Beyond Patriarchy: Building True Community-Police Partnerships

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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This episode was produced by Story On Media & Marketing: https://www.successwithstories.com

[narrator] (0:02 – 0:18)
Welcome to Beyond the Band-Aids with Project PACT, hosted by Dr. Carol Engle Enright, Kristen Daly, and Chief Mike Butler, where we explore how police, public safety experts, city leaders, and dedicated community members can work together to drive meaningful change.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (0:20 – 1:50)
Welcome to Beyond the Band-Aids. I’m Carol Engle Enright, and I’m going to moderate today as we talk about the shifting of police culture from a very patriarchal kind of style to a partnership style. Now, what’s going to be important on this is all the philosophy that goes behind it, the attributes that come in with the work environment and how police work with community, and just the basics of the professional and personal development of policemen, and the satisfaction that they can start to gain from their work, from their service to community.

I represent the School of Statesmanship, Stewardship, and Service. We’re a nonprofit, and we do training around professional and personal development to really bring forth the qualities and attributes of statesmanship, stewardship, and service. I have Mike Butler here.

He’s also active with the School of Statesmanship, but serves on the board of Law Enforcement Action Partnership, LEAP, as well as Kristen Daly. She’s also on the board of the Law Enforcement Action Partnership, which is sponsoring this podcast. Kristen, I’m going to let you talk about your professional life in policing, and then, Mike, can you kind of introduce yourself again?

[Kristin Daley] (1:51 – 2:20)
Sure. So, very briefly, I am the executive director of New Blue, which is a national incubator for police officers to collaborate directly with community members on projects that change practice or policy within the police agency. I have a 17-year career in police policy and training, and I have a background in victim advocacy for sexual assault and domestic violence, which I’ve done for a very long time, and train officers on trauma-informed best practices.

[Mike Butler] (2:21 – 5:27)
So, I was the public safety chief in the city of Longmont, Colorado, for over a quarter of a century. I oversaw police, fire, emergency management, and some other social services. I’m also a board member on the Law Enforcement Action Partnership, and by the way, I just want to make a plug for LEAP.

They are sponsoring Project PAC, and we’re very grateful for that sponsorship. And so, New Blue, the School of Statesmanship, Stewardship, and Service, which is also known as SOSAS, S-O-S-S-A-S, and LEAP, the Law Enforcement Action Partnership, are partnering to bring you Project PAC. And I just want to start by saying that culture is not an easy topic.

We talk about it a lot. We use that. We say things like, we’ve got to change the culture fast, but most people don’t understand exactly what that means or feels like or smells like or tastes like.

It’s just something that, especially since Ferguson that occurred in August of 2014, we’ve heard many pundits say it. We’ve heard police chiefs say it. We’ve heard people in the communities that police departments serve say it, but we haven’t done it.

And so, Project PAC is equipped with the instructional material, the guidance, and the skill to be able to help police departments and communities shift and change and transcend their cultures. And so, that’s why we call this podcast Beyond the Band-Aids, because up until now, what we’ve tried have been more or less band-aids. Cultures haven’t necessarily shifted and changed.

And you can talk to any police chief in America, any sheriff in America. You can talk to people in communities. At some level, at some point along the line, police chiefs and community members were somewhat on bended knees saying, how do we do this?

What needs to happen? How do we go from here? And so, oftentimes, what we saw was, well, let’s change a policy or let’s add some new technology, or let’s kind of readjust the chairs, if you will, in terms of where the levels of supervision are at.

Let’s mandate more accountability. But the more popular one has been, let’s change the top person. Let’s change the police chief.

The new police chief will help us go in the direction we want to go. And I have to say, in my own experience and my own research and my own observations from around the country, that hasn’t worked either. So this is not an easy topic.

We don’t pretend it’s an easy topic. But it’s something I think we have to talk about. And it is the elephant in the room, I think, when it comes to how police departments are going to ultimately see themselves and how they’re going to be within their communities.

And so that’s the topic for today. And I’ll turn it back over to Carol.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (5:27 – 7:42)
Okay. So I’m a PhD. I have a PhD in education and human resources and a lot around leadership and working with bridging students from being a student to professional organizations with professional skills.

As a researcher, it was interesting today, I went back to culture, back to the definitions. Culture is shared beliefs, values, and behaviors that are passed through generations by an organization or civilization, a group. It also is used to grow a prepared medium.

And I also went back to environment. I’ve been listening to a lot around health and brain science and neurological discoveries. And we’re finding that the environment that you create really can start to work with.

