Breathing New Life Into Police Training with Neill Franklin

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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[narrator] (0:02 – 0:18)
Welcome to Beyond the Band-Aids with Project PACT, hosted by Dr. Carol Engel-Enright, Kristin 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] (0:19 – 1:26)
Welcome to Beyond the Band-Aids, a Project PACT podcast. We are sponsored by LEAP, the Law Enforcement Action Partnership, and in partnership with three nonprofits, LEAP, the School of Statesmanship, Stewardship, and Service, SOSUS, and New Blue, a forward-thinking police design incubator coming up with new ideas for the culture of policing. So we’re excited you’re here today.

We hope you have listened in to previous episodes, and we’re most excited because we have a special guest on our podcast today, Neill Franklin, who has a beautiful history in policing. And Neill, I just want you to tell your story, just right from the beginning, what happened, what called you to policing, and where did you start, and then where did you go? And I’ll chime in on the education piece, and I know Mike and Kristin know you so well, of working with you at Law Enforcement Action Partnership.

[Mike Butler] (1:27 – 2:23)
Before Neill, I just want to make sure that our listeners know what a special guest this gentleman is. And I’ve gotten to know Neill a little bit over the last few years, and his role as a, being a member of the Law Enforcement Action Partnership, and what he’s done with that particular organization. And I also know that he’s done some incredible work for the city of Baltimore, Maryland, and is quite renowned nationally and internationally.

When a media outlet needs an expert to talk about what’s happening in our police profession, you’ll often see Neill in their studio. And so having Neill with us is truly special. So thanks, Neill, for being here, but I don’t want to interrupt your own story.

I just wanted to make sure that our listeners knew what kind of special guest we had today.

[Neill Franklin (guest)] (2:25 – 7:50)
Ah, well, thank you, Carol and Mike. You’re too kind. So I’ll try the abbreviated version here of my career, my path, my interest in law enforcement.

And Carol, I’m going to surprise you here. Unlike many people who go into policing, I didn’t have any idea. I didn’t have a clue.

And what I mean by that is, now, in my neighborhood in Baltimore, I grew up in Baltimore, we had, kids had a good relationship with a couple of police officers in our community. Just a couple, but that’s all it took. So there was some sort of interest a little bit, but when I got out of high school, I was in tune more with going into the military.

But my brother was already a state trooper for Maryland, and I got to see a little bit of what he was doing. So I was like, huh, if I go into the military, I’m committing to four years. If I go into the state police cadet program, I can quit if I don’t like it, and then go into the military.

So I tried the cadet program and kind of liked it. So I stayed with it, graduated from the academy in 1979, the summer of 1979. And I was the youngest person to ever graduate from the police academy in the Maryland State Police, because I still had a couple of weeks to go before I turned 21.

So they told me to go home, put my gun away, and stay out of trouble until you turn 21. Don’t get involved in anything. But soon after my entry into Maryland State Police, I worked undercover, did that for a couple of years, came back out, ended up getting promoted, went into criminal investigation, back into narcotics investigation as a lieutenant overseeing a number of drug task forces in the western part of the state.

Fortunate enough to continue to get promoted. And then I had the Northeast Region for the Bureau of Drug and Criminal Enforcement. So I had task forces for criminal investigations as well as drug investigations.

But what I enjoyed most were my last two years with the Maryland State Police, where I was the head of training, because that gave me an opportunity to take everything that I had learned. I also did some time in planning and research and the boring parts of policing and personnel, but that gave me the opportunity to share my experiences and the good and the bad with the new recruits coming on board. It was then when I retired from state police, I was recruited by Baltimore to head up their training and education section, which I did for four years.

I also did a little bit of time as a chief of HR, human resources, which gave me some really good insight to policing resources. Not just the people, not just the equipment, but the funding, right? State funding, federal funding, grants.

It also gave me some insight into community relations and how that works and how we as a police agency connect with the community. Even though I had some experience throughout my career in doing so, that just gave me another perspective from a different place. Then I did six years, almost sound like I’m doing time in prison, but then I did six years with Maryland Transit Police Department in a number of different roles from investigations to a general inspector’s position, chief of patrol.

But during that time, something really special happened. I actually came across this website called LEAP, and that was kind of interesting. I reached out because at that time I’d had all these questions about how we were enforcing drug policies, what was the foundation of our drug policies, why they were what they were, how did we get to this place, and LEAP had the answers.

So I reached out, connected with LEAP, became a board member, and then shortly after that became the executive director where I was for 10 years, 10 great years. And here I am now, and just, I can’t get out of it. When I say I can’t get out of it, I’m talking about changing not just the face of policing, but the foundation of policing.

