What Do Healthy Communities Actually Look Like?

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

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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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[narrator] (0:02 – 0:18)
Welcome to Beyond the Band-Aids with Project PACT, hosted by Dr. Carol Engel 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 (co-host)] (0:19 – 1:00)
Welcome back to Beyond the Band-Aids. I’m Dr. Carol Engel Enright, and I’m here with Mike Butler and Kristen Daly, and we have a special guest on with us today. On our last episode, we started talking about shifting the culture within the police department, and we thought it would be really validating and wonderful to invite Neil Gross on.

Neil, I want you to kind of introduce yourself and then talk about your background and how you, Neil is a professor, a department chair, and maybe at this point a chancellor. I’m not sure. Department chair of sociology at Colby College in Maine.

[Neil Gross (guest)] (1:01 – 2:39)
And yeah, happy to talk about a little about myself. I’ve luckily passed the baton on department chair, so I’m no longer doing that. But yeah, so I’m a sociologist at Colby, which is a small liberal arts college in Maine.

It’s been around for a long time, since the early, early 1800s. And many years ago, before I went to graduate school, I was a police officer for the city of Berkeley. So I did that for a very short time, actually.

I worked kind of part-time in policing all through college. The various police departments that I worked at had kind of part-time non-sworn positions. I went to Police Academy, I got hired by the city of Berkeley, and did that for about 11 months.

Realized that my talents were probably best used elsewhere. So I went to graduate school thinking I would study policing and how to improve policing and make policing better. And I fell in love with other topics in graduate school and didn’t do work on this topic for, gosh, a really long time.

And then I got to Colby in 2015 and started teaching a class about policing. And it was a chance to sort of reconnect with that part of my history and to re-examine the scholarly research on policing at a time of tremendous controversy in the country over the state of policing and police treatment of Black Americans in particular. And, you know, at some point in the course of that teaching, I realized that I want to write a book on the topic.

And that’s kind of the origins of the book that we’re talking about today, Walk the Walk.

[Carol Engel-Enright (co-host)] (2:39 – 3:12)
Okay, so Walk the Walk was published in the year? Oh, 2020. 2022.

And, and you kind of scoured the nation, looking for an example of what you thought progressive, modern policing could look like, or where things were shifting. Talk about how you, you know, how you were finding out about departments and, and then visiting and how you were making decisions about what you saw.

[Neil Gross (guest)] (3:13 – 5:29)
Yeah. Well, I knew that I really wanted to write a book about police culture. It had always seemed to me that, that the one of the things that was really distinctive about the police is that they have such a strong occupational culture and a strong ethos.

And that there are, you know, really positive things about that culture, commitments to, you know, finding out, finding the person who’s committed injustice and tracking them down and doing right by victims. But there were some negative features of that culture as well. And I wanted to find out more about that.

And when I was teaching my class here at Colby, you know, a lot of books we read were books about the serious problems with policing. And those problems are certainly serious, there’s no doubt about it. But there weren’t very many examples of police departments in what we read that were, you know, had moved in really good directions, that could be really exemplars for, for other departments.

And so I began to cast around for, for departments that, you know, seemed like they had really made some significant change, some significant progress on a number of dimensions. So I looked at lots of different kinds of data on this. I had interviews, lots of interviews with people around the country, and I’d say, you know, tell me what police departments are doing poorly.

And they would just list off, you know, this department, that department, and I’d say, well, what departments are doing well? And silence, oftentimes. So it took me a while, but it wasn’t long before a few departments came to, came kind of bubbled up.

And Longmont, where, where, you know, Mike was, was the chief was, was one of those. And I decided to investigate more, not all the departments I looked at kind of panned out, there were some that I was considering, including that I decided not to in the end. But, but, but three really stood out to me.

So it was Longmont in Colorado, Stockton in California, and then LaGrange, which is a small community in, in Georgia. So my idea was to go and find out, you know, what, what was going on in these departments, and what made the chiefs and the officers and the departments tick? And what had the, how had the department changed and transformed?

And through what processes that occurred? And were there any lessons in that, that we could learn as we tried to, you know, continue to improve policing in the country?