If you think about a police department as an environment or a medium for growth, I think we can all agree. What shifts, what changes need to take place to move a culture? Now, you can’t disrupt a culture, especially with policing, something that needs stability and safety and is providing safety for every citizen in a community.

I’ve learned to get my head around the beauty and the duty of this profession. So I want to talk to Kristen first, and then I’m going to come back to you, Mike, of what it looks like from her side when police departments have started to move into a community-minded kind of environment or medium and started to collaborate, start that connection, that communication.

[Kristin Daley] (7:44 – 8:53)
I think it starts internally within the agency. It starts with everyone from leadership all the way down and all the way back up again in cultivating a space where people feel safe, feel invested, and feel like they’re there for public service. And then that will extend outward into their interactions with the community.

And I think we have to acknowledge that a lot of communities aren’t especially trusting of their police departments in this climate. And police are tasked with taking that first step toward opening things up for the community to express their needs very directly. So for me, it definitely starts within the department and creating an environment where officers understand that it is their responsibility to come into this with a serviced mindset and to value treating people within their agency and externally in the community with dignity and respect.

Wow.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (8:53 – 9:08)
So that’s interesting. If the police are responsible for taking that first step to begin collaboration and they’re walking into a hostile environment, again, I want to use the environment, the medium word.

[Kristin Daley] (9:09 – 9:31)
Yeah. And I’m certainly not saying that’s an easy conversation to start. It’s not.

But I think we have to recognize that there is a power dynamic at play and police need to take that first step to extend the opportunity to the community to feel like they are contributing to public safety. Okay.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (9:31 – 10:27)
Okay. So the power issues. All right.

So, Mike, you actually went through this. You said 26 years. I live in the community where you were a chief of police and I watched this shift happen within community.

I watched how it changed the safety, the healthiness, the well-beingness of our community and always felt that kind of, well, I’m going to say the friendliness of the police force around the community. Just what happened when you walked in? Most police departments are very patriarchal.

The chief is command and control. What happened when you came in, when you said, we’re going to take a risk and I just want to take that back to it’s the 1990s, correct? Correct.

[Mike Butler] (10:29 – 13:56)
So what does it take to shift from a patriarchal to a partnership and- That may be an entirely, that’s maybe several episodes, but yeah, and I didn’t see it as much as a risk as much as I did a belief in people. And so for a long time, I saw the unlimited capacity in people. I worked as a police officer.

I worked my way up through the ranks and did everything in a police department that you could possibly do along the way. And what struck me more than anything was the sense that police officers do want to make a difference. There is that idealism.

Sometimes it’s a little hidden, sometimes it’s a little dormant, sometimes it’s quite overt and apparent, but they want to make a difference. And I think a lot of people want meaning and purpose in their lives, same with police officers. And one of the things that I noted pretty quickly based on how things were operating was there were a lot of people that didn’t necessarily feel like they belonged to the police department.

I want to add that to Kristen’s list of dynamics that need to happen, that people do need to feel and believe they belong to the organization. It’s their organization. Belonging has these dimensions to one’s ownership.

This organization belongs to me. They didn’t feel that. The others are relational and I belong to this organization.

They didn’t feel that either. And so they just felt like, well, as they entered the door, they didn’t have to engage their brains. They felt like renters.

They didn’t feel like owners. And someone else was going to make the decision. Someone else was responsible for the outcomes.

Someone else was going to create the work environment that made me feel better about my job. I didn’t have much, I didn’t have much say about, I mean, that’s how people would think. And so you can encounter that in lots of industry and lots of institutions, not just the world of public safety or policing, but definitely in policing.

If you ask police officers, do you feel like you believe and belong to your organization? And how does that play out for you? If they really say they feel like they believe and belong, well then, you know, ask them to what level they sense that they’re responsible for the organization or they’re responsible for the outcomes of how things go, or they’re responsible for decisions that get made.

And then there’s other litmus tests to kind of go along. So that’s part of what we’re dealing with here. And I get the old models of how we’ve all been raised in police departments.

I add the old model too, in terms of, you know, if I want your opinion, I’ll give it to you, so to speak. And rank meant everything in an organization. And if you wanted your voice to count, if you wanted your thoughts to matter, you had to have rank.

And you had to have a level of official sanction status, if you will, in order for you to be in the room where decisions were made. Ask people, are you invited to meetings where command staff is generally invited to? Ask people, are you part of decisions that get made about how the organization feels in the community?