It’s a long, hard road, but as I, on paper, I’m retired, can’t ever retire from this work.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (7:50 – 7:52)
You think about it all the time.

[Mike Butler] (7:53 – 8:27)
So I want to respond to a couple things. Thank you for that background, and I know there’s a lot more to it, but thank you for the higher version of it, if you will. But I graduated from the University of Maryland.

I don’t know if you knew that, so I’m an old Terrapin fan, and I know that area really well. Maryland was always a special state for me and had a lot of things going for it, and so just wanted to let you know that, that that’s part of what we have in common in terms of growing up in that area. I was there for like seven or eight years, I think, so anyway.

[Neill Franklin (guest)] (8:27 – 8:30)
That’s good. I didn’t know that. That’s good to know.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (8:31 – 9:57)
Yeah, crossing paths. I love that you found your way into training and helping younger people with experience and thinking about what the next generation, certainly you weren’t at the next generation in your 20s, but how you were conveying experiences and then how you were preparing people for what they were going to face out there. I also picked up that there’s a lot of criminal investigation that goes on that a lot of people never know about that’s happening within all communities to keep communities safe, and I thank you for your service.

I just want to say that from the start. I’m the lay person on this podcast. I haven’t dealt as much with the police community.

I have dealt with training and education, so I just wanted to go back to the Law Enforcement Action Partnership, and yes, it did take on drug policy, but what were you seeing in the streets that you were saying? It wasn’t working. You were seeing a disconnect, and I was going to bring it up at the end of the podcast, but your Newsweek article at the very end says we need to connect the dots.

Tell us about connecting the dots. That’s a big part of what we do with SOSUS and what we do with Project PACT.

[Neill Franklin (guest)] (9:59 – 13:53)
There are a couple of things that I saw. Just real quick, I want to touch quickly on a drug policy part that I saw. It was in the year 2000 when I was with the Baltimore Police Department.

This is after decades of working undercover. This is after decades of overseeing drug task forces and the work that we do. When I was overseeing the drug task forces, I got to see a little bit about and understand a little bit about the imbalance in enforcing our drug policies relative to race, looking at where we were assigning our Black and Latino undercover officers and those areas in our community that we focus more upon, which were communities of color.

I got to see a little bit of that, but I didn’t understand the violence on the heels of drug policy until my friend, Ed Totley, was killed working undercover. He was working with the FBI on a task force. He was making a buy of cocaine from a person he had bought from before many times, but this time, this individual decided that he wanted to keep the drugs and the money, so he killed Ed Totley during that buy.

That made my ears perk up regarding the violence because then I started connecting the dots of violence that I was seeing in Baltimore relative to the illicit drug trade. A family of seven who were killed in one night, the Dawson family, they were doing what we, the police, would ask someone to do, work with us, let us know who’s selling the drugs in your community, give us the information we need, we’ll come in and we’ll get rid of them. We’ll lock them up and we’ll do what we do.

The mother, Angela, did just that. She contacted the police. There’s this guy and his crew outside of my house selling drugs.

He found out about her reaching out to the police and he set their home on fire to send a message to the community that you do not work with the police in ratting me out and killed the entire family that night. There were other instances, other police officers I knew getting killed relative to drug policy. That’s what really pulled me into learning more about it and how it works, not just within our communities, but nationwide and internationally.

I want to touch on one thing real quick about training, what I saw, Carol, and what is still a problem today, is that we do a really good job overall in our academies in teaching new recruits what they need to know about the law, about the constitution, about working in communities, and for the most part, and so on, and how to apply those things. But then when they get out in the field, that handoff to the field training officers, this is where we’re losing it. Because many of those field training officers are now under the culture of policing in the streets.

And I’ve had recruits come back to me and say, you know, the first thing they said to me when I got out there was, forget all that stuff you learned in the academy, we’re going to show you how it has to be done in the streets, and how you interact with people, and how you treat people, and how you speak to people to get your respect, and this, that, and the other. So I think what we need to do, we need to focus on two things. We need to focus on our field training programs and we need to focus on first-line supervision.

But that’s a whole other conversation. I just wanted to speak about that disconnect from the academy to the street, and the work that I see that I think needs to be done.

[Mike Butler] (13:54 – 15:39)
So Neil, thank you for that. And without saying it, you said it. I mean, you were up to your ears in the war on drugs, as it’s been called, in terms of addressing the supply side of narcotics and illicit narcotics in our country.

And you experienced a lot of the residuals of that, that didn’t go well. And, you know, we’re so good as a country in declaring war on many things. Lots of social issues, whether it’s poverty, whatever else, and we like to declare war.