[Carol Engel-Enright (co-host)] (5:29 – 6:39)
All right. So, so I was reading through the introduction, again, in your first chapter in the in the Walk the Walk book, and, and you talked about your own idealism, as you had planned. We talk about this often on the podcast, that the idealism to be an officer is there, that you were hoping to make the community safer, and to be, to help people.

And, and, and then you had a situation where you felt like that value was not in place. And it, did it jade you? Did it, I know you in the book, you talk about you didn’t feel trained, you didn’t feel like you were prepared.

And you often wondered how it would have turned out differently. And so let’s talk about that in terms of Project PAC, and what we’re trying to do with this program, what certainly with the podcast, and then with the advising and the collaboration and shared vision that we’re trying to bring about with training. So talk about, you know, how that felt.

[Neil Gross (guest)] (6:39 – 6:40)
Yeah, sure.

[Carol Engel-Enright (co-host)] (6:40 – 6:41)
On a personal level.

[Neil Gross (guest)] (6:41 – 9:28)
Yeah. So, in the book, I talk about a one particular car stop that I made, and this was after I’d finished field training. And it was, you know, in many ways, it wasn’t a particularly eventful car stop, it wasn’t for any serious offense.

But the people that I stopped, didn’t want to be stopped. And, you know, didn’t want to didn’t want to talk to me. And, and the situation very, very quickly escalated into something that could have ended pretty horrifically.

And, you know, I don’t know that that situation jaded me on policing. But, you know, I was coming to realize at that point that there were just a lot of tools that I kind of didn’t have. And it caused me at least to reflect on the nature of police training.

So I, like I said, I worked in Berkeley, California, which was a pretty progressive police department at the time. But like many departments, it didn’t have its own police academy. So I went to the police academy that was run by the city of Sacramento, which is much larger on the, than it was on the grounds of the California Highway Patrol Academy.

And it was a very, as academies go, it was a very militaristic academy. We lived there during the week, get home on the weekends. And it was, you know, just kind of what you’d imagine classic, like, you know, start with the, you know, the runs in the morning and, you know, drill instructor, yell in your face and all that kind of thing.

Campish, exactly. And I think as the trainings went, it was very, it was very professional. It was very well organized, you know, high quality teachers, no objections to it.

But I think, you know, we were taught that, you know, that officer safety is the first priority and that people are out there, not all of them, but many of them are out there, you know, and will do you harm unless you really step up and make sure to protect yourself and protect your colleagues. And that was drilled into me, you know, on the streets as well by my FTOs who, you know, I think were, again, many were very good officers, you know, very, very smart, very savvy. And I was, I don’t want to say that I was paranoid as a cop.

But, you know, I was very young, I was 22, I guess. And had spent a lot of time in policing, you know, relatively speaking before that. So I was not, wasn’t completely new to it.

But, you know, certainly hyper aware of any sign of danger. And, you know, not necessarily thinking about broader concerns, not necessarily thinking about how, you know, the actions I was taking would impact the community as a whole. So I think I realized quickly that, that at a place where I was, that had a good, a good culture, a by and large, and where training was quite solid, there was still some fundamental piece that I was lacking that I felt like some of my peers were lacking as well.

[Mike Butler (co-host)] (9:29 – 10:33)
So let me ask you about that then. Was your training more in alignment with, here’s how the laws get enforced in terms of the role of policing, being more of an enforcer of laws, versus perhaps, maybe even, maybe even more of a partner with the community in terms of what that looked like. In terms of, a lot of police academies, the academy I went to was very much focused on law enforcement.

And so when you got out of the academy and you became certified and you hit the street, even the field training officer program was, you know, the critical desk checklist, I think what they called, were very much aligned with law enforcement. Was that your experience, Neil, or was there other aspects in terms of, here’s how you access resources in a community, here’s how you partner with a community, here’s how you help a neighborhood find resilience and self-sustainability? What was, talk a little bit about that.

[Neil Gross (guest)] (10:35 – 11:45)
So again, you know, I think the Berkeley Police Department was in many ways ahead of its time. There certainly were people there that were doing the kind of partnering that you’re thinking of. But, you know, as someone who was just coming out, I didn’t have exposure really to any of that, except, you know, the occasional, like, stop by a community meeting.