So anyway, that’s what I encountered.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (13:57 – 14:20)
So, okay, so go back to, you did start your career in a more patriarchal style of police department, right? And you started as a patrol officer. Did you feel like you had a voice or did you know you had to rise in the ranks to ever have your opinion, your ideas kind of listened to?

[Mike Butler] (14:20 – 16:11)
You know, I’ll just tell you a story. I had a sergeant that I worked for who said, and he and I would engage in conversations. Sometimes they were a little bit awkward.

Sometimes there was some tension involved, nothing new there. And ultimately he would come to the point where he would say, Butler, he says, I don’t care if you have 27 years of experience in this organization, as long as I have 28, you’ll always be a rookie in my eyes. And that’s not unusual.

That’s not unusual for people to say, because I have the stripes or I have the bars or I’m a captain or I’m a deputy chief or I’m a chief, I have the power. And it’s up to me. And so that’s understandable too, because it’s how we look at how we create cultures of accountability.

Is it going to be demanded, purchased, or legislated, or is it going to be chosen? And so it gets into that element as well. So I had sergeants that operated that way.

When I was a sergeant, I had lieutenants. I remember one lieutenant that I won’t mention any names, who was quite intimidating and his style was to intimidate those who worked for him. And so there was a sense of, if you crossed him, you were not going to have a great day or maybe a great week or a great month.

And so that’s not unusual for those things to happen. And I constantly am talking to police officers and others at line level, where they’re staffed at line level, who sense that their voice doesn’t count, their recommendations and suggestions aren’t necessarily considered. They’re not invited to the meetings.

They don’t know anything about the business, so to speak.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (16:11 – 16:18)
And yet, in most cases, those are the very patrolmen that are interfacing with the public the most.

[Mike Butler] (16:19 – 16:56)
Is that correct? That’s a great point. And that’s why the sequence has to be that there has to be legitimate, authentic partnership with an organization for that to be mirrored by those people who are in constant interaction with the people they’re serving.

For them to understand what that model of partnership looks like, you can’t sit there and say, I order you to work in partnership with the community. But if the officer or the line level person is saying, here’s how partnerships work in our organization, what’s that look like? Then they can say, this is what it looked like between me and someone in the community.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (16:56 – 17:57)
And I wanted to start this episode out with thinking, wherever you are out there, if you are serving your community this day, both as a police officer, as a patrol officer, thank you. We’re thankful for you. And one of our big purposes is to kind of bring to the surface what it is, the gifts and the talents that all police officers, from the patrol officer on the street, all the way to the chief, they’ve brought that idealism.

They brought that sense of service and duty. They are willing to stand in front of danger to protect community and citizens. And I just, I’m very big in the neurosciences and I think we all need to proceed from this state of gratitude.

[Mike Butler] (17:57 – 17:59)
People ask me what I miss.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (17:59 – 18:00)
For police officers. Yeah.

[Mike Butler] (18:00 – 19:20)
What I miss more than anything. I miss being around people who have this kind of philosophy of life is, I’m willing to give my life for people that I don’t know, for strangers. I miss being around people who have that sense of decorum, that sense of, this is who I am and this is what I’m about.

And I’ve met very few police officers who don’t think and feel that way, but there’s also a very practical and almost economic aspect of this too. And that is, every one of these police officers in America, and there’s close, there’s somewhere between a hundred thousand and a million police officers that are paid and volunteers and auxiliary that have these incredible gifts, these incredible talents, these incredible skills that because there’s this kind of patriarchal style in the vast majority of police departments, don’t get activated. They don’t get surfaced.

They don’t get used. And I know police officers wish that they had that capacity to say, here’s my gifts. Here’s my talents.

Here’s my skills. Here’s my resources. I want to use them.

And I want this department that I work in to leverage them in a way that works for the good of the whole. So that’s kind of where we’re coming from.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (19:20 – 19:26)
So we’re going to work on that with Project PAC too, right? In collecting those resources, Kristen. And go ahead.

[Kristin Daley] (19:26 – 19:43)
I think, you know, a great leader really fosters that exactly what Mike’s saying. You know, they, they foster that openness within their organization and they know the value of engaging with individual and collective strengths and encouraging everyone to contribute their ideas. Right.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (19:44 – 20:21)
Well, moving forward, you know, I come from design thinking and design thinking only happens when shared ideas for a future that does not exist yet. Come together and, and start to start to form. Let’s talk about decision-making processes, how, how that happens top down where it’s all rank and, and commanded or how it happens in a partnership basis.