We like to use the words fight, battle, and kind of those words in dealing with these complex social health issues sometimes that don’t necessarily deal with the complexity of the issues themselves, or the human side of it. And so I know you were deep into that, and that’s why your experience means so much, I think, to all of us. And the other part that you addressed, my own experience too, says how we address our new officers when they get into the field training officer program, or all the training and education that they receive.

You know, one of the things that we’re talking about with Project PACT is how to preserve that sense of idealism that these new police officers have, how to preserve it, how to protect it, how to expand it even. And you touched on two big areas there with the field training officer program being one of them and the culture of policing in terms of what it’s really like versus, I mean, what people perceive it to be really like. So thank you for that.

[Neill Franklin (guest)] (15:39 – 17:41)
Let me just comment on that real quick, Mike, about what I thought or still think a big part of the solution is with that transition so that they can keep that idealism when they come in. Before I left the Baltimore Police Department, I had started a program which didn’t carry over with the next department head. What I noticed is that the field training officers were not really part of the academy.

So they didn’t have the same philosophy that the instructors had and the way of doing business. So one of the things that I thought we should do was, number one, make the field training officers, even though they’re assigned to districts or precincts, make them part of the academy. And the first step with that was to send them to instructor’s school, to certify them as instructors, which none of them were.

So in that training, they would then understand the importance of being an instructor and not just someone who’s going to check boxes to see if a recruit can do certain tasks, right, where they would continue the learning process for that recruit. Because this is how you would begin to change the culture with that handoff, right? So if they were to report back to and become part of the academy where you had that philosophy, you stand a much better chance of that recruit than maintaining all that they learned in the academy and the feeling of doing things the right way when they make that transition.

And then the last part of that was first-line supervision also has to become part of that process and to figure that part out. And there’s more to it, but I just wanted to say that.

[Mike Butler] (17:41 – 18:01)
Well, thanks for that, Neil. That goes to show your comments show that you understand this part of a police department and the police culture pretty intricately. And I hope for our listeners, especially those who are from the police profession, get what Neil’s talking about.

Sure they will. So thank you.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (18:01 – 20:11)
I think you have addressed a lot of the, well, a couple of the issues, how slow evolution is in terms of shifting and changing culture. And then also the value of relationship, the value of connection seems to me like what you said was the academy ends and the police department begins and whatever the tradition, the ritual, we talk about the rituals, the slogans, the beliefs, the culture of each individual police department and understanding that each individual police department is a result of what has happened in the past, but how you think forward, how you share a vision, how you create, how you bring that idealism to something that can bring to life. And we, on Project PACT, we talk about the bridge between community and the police department and the relationships. I love that you talked about there were a couple of guys in your neighborhood that you got along with well, that gave you a different vision of policing and how we can bring that vision forward and that kind of training that you’re talking about.

That’s what we’re about. That’s why we all show up here day after day and figure it out what’s next. So how do you feel about communities?

You’ve watched this take place. You talked about a community activist that wanted to work with the police, but then paid a price. How do you feel about working into the communities and what can police, what do you think they can do differently, better, connected, as well as citizens?

I don’t want this to all be, it’s too big a load for the police. It has to be all of us. We have to all start to act more responsibly and care about what’s going to happen tomorrow in our safety.

[Neill Franklin (guest)] (20:12 – 29:04)
Yeah. So let me begin with saying something. Carol, when you opened up today on this podcast, you said something about PACT, which is beyond the band-aids, right?

You know, that’s why, Mike, it’s been taking us so long to move forward with policing and its culture, because for the most part, we have been about band-aids, right? Something is pushed down typically to a police department because something happens in the community that’s awful, and we come up with a new policy, maybe it’s on the heels of a consent decree, and we come up with some new policies and training, and we do it as a band-aid. We’re not really serious about solving the issue or the problem, okay?

It’s a band-aid. But what PACT is about, it’s about solutions. It’s about moving beyond the band-aids.

So, Carol, as you’re talking about communities and beginning first with the police and what we can do, we first need to understand that we’re the ones that have the power. So I think the first move is on us in establishing the trust. If you don’t have the trust, you know, if the community members do not trust you, especially in underserved communities, you’re going to be ineffective in so many ways.

Not just will you have issues that end up on the 11 o’clock news at night because of how a police officer either used excessive force or maybe just disrespected someone, did something wrong, and now you’re in the news. But you’re going to be ineffective in solving crime. You know, it’s a handful of people who commit most of the crimes within a community.

And, you know, speaking, for instance, to violent crime, maybe someone’s committing robberies. Maybe they’re doing breaking in and burglaries in homes or whatever it may be. If we don’t get information from the community, you can’t find out who did it because the police aren’t there when these crimes happened.