You know, I worked the night shift. This was the 90s. Berkeley has a high crime rate.

It’s adjacent to Oakland, which has an astronomically high crime rate. It was, it’s a college town, but, you know, again, high crime rate, college town. And, you know, we were focused primarily on law enforcement.

So, you know, I was assigned to a part of the city that, you know, had a relatively high rate of violence. The crack cocaine trade was flourishing, and the job was to, you know, respond to calls, clear them, get back out, you know, be proactive. That was definitely the focus.

So even if I’d wanted to interact with the community, I don’t know, other than, you know, stopping by, again, a community center in the evening before everything closed down, I don’t know that I would have had much of an opportunity. So if that was part of what was happening behind the scenes, I didn’t, I wasn’t kind of fully aware of it as a young officer.

[Kristin Daley (co-host)] (11:46 – 12:12)
And in thinking about relating to the community and building those relationships, clearly, officer safety is an extremely critical part of training you receive in the Academy, but you use the word hyper aware. And I’m just wondering if you could talk a little bit about the mindset that that puts a young officer in, in terms of, you know, trusting community members or relating to community members. How did that feel for you?

[Neil Gross (guest)] (12:12 – 13:38)
Yeah. You know, I think that, you know, everyone’s experience with this is different. I mean, I grew up in Berkeley, so it was, it was my community.

So I didn’t feel, you know, particularly like alien from it. But, you know, if you’re a young person, there are just, you know, things and experiences that you don’t have yet. And, you know, it’s hard to read people’s actions sometimes.

And I think I, partially because of my training, and also probably just because of my youth and policing is kind of a young person’s game, at least at the patrol level, typically, I think I was, you know, very aware of any potential sign of danger and, and too quick to imagine that, that things that that look like they could be dangerous would be dangerous, as opposed to assuming that it was probably going to be fine. So I think I was, you know, quick to assume to make the call that something would, you know, was much more dangerous than it was. And when you make that assumption, you know, it can lead to some real problems.

So, you know, I think looking back on it, I wish that I’d had myself a different perspective, I wish I’d been able to bring a little bit more maturity to those, to those interactions. And I certainly wish that the training and ethos had been a little bit more, a little bit more balanced. I think that would have been pretty helpful.

[Carol Engel-Enright (co-host)] (13:39 – 14:43)
Okay, so let’s get to ethos. As you started to put your research together around the three cities, you looked for this kind of culture, I wrote it down, you looked for chiefs that had signed on to replace, you talk about police culture being somewhat aggressive. And I think the majority of Americans might agree with that.

And that these chiefs were, were there to change. When you say change cop culture, your book talks about values, beliefs, and assumptions. And, and I thought, boy, that’s really interesting.

You also talk about, it can’t just be at the chief level, you know, the culture can’t result in a policy or a rule or regulation change. So talk a little bit about as you went into these departments and did the interviews, what you started to see or how you connected the dots that the ethos was indeed different than what you had experienced, and then what you had researched.

[Neil Gross (guest)] (14:44 – 17:19)
Yeah. You know, I think one thing that’s that’s complicated about departments, and this is true for policing and other kinds of organizations is that it’s never all one thing. Right.

So you can go into a where, where the general culture is, is, is pretty positive. And there’s going to be a few people who are not positive. And so it’s not as though I set foot in in these agencies, and you know, everything was, you know, kind of hunky dory.

And it was also pretty clear going in that, that each of the chiefs had approached culture change differently and was interested in a different kind of culture. You know, Longmont and Stockton and LaGrange are very different. Demographically, they’re different in terms of the criminal justice, the crime issues that they face.

And the chiefs were all also quite different in their personal orientations, in some cases in their politics. So it’s not as though they all pushed in exactly the same direction. But you know, what I noticed was that in each of these places, there had previously been a real lack of trust between the police department and the community.