And Mike, you might have to take this, you have the practical boots on the ground with this one.

[Mike Butler] (20:21 – 20:29)
I know Kristen has some experience with this as well. She’s worked in some organizations and, and, and gets a sense for this too, but.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (20:29 – 20:35)
So let’s talk about it from both, both the police department and then organizations as well.

[Mike Butler] (20:35 – 20:35)
Sure.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (20:35 – 20:36)
Especially around communities.

[Mike Butler] (20:37 – 23:37)
Yeah. So, you know, partnership, you know, there, there’s a few components to partnership and one is joint accountability. If we’re, if the three of us were in a ABC corporation, we were the board of directors.

We would all have the same level of accountability as the other person in terms of how the decision gets made, what decision gets made, the outcome, being responsible for the outcome. That’s that’s a big part of that. The other part of this that can be scary, but I want to be able to explain this is we’d all have the right to say, no, we’d all have the right to say, you know, this isn’t how I want to do it.

If I can’t say no, guess what? My yes doesn’t mean a lot. And I want, we want the yeses to mean a lot.

We want people when they make a commitment is to make a commitment unconditionally, not to, not to make a conditional commitment, but so we want people’s yeses. And so that can be scary and that’s something that we have to, we’ll explain more of, but it works. It works because I can, we can talk about how we, and we, in our training, we’ll talk about how we can convert nos into yeses.

And so, so anyway, that’s, that’s a big part of that. The other is to be part of, of, of the exchanging of purpose in terms of what’s happening. And so what is the purpose for our organization?

What’s the purpose for this unit? What’s the purpose for the work that I’m doing? That they have that opportunity and that partnership to kind of say, this is what I believe.

This is what I think. And so those are the, those are some of the kind of the attributes of a partnership in terms of, it’s a level playing field. It really is.

Everyone has the same voice. And what I used to tell people, your voice counts, your thoughts matter, humans is going to be valued. But in order for you to, that your voice to count, your thoughts to matter, your agenda has to be bigger than your self-interest.

If your agenda is about the organization, about how we’re going to deliver services or about how we can expand something that makes, that benefits the community, your voice will count as much as anybody’s, including mine. I made that very clear. That was something that people had to get used to.

The other thing that people had to get used to is just because your voice counts and your thoughts matter, doesn’t mean you’re going to get your way. And so that’s a big part of that too. And so, and so finding that sweet spot where everybody’s voices count and we could create something that was more expansive than any one person’s perspective was a skillset that, that leaders had to learn.

And that’s what we’re going to talk about a lot with Project PAX Instruction is how do you harmonize those contrasts in a way that says that everybody’s voice counts, just that we’re going to, we’re going to create something more expansive than maybe anybody’s voice.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (23:37 – 23:38)
Anybody’s one idea. Yeah.

[Mike Butler] (23:38 – 23:45)
So that’s, decision-making is a big part of partnership and we’ll, we can talk more about that, but I’ll let Kristen weigh in here too.

[Kristin Daley] (23:45 – 24:39)
I am 100% on the same page as Mike. And I think if you take all those steps and build that kind of culture and environment, you’re also fostering things like responsibility to the greater good. You’re creating people that are generous with not only their colleagues, but with the people they’re serving.

And you’re creating people, employees who are compassionate towards everyone. Compassionate towards groups that don’t feel like they are a part of the whole and bringing them into that. So you’re building an agency of people who are genuinely there to serve the community and they’re there to support each other, boost good ideas and think outside the box, create innovative programs, create practices that show that generosity of spirit and that compassion for others.

[Mike Butler] (24:40 – 25:53)
And I just want to add something, Kristen, you jogged something for me, you know, in this era where retaining good employees and recruiting good employees is a huge challenge. If people know your organization’s the kind of organization where their voice counts or thoughts matter, they’re part of the decisions, they can attend meetings where big, big ideas are being surfaced, budgeted and implemented, that they can be part of the creation of the future, if you will. You’re more likely to retain your good employees and you’re more likely as your reputation grows in that arena to attract the people that you want to attract into the organization.

But we’re not doing that. And I’m convinced beyond any other kind of clever idea that we’re trying to throw out there in terms of trying to get people to join up, sometimes $50,000 as a bonus, that their sense of how they feel about their workplace, their sense of their own voice, their thoughts, and that they’re part of things in a bigger way will mean as much, if not more than anything else in terms of your retention of employees and your eventual recruitment of employees into your organization. Yeah.