But the quickest way to finding out who the culprit is, getting the information and evidence you need to make the arrest and then hold that person accountable is getting information from the community, the people who know what’s going on. After, when I talked about Ms. Dawson and her family who was killed, once that happened, in East Baltimore, no one was giving any information to the police about anything, not just drug crimes, but crimes of violence. People were getting robbed in their neighborhoods and they’re like, okay, it’s just part of living here.

It’s part of, but I’m not reaching out to the police. I’m just not going to do so because I don’t trust them with the information. I don’t know what can happen on the back end of this.

Hey, it’s just part of, we’ll try to handle it among ourselves. So in establishing that trust, not only will you have people coming forward to help you solve crimes, but it’s also before you can even solve the crime, you have to have people reporting the crimes. So I, let me say this real quick.

I went to DC a week ago to talk about the immigrant community within our neighborhoods, within our cities. And the fact that, yeah, we all know we have a problem at the border with how people come and go across the border. We know that.

But once they get into our communities, in our neighborhoods, the local police have to figure out how do we establish trust with the immigrant community because we don’t want them to be victimized by people committing acts of violence. We want, you know, we want women who might be in a violent domestic relationship. We want them to be able to come forward and trust us and not fear that they’re going to be deported.

We want family members who may be legal citizens in the country. We want them to report crimes against their relatives. We want them to come forward with information who’s committing the crimes.

I just wanted to mention that because a police agency has to realize the importance of building trust and how you go about doing that, you know, the relationships that you establish with the youth within those communities and so on. So it begins with communication. It begins with, again, the culture of policing.

If you can get your police officers just to stop cursing at people, you’d be surprised just how far that would go in establishing trust. If you could get your police officers to understand when they’re called to a crime, not to investigate the person who calls you before you get into solving their issue because it’s, okay, what’s your name? What’s your date of birth?

Let me run you through the system. And the next thing you know, you’re locking that person up because they have a failure to appear in a traffic court or traffic case or something. So that kind of stuff, right?

Give the attention, the proper attention to the people who need you, who you’re there to serve. But I think it begins first with introducing the new police officers to the community, right? Having something set up so that when they’re going through that academy, because many of these police officers come from other states, they come from other cities, other towns, rural communities, and they know nothing about the community that they’re now going to be serving.

So before they get out there, while they’re in the academy, have programs, processes set up to immerse them into the community that they will be serving. That goes a long way. And there are a number of organizations out there that do great work, like the Youth Police Initiative by the North American Family Institute.

I’ve seen a number of great programs out there that do this. And many of those relationships that are developed between the recruit and community members continue over to when they go out into that community to work and serve. So there’s so much that police departments can do.

And then real quick, as a citizen, once a police department and its members start reaching out to you, or even before, you know, make the effort. If you’re walking down the street, make the effort to greet a police officer. You know, despite how you may feel about it, you’ll be surprised how far a thank you will go.

Right? Just, hey, thank you for being here. Appreciate you.

A couple of words, you know, that I guess what I’m saying is on both sides, we have to begin positive communication. And it doesn’t have to be anything elaborate, doesn’t have to be a program. It’s just how you interact with each other, just how you greet somebody.

You know, if you’re a police officer, somebody comes up to you and says, good morning, you know, Officer Franklin, thank you for being here, reaches out to shake your hand, shake their hand. But I’ve gone up to police officers to thank them, you know, now that I’m retired, extend my hand. I’m sorry, sir.

I’ll shake your hand. We don’t shake hands. To ask them a simple question, and they don’t respond to you.

They’re like, they give you this look, like, why are you talking to me? No. It just begins with being cordial to one another.

And then from there, we could take it into a more in-depth, you know, processes of how we begin to establish trust and how we deal with, see, when you have trust, it’s easier to deal with an incident that does come off the rails when something does bad happen. And then we could talk a little bit later about maybe transparency, if you want to, as it relates to police departments and making information available to the community that the community should have, information they should have.

[Kristin Daley] (29:04 – 29:20)
Yeah. Neil, this is a topic we’ve discussed a lot here, that human connection and how to begin those interactions that do build trust. Could you say a little bit more about what that does internally for the agency culture when they start to establish those bonds with the community?

[Neill Franklin (guest)] (29:21 – 33:41)
Yeah, sure. Well, first, I got to say this. The time that I did with the Baltimore Police Department, one of the challenges that I did see first was internal communication.

I mean, if you’re not communicating cordially among yourselves, you know, within your organization, it’s going to be very difficult to carry it, to do that in the streets with people you don’t know, or people you just may be meeting, people you’re serving. So this is where leadership comes in, and leadership has to make themselves aware, whether it’s the police chief, the police commissioner, the precinct captain, major, whatever that top person may be. You got to get out of your office.