And over a fairly long period of time, the chiefs in each instance, worked hard to fashion a department culture that would allow for the development of greater trust, you know, in some places by, by, by doing, you know, real work around, for example, racial reconciliation in LaGrange and really leaning into that, in other cases, doing some really what might seem to be fairly basic work of just having conversations with, with people between the police department and, and community organizations in Stockton. And then, of course, in Longmont, doing a whole range of things to try to make it so that the police department was really an expression of the community, more than a government entity, kind of responding to calls. So in all in all three places that the chiefs had made policy changes, of course, they listened to community members, they run with ideas from the community, but they’d all kind of recognize that policy change wasn’t enough, and that you had to change the orientation that police officers had toward their work had toward their interactions with citizens and had toward the communities.

And that’s ultimately what really stood out about all three places. As I said, there were some cities that I examined that I thought initially would be examples of that kind of change and weren’t a little bit more examination. So I would say that these are these are three places where that change was, was really, really strong and robust.

[Carol Engel-Enright (co-host)] (17:19 – 18:22)
Can you can you speak a little more to the orientation? What does that mean? As an officer, and I understand, you know, you’ve got to protect your own safety, you’re there to protect the safety of the municipality and all the citizens.

And how, how did you see, and let’s talk Longmont, because then Mike can can join in on on what he was doing on his side. What could you see in terms of, you know, from the neuroscience, to protect yourself, you’ve got to be a little on the amygdala side, a little into the fear and suspicion, being aware that hyper awareness that you talked about, but on the connection side, how, how are they managing that? Because I think that’s the big, big question.

And in terms of building trust as well, that there’s not going to be this alertness and this response, this quick reactive response, but there’s going to be this connection and long term relationship.

[Neil Gross (guest)] (18:23 – 20:27)
Yeah, I mean, I guess there’s different ways to think about this, as I, I came to see it over over time, I kind of realized that the the best police officers in these agencies, they just had a whole variety of tools that they could use in and they were comfortable deploying whatever tools seem most appropriate in the situation. So it’s not just that they had, you know, kind of physical tools to use and technology, but they had a whole range of ways of talking to people and ways of interacting with people. And they could, you know, kind of up the level of escalation, lower the level of escalation, they could see that somebody really needed a, you know, a police response or situation really need a police response, where they could see situation really needed a kind of friend mentor response, and they were able to be flexible and adjust.

You know, the best officers that I saw in these agencies, they knew that they had these tools available, they knew they had the support of the administration to use those tools, they had the time at their disposal, to use those tools, as the situation called for it. And they they weren’t all amygdala, as you said, they, you know, when that was necessary, that’s absolutely what they did. And, you know, I spent a lot of time in the book talking about the dangers of aggressive police culture.

But let’s, let’s be clear, sometimes aggression is exactly what you need. In policing, there’s, there’s no question about it. But there are many times when aggression is the last thing that you need in policing.

And so the best officers, I think, naturally learn, you know, when, when to be aggressive, when not to be aggressive. And, you know, as I saw the best police agencies, give give officers the skills they need to deploy that full range of tools. So the tools were a little bit different in the different agencies, partially because of what what worked in different, different local cultures.

But but all the departments had aimed at really expanding the the skill sets, the emotional skill sets, the cognitive skill sets of officers. So that was a big part of it. And then also just thinking about like, what is it you’re doing?

What’s the you know, what are you trying to do for the community? Are you are you just trying to arrest people who’ve broken the law? Are you trying to shore up the basis of the community?

Are you a part of the community? How do you see your job? How do you see your role?

So that was another big part of kind of what I meant by orientation.

[Carol Engel-Enright (co-host)] (20:27 – 21:02)
Okay, Mike, you want to do you want to talk about like, how did you give all those those officers in your department? The tools? I know, everybody listening to this is like, well, we want the tools.

Where are these tools? I love that you talk about emotional intelligence and the cognitive skills. That’s a huge part of what we’re doing in Project PACT, especially around the training.

So, Mike, how did you see that? How did you see the tools and the orientation towards being adaptable and flexible with, with this situation and how you trained your officers into that?

[Mike Butler (co-host)] (21:03 – 27:11)
Sure, thanks. I really appreciated Neil’s response there in terms of tools. But for us, it was it was tools plus culture plus exposure to other aspects of the community.

Most police officers are typically only exposed to what’s not working well. The man’s inhumanity to man, and they go on calls for service. And that’s a lot of their response or detectives investigate crimes, special units have kind of a more focused, intense response to a specific category or type of crime, dealing with particular social or health issues.

