. And so we’re going to be making those, we need to make those shifts, folks.

Now there is a place, one of the things I want to make clear, there will be a place for enforcement, but we’re going to have to say, it’s going to have to be more judicious, more refined and more community driven as we move forward. But in essence, when we got to that point of making those changes, Kristen, with our police officers in terms of how we dealt with certain health and social issues that had something to do with addiction and mental health, our police officers were ready and had already been working in a culture of how we could work more with the heart of our community.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (44:43 – 47:29)
Yeah, Mike, I like that in some of your writing, you talked about where enforcement is precise. You know, if you start to heal the community of the health and social issues of kind of low level criminal activity or low level menacing or whatever, and those people are not taking up the resources. I mean, resources are limited.

The number of people that can answer calls are limited. I want to, both of you talked about culture and I looked up that definition as well. It refers to the cumulative deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings, hierarchies, notions of time, roles, spatial relations, concepts of the universe, material objects and possessions acquired by a group of people in the course of generations.

And so, you know, when we say we’re stuck, it just means we’re at a point of time and space where there can be more. And some of our early notes, I have written trust builds, relationships heal and equity begins to form. Imagine that.

Now I come from a design thinking background and I will always say visualize what can happen in a community when people start to feel trust, have relationships that heal and feel more equity with each other. I just want to go around and maybe wrap this up on the defund refund kind of cycle and where you think we’re at and how we can move forward. Of course, I want people to go to the projectpact.org website and maybe ask for a copy of Safety in Your Hands. You’ll get to read about Anson, Vesuvio and the third person, Rubin. I think their stories are in there. But maybe go around one more time and let’s talk about, you know, instead of defund refund, what can the average citizen, the police patrolman who’s in his car working every day to make communities better, what can we start to believe in that’s good and better for the future of policing?

[Kristin Daley] (47:30 – 49:15)
Sure. So what you said about the definition of culture, Carol, was really interesting to me around culture and the alignment with material. So I believe budgets are moral arguments, you get what you fund.

So while defund the police can be a really polarizing term, explaining how it is important to reallocate funding can be a very effective argument. Do we want funds that go to police departments to spend on militaristic equipment or do we want those funds spent on training that focuses on empathy and wellness and community engagement? Maybe it’s not about defund or refund.

It’s about reallocating resources. So taking a look at police budgets and redistributing funding to practical community services, the ones that Mike was talking about. You know, let’s fund schools, let’s fund community centers, libraries, affordable housing options.

Moving in this direction is going to make our communities stronger and it’s going to make our police agencies more effective at addressing serious crime. And it’s going to make people feel safer and more secure. You know, we want police to be a part of our communities.

They are a part of our communities. We need to stop thinking of that role as literal enforcers and move it towards true public service. And we want to reimagine what policing looks like and what reallocating these resources looks like.

And we want to reinvest in communities. So to me, defund and refund aren’t quite the right words. It’s more about reallocate and reinvest and reimagine and find a better way forward for all of us.

[Mike Butler] (49:17 – 52:06)
Well said, Kristen. I’m going to build on that a little bit. I’m also going to use another re-word.

It’s called repurpose. And it’s repurpose what we’re doing and get out of this identity mode of being just the enforcers, the aggressive enforcers in any one community. I’m absolutely convinced that in the vast majority of communities, police departments have a legitimate platform to operate from.

And that the vast majority of community members, notwithstanding what happens, support the police, want the police to do well, want the police to be effective, want to be able to depend on the police, trust the police. And I know there are exceptions to that. And sometimes those exceptions run across lines or people of color lines.

I get that. Because the potential for disparate impact, we haven’t talked necessarily about what’s happened with why the police have so many different contacts with people in communities that are economically disadvantaged versus communities that don’t have economic disadvantage. What’s going on with that?

Why is that the case? We’re going to make a program out of that, but that’s been the case. That’s probably the case all over the world in terms of who the police are more in contact with.

And so what’s that look like? And so it gets bigger than the police in terms of how we see the wounds in our community, the social and health issues. Are we going to continue down this legislative track?

Are we going to continue to try to pass more laws and stiffen penalties and invoke the criminal justice system? Or are we going to become more comprehensive, or the word you used earlier, holistic, in our response, in which the police can become a part of that larger organism-like response to our health and social issues? That’s the repurposing I’m talking about.

And so I think we can do that. And I think the police are open to that. I’ve seen other police departments quite interested in this way of doing business versus just being the role of enforcers.

So I’ll use the word repurpose along with reallocate, re-imagine, rethink, reset, recalibrate. But I think ultimately we’re going to have to re-something here. And that’s what Project PACT is going to be doing.

And we’re going to have to get beyond the band-aids of what we’ve been doing. And those band-aids have been very minor, very minor approaches to shifting the things that need to be shifted. We need something deeper, more complex that can be able to help us.

And Project PACT has a lot to offer along those lines.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (52:07 – 53:36)
That’s great, Mike. Thank you, Kristen. And I just want to say from the citizen community member point of view, and from my research, you know, Maslow’s hierarchy talks about food, clothing, and shelter is the basics, but right above that is safety.

And so feeling safe, feeling that sense of belonging in community. What if, as we re-imagine, what if every citizen could feel that sense of belonging, and every policeman could also feel that partnership, that sense of belonging to the community, that we’re all working together, and that there be this commitment to that, to creating that. I see it in terms of neighborhoods coming together, not just as a neighborhood, but neighborhoods with other neighborhoods.

How’s your neighborhood working? That that’s not only the role of city management, that’s really the role of citizens, active, engaged citizens in a community. And that we have these hard, brisk, frank, sometimes, what’s your word, Mike, on conversations?

You have a certain word where we’ve had different ideas, but we can come together and put them all on the table, that we learn to do that.

[Mike Butler] (53:36 – 53:37)
Oh, harmonize the contrast?

[Carol Engel-Enright] (53:38 – 55:18)
Well, harmonize the contrast, but sometimes, you know, it takes a tense conversation to get those contrasts out in front of people, right? Absolutely. We shouldn’t depend on news or media or social media that’s anonymous and can’t have a real conversation, that there is real healing power and connection.

It is proven. Again, I’m the academic, but if you go into social intelligence, you can read some of the science that they’re discovering in terms of how heartbeats start to go together as people align their interest and their love and care and connection for each other, and even how the mind can start to connect. So very exciting what’s happening.

We’re really excited about what Project PAC is doing. Mike and Kristen are available to your city, your police department, your neighborhood groups for collaborative advising. We also do in-person classes on training these effective communications, social emotional skills, how to work through the democracy part of what we do in America, and how to bring great conversations, restorative practices.

I will say Mike Butler is, I call him the grandfather of restorative justice. I have traveled around the country with him as he talks to different groups. He put it into place so many years ago, really.

[Mike Butler] (55:18 – 55:21)
I used to be the father, but now I’m the grandfather.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (55:23 – 55:53)
And so go to our website, projectpac.org. Those will all be on future episodes. We’re excited to bring you all of this information, and we’ll be bringing guests on as well.

Go on and sign up for the newsletter and your copy of Safety in Our Hands so that we can keep in touch with you as things move forward. We’ll be having some digital training possibilities starting in the new year. And thank you again for listening.

[Speaker 4] (55:56 – 56:47)
Thank you for tuning in to Beyond the Band-Aids with Project PAC’d. We hope today’s episode has inspired you to think differently about public service and community engagement. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate, and leave a review.

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