You got to talk to people. You got to hear their conversations. You got to see how they’re interacting with each other and have some sort of process to ensure that your people are cordial with each other, not disrespecting each other, you know.

And this could be anywhere from, you know, off-color jokes to even the language you’re using in your roll call rooms, you know. Go to roll call meetings and see how that lieutenant or sergeant is communicating information to the men and women. And then if they’re joining in a way that could possibly drive, in using language that could possibly drive a wedge between the police and the community, you have to pull that person aside and straighten them out.

So it begins with leadership getting up and out of their seats and going around interacting with their people, having open door policies of some sort so that they can get good feedback, good information about what’s happening within their own walls. And then now you can take that to the street. You have to have really good policy, and this goes back to the first line supervision thing, right?

It begins with language. It begins with the words you use. It begins with your body language.

All of this, all these different forms of communication. I mentioned the field training process. I was out on patrol once.

As the head of training, you had to go out at night every so often and be the city-wide duty officer. And I was on a call once, just responded to a call. When I’d hear a call, I’d respond.

And there was this officer cursing at a citizen, getting them to move down the street. And I walked up to the officer and I said, here, come here. Let me talk to you for a second.

And I said, we don’t do that. Well, sir, sometimes that’s how you got to interact. No, no, no, that’s, it’s not.

And I looked at on the officer’s shirt and he had a field training officer badge. It stayed on his shirt for about 30 seconds because I took it off and I removed him from the program. You got to send a message of, you got to have policies that you stick to so that when a first line supervisor or someone else witnesses this, you got to hold that person accountable.

And it begins with, again, first line supervisors and lieutenants walking their talk, which I hate to say it, but we don’t see that a lot. You know, there was a time the sergeant was spitting on someone who had just been arrested. We don’t do a very good job of policing our own when it comes to how we interact with people in general.

We got to do a better job of policing our own ranks, Kristin. And it begins at the top. It begins with the chief, the sheriff, the commissioner, and then that person has to bring their leadership into a room and say, hey, this is how it’s going to be.

There are no exceptions. And I expect you to carry this message down to our men and women in the streets. And this is how we’re going to be as a police agency.

[Kristin Daley] (33:42 – 33:48)
I completely agree. And, you know, without treating people with respect, it’s kind of impossible to build trust.

[Neill Franklin (guest)] (33:48 – 33:53)
Absolutely. So it begins with communication at its most basic level.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (33:54 – 36:01)
So I’ve noticed both of you have talked about, and I just want to bring Project PACT and the training that we have that’s going to be available soon. And to think about that first officer straight out of Academy that might be listening to this podcast saying, well, that’s just the way our department is. How did they, how can they affect?

And I think everything we’re doing with Project PACT is about whoever you are, you have a way to become a better, effective communicator. You have a way to connect with the common good. You have a way to see the lens of goodness in your community.

You have a way, you have a way to make the change that we all want to see. Everyone wants to see this shift in policing. We hear about it.

I’m often surprised how much on the nightly local news is about crimes that have happened during the day instead of the goodness that is happening within every community. So Neil, you’ve been in, you were with Law Enforcement Action Partnership as Kristin was working there and Mike came onto the board and you have seen kind of the lead up to Kristin and Mike doing trainings together and then having this vision of what we can maybe make happen. And we are so appreciative of the support from Law Enforcement Action Partnership.

Let’s talk about the future. Let’s talk about what is a beautiful, effective police department, first line of duty out on the streets? What does that look like?

And you can talk about the transparency on that, the accountability, the trust, but I also want you to think about what does the community need to step up and do?

[Neill Franklin (guest)] (36:01 – 41:28)
Thank you for first line supervision because I think that is, that’s like the hub of the wheel. I mean, from there, everything can flow and be improved upon and be solved in our communities if you have good first line supervision. So let me tell you, and maybe begin with a disclaimer, is that there are police agencies out here doing a good job in that area, but unfortunately, not enough.

Okay. So let me begin with telling you what I’ve seen, where I’ve been. And in Baltimore, I’m going to talk a little bit about what I saw in Baltimore, which I think is very important.

And this, a lot of this is from feedback that I would get from recruits who had gone out and been working out in their precincts, in their districts for a couple of months, couple of years, they would come back and talk to me because that’s what I wanted. I wanted them to do that. First line supervisors, generally speaking, didn’t want to be bothered when a young officer had a question.

They were told to go to a senior officer to get their answer. Bad move. Bad move.

Because more times than not, the answer they would get is, I would call it a street answer and not a policy answer. You know, and, you know, not so much a legal backed answer, right? It’s just about, this is how we do it out here.

Doesn’t necessarily follow policy or even the law sometimes, and constitutional law, which is very important. Additionally, first line supervisors tend to be tasked with things that weren’t about overseeing and supervising and teaching their squad members. Administrative duties that are time intensive.