And so part of our response was, I’ll get to all three of those, but part of our response was exposure. And so we intentionally carved out time when we could for our officers to be exposed to what was good in the community, and to see that the community was, had a lot of things going well in it. And so it was quite a bit of that going on.

And so we had to be intentional about exposing our officers to something that necessarily wasn’t going to activate their amygdala, or put them in a sense of a place where they might feel fear, a sense for their safety. But they’re actually surrounded by people who appreciated them and respected them, and there was also an opportunity for them to connect in a way that was safe for everybody. And so that was part of it.

The other aspect of that was the culture piece, and that was looking at all of our management systems, all the way from recruitment and hiring, to supervision, to training, to performance management, even the architecture of the organization, communications, what we taught our officers, what we exposed them to in terms of training and education. And so there was quite a bit of that in terms of, you know, we worked hard on that philosophical integration of all of our management systems, down to the place where the kind of people we hired and recruited and hired were very much aligned with where we like to be involved and engaged in relationships. We’re not lone cowboys, or lone cowgirls, or have a sense of me against the world, or whatever that might look like.

And so we really ferreted that out, and really asked and really looked deep into the police officers, and if there was a shred of any kind of aggression or violence in terms of what we found in our backgrounds or psychologicals around looking at people, we didn’t accept them. We wanted people who were willing to solve problems with their own cognitive skills and behaviors, and we were very much interested in finding people who could smile easily, relate easily, show compassion and care in their own history, especially if they were a current police officer. And then the tools themselves were very much aligned with what Neil talked about in terms of what are the very aspects of this job that we want our officers to do.

Our motto was policing in partnership with the people. What’s a partnership mean? And are they operating in a partnership internally?

A lot of police chiefs say go out and work in partnership with the community and operate from a very patriarchal style, and that just doesn’t work. And so this command and control, top-down, you know, kind of way of looking at things from a police department’s perspective where, you know, a police chief is expected to hold their officers accountable, we shifted a lot of that towards creating a culture of accountability, towards creating a versatile toolbox for our police officers so that they could have the things that Neil was talking about in terms of situational policing, situational leadership, whatever you want to refer to it as, but there’s just so many different dynamics and situations a police officer can run into in any given hour or any given day. Did they have the versatility to respond appropriately in those circumstances versus this one-size-fits-all kind of approach and seeing things kind of, well, the law is broken, I arrest or summons, and that’s what I’m looking for, I’m here to enforce the law, versus looking at it from a perspective of, you know, the human condition is messy, and how can I more effectively deal with that messiness? And so, you know, we talked at some level, and we’ll talk more about all the tools that we gave police officers, including restorative principles, practice, and justice, including how we dealt with folks who were struggling with their mental health or addiction, or how we dealt with kids, or how we dealt with people in the community who made a bad decision, so to speak. And so, all those, you know, we created over time considerable numbers of options and alternatives to the criminal justice system for our officers to utilize versus just, we’re going to respond to a call for service, determine if a crime was committed to make an arrest.

So, how we exposed our officers, the culture we developed, and the tools were all part of how we responded to the community. And so, and in that, we had a lot of community feedback in terms of what they wanted to see from their police officers. So, that’s enough for now.

[Carol Engel-Enright (co-host)] (27:11 – 27:33)
So, Neil, what are you finding? You talked about trust. I know that trust is a big topic of Kristen’s research as well, you know, reestablishing the trust, especially in communities where it may have been breached.

And you found that in all three communities that are within the book?

[Neil Gross (guest)] (27:33 – 30:02)
Yeah, I mean, I think some people, you know, in some communities would say, you know, it’s not really reestablishing trust. Sometimes it’s just establishing trust for the first time because it may never have been there. But, you know, that’s terribly important.

You know, one of the, it’s very hard for any government entity or really any kind of organization to function effectively if the people it’s dealing with don’t trust them. You know, you can have all sorts of rules and laws in place, but without that trust to lubricate relationships, it’s really challenging. So, a big part of what I saw in all three cities was the chiefs trying to do things to breach the hole, basically breach the divide between the police and the community to allow the police to learn the stories of the community and allow the community to learn the stories of officers so they could all see one another as human and, you know, flawed in their own ways.