[Kristin Daley] (25:53 – 26:20)
People want to feel heard and respected and included at work and that’s any work environment, but particularly one where the day-to-day can be so taxing, so emotionally draining at times. You really want to create an environment that takes care of its people from within. And then you’re creating officers that are best positioned to go out there and do their job and serve their community.

Yeah.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (26:20 – 28:44)
This environment, this understanding of environment and how it grows, it grows an ecosystem or it grows, and I go back to the medium of the culture, like what will grow this? Kristen, as you were talking, I’m thinking about people and populations and organizations and people who feel outside in the margins, on the fringes of not really being a part of it, not belonging to it, both within the department, but also within the community, that that’s probably where the police spend the majority of their time. And so if we start to understand expanding, last week we talked about the lens of goodness and how you expand goodness to crowd out what you don’t want.

Will more people start to feel like they have a voice, they’re in this positive culture? And by the way, I did an AI search on the work environment of police, and I would just encourage maybe everyone who’s not within the policing department to understand how really tough it is, the things that the emotional demands on police, the stress they are under, that they have to be ready and alert to act on a quick second and make quick decisions that are sound-mindedness, that many are working long shifts and extra shifts, and maybe second jobs because city governments quite aren’t thinking about how we really serve community and how we use all those gifts. So I just want to say that on the research side, that they’re dealing with probably maybe one of the toughest work environments in the United States, I would say even tougher than military.

So, Mike, do you want to talk more about decision-making, but I want to get to inclusive discussions. As you bring partnerships in and you open up things, how do you open up those communications and have more inclusive?

[Mike Butler] (28:44 – 31:32)
Let me just say that initially, when I started in my conversations initially, I started talking about, hey, we want to create a culture where your voice counts, your thoughts matter. People were excited about that aspect of it, but because they were so trained, schooled, skilled in a highly dependent environment, what they didn’t understand necessarily was that if you want your voice to count, you want your thoughts to matter, that kind of freedom comes with a larger commitment. And that larger commitment to the organization, the community, wasn’t something that people saw right away.

And when they began to realize that they had to take ownership for bigger things than maybe what they were used to, there was a backing off part of this. There’s a dynamic of, oh my gosh, I think I’d rather have an unhealthy dependency working in an unhealthy dependent culture and kind of working. So there was this kind of back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

No doubt there were champions that jumped right into the deep end and said, this is what we want, this is what we’ve been asking for. And there were some people who were kind of on the fence, there were some cynics, there were some people kind of had this victim mindset that just said, I don’t know if we really need this or want this, you’re the one that needs to make all these decisions, that’s why you get paid what you get paid, blah, blah, blah. And so there was that initial kind of dynamic.

It took a couple of years for us to really create that culture where people realized, and there’s more that goes to this, by the way, in terms of decisions, because we had to teach people business literacy. We had to teach people what the budget was about, because a lot of our questions, a lot of the things we talked about were for funding and budget. We had to teach people personnel practices.

We had to teach people performance management practices. We had to teach people about the various dynamics of the business that they didn’t know about. They were very eager, and so we had to kind of up the ante in terms of who had literacy about how the business was being conducted.

We opened up all of our meetings, and initially there were a hundred people at our meetings. We had to find a much larger room, interesting to facilitate. But on the other hand, we had to demystify, so to speak, the mystery of management, if you will, the mystery of how a business…

So that was all a big part. There’s lots of things that had to happen in order for us to get to that point where people felt comfortable making decisions.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (31:33 – 32:08)
I think it’s interesting that it’s a two-way street. There’s a power dynamic. Well, that’s one way that the information and the decisions are going.

Many people want the partnership model, but they seem to maybe forget that that’s going to require… It’s going to require commitment. It’s going to require more time and effort to understand the business.

If you want to be a partner in a business, you have to understand how it operates. There are tough decisions around finances and economics and salaries.

[Mike Butler] (32:08 – 32:38)
Just to give you an example, in the budget, we went from literally two people in a large organization controlling the budget to more than 50 people being a part of making decisions around budgets. But we had to teach them the literacy of budget and finances. But ultimately, the decisions got a lot better because there were more people willing to be resourceful, creative, and around how to spend money.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (32:38 – 32:39)
Work together.

[Mike Butler] (32:39 – 33:13)
Versus saying to the patriarchal mother or father bird, I just want money, and I don’t care how you get it. And so it was very much a sense of they understood that these pots are finite and limited, and we’re going to have to figure out how to be creative. And so that sense of there was a kind of a social capital of creativity and resourcefulness that grew over a period of time because people had more sense of here’s how the budgets work.