And that’s really important because what a first, in my opinion, in policing, a first line supervisor should be bouncing, call hopping, going from one call to the next, to the next, to the next. When one of their squad members get a call, they should be going. They should be there.

They should be observing. You know, they should be, you know, interjecting the right way properly when need be. Employing law and policy and tactfulness and those communication skills, you know, being an example, if need be.

Complimenting. And then, you know, you compliment in public, but then you have to criticize sometimes. So you pull them aside and you do that in private.

That’s what first line supervisors should be doing with the proper philosophy, with, you know, with the proper guidance from their leaders. And they should be doing it on a very, very consistent basis. That gives them a better opportunity to evaluate their people, to correct their people, to teach their people, to be a coach for their people.

Employing the things that are going to improve relationships between us and the community. Right? So that’s how it should be.

But that’s not what I see. I see too many supervisors, first line supervisors missing mainly from very important critical calls for service. I’m not just talking about a simple traffic stop or something like that.

I’m talking about a burglary. I’m talking about a robbery. I’m talking about, you know, responding to someone that has a knife.

You know, I’m responding to a situation of mental health when someone’s having a mental health episode. You hear that come across the radio. You should you should be there right away as a first line supervisor to make sure that things are going properly, to make sure that, you know, you have the if you have a special situation and you’ve got people in your squad who have special skills and talents, you know, you should be orchestrating that, making sure that they’re on that call for service or on their way.

If you hear dispatch give a call regarding a mental health issue and you know one of your police officers has had some extensive training in those types of situations, but dispatch assigns that call to someone else, maybe a younger, less experienced officer, you should be on that radio saying, no, I want this officer to be the lead on this call. You can be backup or whatever. And I’m also on the way.

So that’s kind of like the snapshot. That’s what I think they should be doing. But unfortunately, too many times they’re they’re they’re unavailable, they’re scarce, they don’t show up.

And we need to have more of that, more of them showing up.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (41:28 – 42:02)
I just want to say, I think this is an issue in almost every institution, that the data points of entry create a bureaucracy where people are more isolated, more distanced from the people that are coming behind them and the coaching and the mentoring. Mike, I want you to chime in, because you will talk about peer accountability and that beauty of coordinating the social capital within your own police department.

[Mike Butler] (42:03 – 42:50)
Yeah, Neil hit on a lot of specifics in terms of what’s what’s what’s happening in our police departments. And we’re still operating off old models, worn out ways of doing business. And just here’s how we did it.

Here’s how I grew up. And what Neil’s kind of referring to, implying is this first line supervisor is doing it this way because their first line supervisor did it that way. And so we’re talking about generations of behavior and things that we need to kind of.

But the other part of this is creating a culture of accountability in a police department. How do you do that? How do you create a culture of accountability in terms of what that looks like?

And so it goes everything in terms of what’s happening. And I know you know what I’m talking about, Neil.

[Neill Franklin (guest)] (42:50 – 43:26)
So I have something for you, Mike, and I want to hear something from you that I know about you and how you operate it. Something we haven’t touched on yet in this conversation is it is how do you get the union, the employee group. Involved and engaged as a leader, Mike, and I know you’ve experienced this, how do you sit down with union leadership and say, hey, I need your help, this is what we want to do, and this is why this is where it will take us.

I know you’ve done that.

[Mike Butler] (43:27 – 46:39)
So, yeah, thanks. And and that’s a part of it. And a lot of things, you know, you hear the same thing that I hear, Neil, in terms of police chiefs, mostly police chiefs.

I had two unions I had to deal with in in Longmont, but that police chiefs say I can’t make any changes because my union won’t let me. And and I think that’s that’s that’s false. I think there are ways of being able to create and connect relationships with your union leaders where their goals and purposes are being met and the goals and purposes that you want to see met can can be integrated, can be unified.

There is a unity of purpose there that if you want to find it, you can find it. And and so we found that and and we and we had support, not just support. It wasn’t or people just not saying anything.

They were actively engaged in in wanting to bring about the kind of culture we were talking about, the kind of relationships that we wanted with our community. And they were actively engaged with that. In fact, at one point leaped at a webinar that was led by Amos Irwin, where we had the union president myself speaking for about an hour and a half about how we did that.

And in fact, we are going to have that same union president on our podcast here in the not too distant future to talk about that. But thanks for bringing that up, because I personally think that’s more of an excuse and that we should be able to figure out how to have that relationship. And that’s something one of the things you’re talking about, Neil, that I don’t think a lot of police chiefs in this country have is the understanding of how to shift and transcend culture within their police department.