And the hope would be then that people would be perhaps a little bit more, a little bit quicker to assume the best of others when that was appropriate. And to, you know, the community could provide information to the police when necessary. The police could make suggestions to the community about, you know, things that they see that the community might do better.

So, in all three cases, it was trust building, but I think a lot of it really was just trying to break down the barriers between the police and the community. And that was true both for, you know, trying to get cops to talk to community members, but it also really had to do with the relationship between the leadership of the police department and the community itself. You know, one thing that I’ve always admired so much about Mike and the other two chiefs was that they had strong visions for where they wanted to go, but they also recognized that they all were also very humble and recognized that, you know, there’s a lot of sources of ideas about, you know, that could be helpful for figuring out good directions for a police department to take and whether those ideas come from, you know, other members of the department who aren’t in leadership positions or whether they come from, you know, activists in the community or religious figures or whomever.

You know, if you’re open to good ideas whenever you hear them and, you know, try to say yes when you can, you know, sometimes really great things can emerge out of it. So, the chiefs were also very open to making themselves really connected to the community. That seemed really important.

[Carol Engel-Enright (co-host)] (30:02 – 31:41)
Yeah, curiosity. We like to talk about curiosity and discovery that that bridges those, I don’t know, did you call it an abyss? And I know Kristen’s working around that too with communication, open communication, more than transparency.

This idea of being humble and you don’t have to know everything. You don’t have to be the total expert. There can be resources coming from lots of different directions.

What are you seeing in new trends since you’ve done the research and crossed the country? Because you were kind of into an ethnography of the cultures as you came into the communities and lived with the officers and went on calls and actually saw it firsthand of how responses were made, not what you were told, but you actually saw it, right? So, what are you doing now to see the new trends?

And I will just say to the audience, of course, you know, we knew Neil when he was researching the book and writing the book, but now rereading the book, it is so current. It’s such a beautiful essay of where we can go. So, if you’re in a police department or you’re in a community organization or you’re a community leader, please pick up this book and you will understand how this philosophy is moving forward.

And you were one of the first to report it, so tell us what’s happening these days.

[Neil Gross (guest)] (31:41 – 34:06)
Yeah, sure. You know, I wrote the book in a period, a very particular period. I started this project well before George Floyd was killed.

And so, there had been some mobilization around Black Lives Matter, but it was prior to the real effort of the movement was a little bit later. And things have changed in so many ways since then. One thing that I have been aware of, as Mike said, is that, yes, interest in police change, police reform, support for the police, it ebbs and flows.

And I think I knew at that time that as Black Lives Matter was unfolding, that there was very strong, since then, that things had to change and very strong efforts to kind of legislate that change. And I think I was aware that most of those efforts were probably not going to work and would not sustain long-term, that efforts to legislate change are rarely successful and, you know, politicians change and administrations change and that really the only thing that would be sustainable long-term would be to try to grow a new culture. And that’s kind of where I’m seeing things now.

You know, I will say that certainly under the new administration, you know, efforts at trying to get departments to change through consent decrees and federal investigations, that’s stopped. And there is still change happening and real progress being made in lots of different agencies. And sometimes that’s because of what state legislatures are doing, but mostly it’s because of what, you know, chiefs and officers and community members are doing in places that are really committed to trying to make things better.

It’s an interesting time because the sort of legislative efforts to fix policing have, in many places, basically come to a standstill. And yet, you know, good change continues to happen in a whole bunch of places, including Boston, which is the closest big city to me, which has really made some remarkable strides in recent years. So I’m seeing, you know, encouraging signs on the ground.

And, you know, I think there’s more that can be done there.

[Carol Engel-Enright (co-host)] (34:07 – 34:24)
Great. And Mike, do you want to talk about that? Or Kristen, in terms of what you’re seeing as well, that this culture shift is not being driven by any kind of authority or institutional coercion, that it’s happening in the grassroots, it’s happening in the community itself.

[Kristin Daley (co-host)] (34:26 – 35:28)
Yeah, I completely agree with Neil on that. I think, you know, it’s happening through individual chiefs and officers, and they’re kind of creating this network nationwide. And there are changes happening in individual departments that are extraordinary.