It was a… Yeah. That’s how it worked.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (33:13 – 33:21)
And when people are growing in a relationship in an organization, they’re feeling better about that work culture that they’re experiencing.

[Mike Butler] (33:21 – 33:23)
It doesn’t mean the problems go away.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (33:23 – 33:24)
No.

[Mike Butler] (33:24 – 33:25)
But on the other hand…

[Carol Engel-Enright] (33:25 – 33:28)
No, but you have company working through them.

[Mike Butler] (33:28 – 33:28)
Yeah.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (33:29 – 33:33)
Kristen, you want to talk about open communication and how to…

[Kristin Daley] (33:33 – 33:34)
That’s just what I was about to say.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (33:34 – 33:34)
Yeah.

[Kristin Daley] (33:34 – 34:17)
So all of this, what Mike just said about involving people in the big decisions and involving them in conversations around budget speaks to a word that has become so, so important in thinking about police and community, and that’s transparency. So if you’re creating an internal environment where leadership is transparent with the team, with the staff, with the officers, you’re setting a great example and a great kind of standard for the way that that agency engages with their community, with transparent communication, with inclusivity, with being upfront and open and honest about how decisions are made. And that is hugely, hugely important.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (34:17 – 34:32)
Yeah. When people know how decisions are made, they can build more trust. The suspicion starts to go away.

They go, oh, I can understand. And it’s just, I don’t know why more people don’t share more information.

[narrator] (34:33 – 34:33)
Exactly.

[Kristin Daley] (34:34 – 34:51)
When leadership is operating from a place of secrecy and all decisions happen behind closed doors, the larger team doesn’t sometimes understand why a practice is being put into place. And, you know, maybe if they understood that, they would get on board a lot sooner.

[Mike Butler] (34:52 – 36:26)
Yeah. The old models spoke to those who have the knowledge have the power. And if you didn’t share that knowledge, you didn’t have to worry about sharing your power.

What’s counterintuitive in this partnership model is that the more you share knowledge, the more you increase people’s capacity, the more people are aware and understand what’s going on, the more effective you’re going to be as a leader. And the more you can do and the more you can get done and actually the more you can delegate. And so there is a sense of freedom that comes with more people having more information, more knowledge, more choice, more power that comes with this partnership that may seem counterintuitive initially, because that old tired, worn out model of those who have the knowledge, have the power, and I’m just going to keep it to myself is still very much playing out in our world today.

And what we’re talking about is truly a kind of a rethinking, a reimagining. And so when we’re talking about shifting cultures and policing, and we’re talking about reimagining and rethinking, resetting, recalibrating, that’s what we’re talking about. One of it is about the disbursement of power and the redisbursement, the reappropriation of power and the kind of the sharing of power in a way that, again, the benefits come back to the leader.

Your effectiveness goes up much more dramatically than if you’re the only person who knows.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (36:27 – 38:23)
As you were saying that, I’m sitting here thinking, we talk about social capital, but we don’t really talk about intellectual and experiential capital, and how that is absolutely an asset to any department, any organization. If you bring your people along, if you expand their knowledge, their experience, they’re bringing that back to you, that two-way street is existing. Mike, I want you to, and Kristen, you’re both working with groups and talk about, and I’m going to preface this with 20 years of teaching students on the university campus and running internship programs.

And so often in every weekly report, I saw the boss. The boss told me to do this, the boss told me to do that. We have this, even with the younger generation, I’m speaking, I hope I’m speaking to some of them out there.

You have become empathic, understanding, working to understand people right where they’re at, broadening your perspectives, but then there’s this word, this boss word, or this, and I, we travel together, sometimes Mike will run into some of his officers, and of course he’s always chief. But I don’t think they use that word, I think they use that word with him in a term of respect of elder and mentor. I want to talk through the concepts of taking your department into, leveling down to this partnership, this inclusive environment, and then becoming a facilitator, a convener, and a mentor to raise this capital that’s growing in this positive work culture.

[Mike Butler] (38:25 – 38:27)
Take it away. What’s your question?

[Carol Engel-Enright] (38:27 – 38:39)
How did you, how did you, how did you start the mentoring? How did you start the facilitating? Were you doing it?

Did you allow other people to come in and start that?