A lot of specifics you’re talking about are are kind of residuals of something larger in terms of how do we create that culture of accountability? How do we create that culture of connection? How do we create that culture of partnership that we want to have with our community in ways that we’re operating and we’re experiencing that internally?

And so we can mirror that with the people that we’re talking to in our community. We’re still very much juxtaposed differently and very much counter that our internal cultures and police departments are very much counter the kind of culture and relationship we want to have with our community. And Project PACT, that’s a big aspect of what Project PACT is going to do.

So thank you, Neil, for bringing all that up. And I know that your comments today are just really right on in terms of what needs to occur differently within our police departments, with the FTO program, first line supervision. And I’m going to throw in that sense of culture of accountability because we try to develop a culture where peers could be more involved in creating accountability as well, not just first line supervisors, but our peers.

Because you know as well as I do that these hundreds and thousands of calls that a police department will go on in any given day or week, that most of the time it’s done either by yourself or with another officer. Well, what if we had that sense of peer accountability as well working for us?

[Neill Franklin (guest)] (46:40 – 49:17)
As the head of training, I had a relationship, I started a relationship with union leadership, right? Because I knew that I would need them for some things. So in getting, a lot of times when we reach out to the union with an issue or problem, it’s something that they don’t agree.

Something happened and now we need something from them and it’s something that they feel they can’t give or it’s a new piece of policy. We start out with a very difficult problem, right? And it’s hard getting their support.

But in developing this relationship, say you’re a new police chief and now you’ve come into an agency, you’ve got the employee group there, you’ve got the union there, start right away with something easy, a win-win for both of you. And so for instance, in, when I was running training, I said, Hey, union folks, would you guys like more in-service training? I mean, 18 hours a year is not enough, but if you really want your members to be safe, if you want them to have more information, if you want them to be more professional, right?

Because people don’t think policing’s a true profession. So we need to step up our game, right? To show them otherwise.

So how about getting more training? What if I can get you guys a whole week of really good in-service training, right? So that’s a win-win.

Now I’m able to, in that week-long training, bring in people from the community. I’m able to do some other things. I’m able to teach about, so Baltimore police commissioner, Mike Harrison, when he came on board, he instituted a program called EPIC.

Ethical policing is courageous, right? Meaning that hold yourselves accountable. When you see one of your fellow police officers, one of your peers doing something that can cost them their career, don’t let them lose their career.

Speak up, pull them aside, save them from themselves. And you begin with that. So you begin with something easy to develop that union relationship with leadership, and then you can move into more difficult territory when need be.

But anyway, you have that investment, you have that equity built up, and then you can reach out and make things happen. So I just wanted to touch on that.

[Mike Butler] (49:17 – 49:57)
Start with a win-win. You hit on something incredibly important there, and that is the creation or design of new slogans. And Chief Harrison brought in that slogan, ethical policing involves courage, EPIC.

And that’s a slogan that begins to permeate through your organization that didn’t exist before. And so that’s a big part of how we’re going to change cultures in terms of shifting and reimagining slogans, symbols, and rituals that we’ve been stuck in, that are worn out, that are dead, that have reached an admission point of return. So thank you for bringing that one up.

Excellent.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (49:57 – 50:52)
Awesome. Well, I also appreciate that you’ve talked about training. I think every day we are working on innovating and creating a training that can play both to police departments and city government and community activists and citizens and people who care and neighborhoods.

I’m the neighborhood girl. How do you start? How do we start to connect with each other?

Forget about connecting clear across town with the police department. We don’t know each other’s names next door. And so the world can start to look a lot happier, connected, and that brings a lot of safety into play.

[Mike Butler] (50:53 – 51:43)
So I want to ask Neil one more question before you, let’s say you’re all of a sudden, someone calls Neil Franklin and says, Neil, you probably say no to this, but let’s just say you said yes to, we want you to be the police chief in Baltimore, or we want you to be the police chief in Chicago or wherever that might look like. What would be your vision? What would be your hope?

What would you like to be able to just talk a little bit about what that might look? I hope I’m not putting you on the spot too much, but we’re coming at Project PAC from this perspective that the cup is half full and that we can’t create a different future than what’s existed in the past. What would be some of the attributes or some of the characteristics of your department?

[Neill Franklin (guest)] (51:43 – 57:17)
So I guess probably the best way to answer that question is, okay, here it is day one in the Baltimore police department. First thing I’d say to the mayor is you’re going to have to bear with me here for a few weeks, couple of months, as I do some communicating here, right? So it might involve some overtime here and there, but if you want this to be done, just bear with me.