And, you know, I think trust is really essential in building that process of a safer, healthy community. And you can’t build that trust without willing to being willing to kind of give up some of that perceived power. You have to be ready to get vulnerable and get authentic about communication.

And I think, you know, Mike is a wonderful example of that. What he did was, as Neil said, he went into the process very humble, and inclusive of everyone and willing to extend the opportunity to community members. And that is life changing.

You know, you have to be willing to have compassion for the other side, which really isn’t the other side at all, and move forward together.

[Mike Butler (co-host)] (35:29 – 39:49)
You know, and I’ll come at it from the perspective of what Project PACT is trying to do. And that is, we’re not going to go into a police department. If we work with a police department or community, we’re not going to go in and say, you’re a problem to be solved, and we’re here to fix you.

We’re going to come at it from the perspective of there’s a lot of good things happening. How can we expand those? How can we create more of what you would like to see more of?

And what are the examples, whether they’re an officer performance or whatever that might be inside of a police department that we can expand? Because we know that the more that we can create, the more that that kind of crowds out the things we don’t want to see. Many, many change efforts over the years have come at it from the perspective of, yes, they’re a problem to be solved.

That’s all the legislation that we’ve seen over the last decade, or since George Floyd especially, has been a light of, we want to solve a problem. And so when we solve problems, we’re typically only fixing the past. And so how do we create a future that’s different than the one we have now?

And what can we take that’s working well, expand that, grow it, enlarge it in a way that more people within an organization or within a community especially are willing to say, you know, this is what we really want. People, organizations, communities don’t want to be seen as problems to be solved. They want to be seen as, hey, we have some good things going on here, and we want to continue those.

And so that’s where Project PACT is headed. And that’s what we ended up doing in the long run. You know, we ended up emphasizing the cup is half full.

We emphasized the good traits of police officers versus seeing them through the lens of their deficiencies. We emphasized what was possible in the community, not what was wrong in the community. And when we expanded those possibilities, when we expanded what was good inside of our organization, that almost just naturally crowded out the things we didn’t want to see.

So it’s a different change model around how you can move forward. It’s not a model that’s founded in, as I said, through the deficiencies and the problems and looking at organizations or communities as needing to be fixed. I don’t see anybody that’s necessarily broken.

I see everything is kind of stuck and sometimes stuck in old models that have reached a diminishing point of return in terms of how effective those old models are. And so when we begin to look at the other thing we’re going to be looking at, as you know, are the symbols and slogans and the rituals that police departments, communities haven’t relied on for decades that have kind of kept organizations and communities stuck. What can we do with those to maybe help shift so that there is some new conversation, some new language, some new ritualistic kinds of things that we can do?

The departments that are doing that now are finding great success, by the way, great effectiveness, and shifting their cultures and helping their communities shift their own cultures from one of, you know, we’re just going to be dependent on the police, to one of no safeties, to a conversation where they say safety is in our hands versus being all things to all people. Police departments could be fulcrums or leverage points to create that sense that communities and neighborhoods down to the granular aspect of a community can begin to see that they can make a difference on their own. And so as I think I mentioned this to Neil years ago, and I know you guys have heard this, our metric for effectiveness and alumna was we’re no longer needed.

And so when we’re no longer needed and the communities become self-reliant or our neighborhoods become self-reliant or self-sufficient, then our job is done. And so there’s a potential slogan, a new slogan, or a new way of seeing things that we can move forward with.

[Carol Engel-Enright (co-host)] (39:49 – 41:37)
Right. Neil, in the middle of your book on page 117, you’re talking about Mike and Mike says around this, I want to get back to this concept of ethos, because I think as you were talking about the culture of accountability, but really the identity of policing, you know, instead of the criminal justice system walking in to take your freedom and force you through a large institutional power, you write what people need when they call the police is a neighbor, a friend, a coach, a social worker, a psychologist, a minister, an ambassador to connect them with the appropriate municipal service. And this idea, and I know you also, when I first read the book, and I just have to say, when I read the book, I had tears streaming down my face, two reasons.