[Mike Butler] (38:40 – 43:02)
So there was, this is not un-messy. And so there’s a predictability and an identity that you have to work with in terms of here’s what people are used to, whether it’s your command staff that says, no, I’ve always been the one that had the knowledge and the power, or people in the organization, you’re always the ones that made the decisions. There was, there was nothing un-messy about this.

And so, but my own way of dealing with it was a lot of one-on-one conversations, a lot of one-on-a-few conversations, a lot of answering questions, giving people that opportunity to tiptoe into this, into a new arena, helping people see what the benefits were. And so the nature of my, the conversations, which I spent tens of thousands of conversations in the first six months, probably to a year, and these were the nature of the conversations and always the lean and, and kind of mode of these conversations was not answering the how question, not answering the what question, the where question, the when question, but talking about the why part of this. So people were always saying, oh, how did you do that?

Or what did you do first? Or where, where did you do that? And how did you, and so those are questions I was very careful about answering in terms of in these conversations, because ultimately that’s what people come back to is- They want the expert opinion.

They want to know how, and they want to know what, where, and, and, and most people didn’t care about why, because they were trained to believe that the why wasn’t important. But the, the, the, the, the, the, the person at the top of the organization in these new cultural environments have to get really good at talking about why we’re doing this. And, and, and so, so that was a big part of where, where I ultimately went with my conversations and, and so, but there was, so lots of conversations, lots of giving people an opportunity to sometimes when you had a champion that says, I want to do this and you created what needed to be created for someone to follow through, you made a big deal about that example.

And people begin to see, well, that person may have made a mistake or a few mistakes, but they didn’t get hammered. They were ultimately able to learn from those educational episodes of mistakes and failures that they could move forward with this. And so, so there were a lot of things that came into how we dealt with mistakes, how we dealt with failures in terms of how we dealt, because ultimately up until then, in that very punitive, patriarchal environment that we inherited, there were lots of internal affairs investigations for simple mistakes.

And we cut that out and we just said, no, we’re going to treat mistakes that people are trying to do the right thing and didn’t, ended up making a mistake as educational episodes versus no, you’re going to get punished and you’re going to get a day off or you’re going to get a letter of reprimand. And so we shifted a lot of those things. We actually shifted the architecture of the organization.

There were so many things that we ended up shifting. We changed the profile of the people we were recruiting and hiring. I spent a lot of time on the nature of stewardship, what stewardship look like in creating partnerships with supervisors and your staff, trained a lot of supervision along that way.

How we trained, how we educated our staff became a big part of, of, of all of that. I mean, so we looked at all of our management systems and made sure that they were philosophically integrated in a stewardship model, in a servant leader model where people’s voices counted, their thoughts mattered. And, and that everything was being done for the good of, of the whole, so to speak versus just your own self or your own unit.

And so when we had these major, as an example, when we had budget discussions to discuss training budget dollars, which were, were, were very, um, that’s the word I’m looking for. They were very, uh, people wanted as much training as they could get. Coveted.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (43:02 – 43:02)
Coveted.

[Mike Butler] (43:02 – 43:43)
Thank you. We would bring everybody into the room and everybody had an opportunity to kind of say, here’s why we need these training dollars. There was, there were 70, 80 people in the room to talk about the disbursement of training dollars as one small, tiny example.

But when everybody left the room, everybody knew they had a greater sense of business literacy around all these training dollars, how they were being used, what they were being used for. And we set up criteria initially to, to work through that. But that was one example of how a decision got made with 50 to 70 people in the room about training dollars.

And so, so that’s what you had to get good at in terms of doing those kinds of things.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (43:44 – 43:54)
Yeah. I, uh, one of the positive work, um, uh, characteristics is that people have access to strategic long and short goals.

[Mike Butler] (43:54 – 44:41)
So let me just, let me just say too, around strategic planning, uh, we had a thousand people involved with our strategic planning process, 800 people from the community and 200 people from the organization. And everybody had the opportunity to create a new future. It took us 18 months because there were lots of conversations with a thousand people that had to happen versus one or two people sitting in a room by themselves.

And two months later coming out and saying, okay, the white chimney goes up to the white smoke comes up the chimney and the decision’s made. And now we have a strategic plan. No, we took the time with a thousand people in 18 months and people at the end, people were involved in, in creating a future.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (44:41 – 45:04)
Okay. Save that for the community episode. Kristen, I know, I know you’ve seen, um, the mentoring process within your association and, um, can you talk a little bit about what you’ve experienced from officers, you know, formal, informal, you know, and, and how that supports the culture within the department?

[Kristin Daley] (45:05 – 47:04)
Well, it starts with communication, with having the types of conversations Mike was just talking about. And then I think it’s about empowering people to make decisions, to be creative, to develop these projects that could build trust and, you know, build support for their communities. Um, I really want to stress the importance.

And I was, it’s funny, I was just having a conversation with someone yesterday about leadership and they were asking like, what are, what are the qualities that you think make a great leader? And that one example I gave was a leader makes their team feel safe to try things and not afraid to make a mistake. So, you know, when we’re working with the fellows at NewBlue and they’re coming up with these ideas for their capstone solutions, um, which will be implemented in their agencies and all of them have the, the kind of mandate that the project has to be around building community trust.

And, you know, that process is a process of elimination in some ways, you know, we want them to start with a conversation with their community. But we also want to be sure that this is a project that is going to be viable and have longevity and actually address the needs that they’re looking at. So I think in mentoring these fellows who, you know, already have a lot of experience, a lot of background with their communities and within their agencies.

It’s a matter of not being afraid to identify the wrong thing at first. It’s an ongoing process. It’s a conversation.

And, you know, look at it from a different perspective. Look at it from a different angle. Is this really the right project to implement right now?

And it’s an ongoing process. It’s a process of communication and it’s empowering people to not be afraid to come up with the wrong answer and then try again and find the right one.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (47:05 – 49:13)
Right, right. Well-designed thinking, creating something that doesn’t exist is always user centered. So, you know, they’re evaluating how it’s working for both the community and the patrol.

We probably need to wrap this up. I just, I think some of this conversation is so valid in, especially if you’re in a police department, if you’re supervising a police department, please go on and you hear this podcast, go on projectpact.org, write email or leave a message. Certainly sign up for the newsletter so that we can keep in touch with how things are moving along as the training program becomes available.

Kristen and Mike can come in or Zoom on collaborative kind of advising services. You know, the one thing I get out of what you’re saying is nobody can do this alone. You know, if you’re an isolated authority figure and you’re trying to make this decision, you need that support.

You need to understand Mike is so good at conversation because he will always have the next question where you have to really start to listen to yourself. And somebody, instead of somebody telling you what to do, you work, you work with yourself and then you work with others to figure out what’s going to be the most unique way forward for you, for your department. That’s why we’re beyond the Band-Aids.

We don’t put one little sticker, one little program, one policy on top of a cut or an infected wound. We say, let’s think about this differently. Let’s grow the culture.

Let’s grow the environment. Let’s create positive because the police themselves are doing such positive work in each community that they serve. And I just want to do a quick roundtable of you guys saying goodbye and what Project PACT means to you.

Kristen, you go first.

[Kristin Daley] (49:14 – 49:27)
I think Project PACT means working with agencies and communities to build collaborative efforts and reach a shared vision of public safety.

[Mike Butler] (49:27 – 50:23)
And I just want to emphasize too that, you know, we’re going to talk about this more, but sometimes this might seem soft and fuzzy and warm, but I also get being a cop for 40 some years that there’s a nature to policing that requires something entirely different. But what we’re talking about with Project PACT is kind of growing the versatility and enhancing the capacity of police departments to be able to respond to the messiness of the human condition in ways that are just so much more effective than having a one-size-fits-all kind of approach. And so Project PACT, I think, can help any department, any community get beyond that one-size-fits-all, enhance the versatility, enhance the capacity, and to be able to deal with that human condition in a much more effective way.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (50:23 – 51:08)
And create healthy communities. We want to thank our sponsorship from Law Enforcement Action Partnership, LEAP, and just some of the work that New Blue and SOSA’s School Statesmanship Stewardship and Service are doing. Again, go to our website, www.projectpact.org, and sign up for the newsletter, sign up for Mike’s pamphlet, Safety in Our Hands. Keep in touch with what you’re doing. If you have an example of a really good police department that you think is practicing best practices of partnership, we would love to know. Thank you for leaving that in the reviews of this podcast, and we’ll see you next time on Beyond the Band-Aids.

[narrator] (51:09 – 52:01)
Thank you for tuning in to Beyond the Band-Aids with Project PACT. 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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Pioneered by Law Enforcement Action Partnership, New Blue, and the School of Statesmanship, Stewardship, and Service, Project PACT is the culmination of three leading organizations committed to enhancing community well-being and policing integrity. Until next time, keep moving forward and stay engaged. Together, we can create a safer, more connected future.