I knew the author, I knew one of the subjects, but also you started to talk about moral courage, a term that we rarely hear in America around anything, you know, and yet something that’s so, I want to get back to this concept of idealism of creating a community of safety and creating, you know, helping others. And just speak to that, you know, how you brought from being the professor of sociology and the research on sociology, how we bring that forward into a new identity, a new spirit of policing as you write.

[Neil Gross (guest)] (41:38 – 44:00)
You know, I think in the same way that the best chiefs are humble, I think that the best people who work on social policy also know that, you know, we don’t know what the right answer is. We can, you know, maybe help people see, help them figure out how to figure out what the right answer is. So, I don’t know exactly what the right answer is moving forward.

I do know that there is no one size fits all solution. You know, America is a very, very large place, communities are vastly different, and, you know, what works well in one agency might not work well in another. And so, the idea that there’s a simple format that will work for everyone I think is problematic.

You know, I think the best departments are able to carve out an ethos for themselves that draws from local traditions and local ideas and that helps community members see what the police do as just an essential aspect of community life and, you know, very much part and parcel of it. So, I love that quote that Mike said that, you know, you reference in the book. And I think it displays exactly what you’re talking about, which is moral courage.

You know, we can talk about the conditions under which organizations are most likely to change, but I think one of them is, you know, having leaders and people in the organization who, you know, feel very strongly about a particular set of ideas. They’re committed to that moral view. They are, you know, really upstanding followers of that position.

Their moral courage sort of emanates from their being. I mean, that’s a real source of inspiration, a real source of change for people. And I think that can powerfully shift a culture.

You know, perhaps for another conversation, we have to have the question of how you find those people. You know, people have said to me, you know, Mike Butler’s a unicorn. You know, how do we find more Mike Butler’s?

And that’s a hard question to answer. I think they’re out there. I think they can be cultivated.

But I think finding people who can really lead with that moral courage and, you know, find an ethos for their department that really, really works for that community for that moment in time is challenging, but doable.

[Kristin Daley (co-host)] (44:01 – 44:18)
I think you’re right that every department looks different and has different needs and ultimately ends up with a different solution. Is there one easily identifiable indicator, do you think, that a department is ready to embrace a new approach and move toward that kind of culture change?

[Neil Gross (guest)] (44:20 – 45:37)
I think it’s the recognition that things aren’t necessarily working as well as they could. You know, I think a lot of police departments are committed to, you know, continuous quality improvement or would like to be. But I think, you know, if you really dig deep, I think a lot of people are, you know, a lot of cops would say things have been working okay the way they are.

If they haven’t been, it’s not the problem of what I’m doing. It’s there’s something else in the world that’s causing the problem. You know, I think being willing to recognize that, you know, your old routines might not be as effective as you once thought they were seems like a pretty important precondition for change.

And sometimes that’s forced on you by circumstances, right? Some huge crisis erupts in your city and you have no option but to change. But I think the best departments are the ones that where everyone recognizes that, you know, circumstances change and, you know, you developed this great way of doing things before and it was perfect and it did what you wanted to do and now the world’s different and that’s not working as well as you once thought.

Or you thought it was working well but actually it wasn’t and now you have better information and you know that you need to change. So, just that willingness to adjust, to, you know, be creative, be flexible, to stretch yourself, that seems like a crucial part of the change process.

[Carol Engel-Enright (co-host)] (45:38 – 46:47)
Okay, perfect. This is going to be a to be continued. And I like that you talk about, like, let’s start talking about the profile because there’s a lot of people who would love to serve and protect and work in this field and how can they come in or how do we find them and where do we go from here?

And thank you for listening. If you are a listener out there, we’re just going to ask you to please review and give us a five-star rating and we’re going to continue this conversation. Of course, go to projectpact.org, our website. We have all kinds of resources. If you are in a police department, you can look for some of the resources or sign up for a free consultation with Kristen or Mike or both. And if you’re a full department, a chief, and you’re thinking about training or a city manager and like, what are they talking about on this emotional cognitive level?

We have some training programs for you. All kinds of resources as we move forward with this new spirit of policing and this great identity of bringing police and community together. Thank you for listening.

[narrator] (46:47 – 47:39)
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.