So first I’ll have to have that really good relationship with the mayor so that they can trust me to do what I got to do. Day one, once I get in there, I start a process of bringing every single police department, I mean every single police officer in that department into what is called the, in Baltimore we have the War Memorial Building, which is a huge hall right across the street from headquarters. And you can, this is where we hold our graduations.

I would start bringing them in district by district so that they could hear directly from me about the future, the vision, what it’s going to look like going forward. You’re not going to hear this from someone else. You’re not going to hear it on the news.

You’re not going to see little sound clips hearing it. No, here it is coming from me. This is what I expect from you as a police officer.

And this is what you should expect from me. And I’ll have a process where you’ll be able to give me feedback and I’ll talk a little bit about that. But I will communicate my vision to them.

And I’ll end with the fact that if you trust me, the same trust that you’re going to have to get from the community, if you trust me, you will be the most professional police department in this country, if not, and beyond. And then I lay out how I would go ahead and do that and what I expect from them as far as communication and language. And I run it all down and say, and within a few months, you’ll have a line of applicants from within this city and outside of this city, going all the way down interstate 83, wanting to get into this police department.

I said, because you will be the most respected police department anywhere in the country. And there’s a lot more to that. But my process where I said I’d be getting feedback from them, one of the things that I see in police departments, and again, it’s about leadership, especially big police departments, there’s such a disconnect between the chief, the commissioner, and the rank and file members.

When the chief goes out, he’s got this entourage. He’s got a someone driving him, another officer or two riding with him, blah, blah. Yeah, bodyguards.

I don’t need any of that. I don’t want any of you. Because when I have to go to a community meeting somewhere, I’m going to call up the district and say, send me your patrol officer who has the patrol where that meeting is going to be.

Send them to come pick me up and get me to that meeting. And doing that drive to and fro, we’re having a conversation. Right?

I’m going to get information firsthand. And this is one way I have to make the journey anyway, so it won’t be time wasted. I’m going to have that communication.

So that’s an example. So mayor, no, don’t ask me to come to some news conference. Don’t ask me to come to some meeting with city leaders.

Save that for six months to a year down the road. Right now, I’ve got some work to do with the men and women. And to be out there, my second in command, make sure they’re competent enough to run with the administrative things that need to be done in that police department, because I’m going to be out in the streets with the men and women who are doing the work, and if need be, showing them how to do it.

So basically, you have to set the tone. You have to set the culture. And of course, we talked about the union, right?

Again, day one, I’m reaching out to the union and say, hey, this is what I’m going to be doing. I’m going to be calling all the folks in. I want you there with me as I’m talking about this vision to all of your men and women.

Right? I want you right there with me. We’re going to talk about that ahead of time, because we’re going to be on the same page as far as taking this agency to a level of professionalism, holding people accountable, maybe an EPIC program or whatever, so that you just don’t keep each other safe from being harmed out there, but you keep each other’s jobs safe.

We don’t want you getting sued. We don’t want the department getting sued. This is how we’re going to do it, but you’re going to see, if you go with me on this, when you go into your neighborhood and you start your patrol, you won’t have to worry about officers being there to back you up.

Community members will back you up, right? When you have a dangerous situation or a dangerous call, because you’re going to be respecting each other. They’re going to see the quality of who you are, the humanity in all of this.

This is just a quick down and dirty.

[Mike Butler] (57:17 – 57:25)
Well done. Don’t be surprised if Neil Franklin gets a call from a city saying, can you be our police chief now? Be prepared.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (57:26 – 57:59)
That was a beautiful vision and a beautiful hope. We teach from design thinking, so once you can imagine what that looks like, thank you, Neil, for giving us what does that look like. Mike has done so much of that in his own experience, and Kristin is working with professionals every day that are doing the same thing, creating this vision and then bringing it to life.

[Mike Butler] (58:00 – 58:08)
Hey, Neil, will you come back if we ask you? Oh, yeah, sure. Great.

We feel like we just barely touched.

[Neill Franklin (guest)] (58:09 – 58:14)
Barely, yeah. I got a busy month of May coming up, but anytime after that’s fine.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (58:15 – 59:44)
The tip of the iceberg. We’re going to wrap it up for today. We want to remind our listeners and our viewers to please give us a rating.

My own kids say, ask for the five-star, Mom. And as a teacher, on teacher evaluations, we were told you can’t do that, but I’m going to ask for a five-star, but I also would love for listeners to give us some comments, give us some feedback, give us your questions, give us your just what Neil was talking about. Give us the feedback on how we can take this forward.

I’ve loved this conversation. It’s been a beautiful discussion around professionalism of policing. And so that’s a wrap up for Beyond the Band-Aids, Project PACT.

Oh, and make sure our podcasts are becoming so popular. We’re getting a lot of people on our weekly newsletter. So please go to our website, projectpact.org, sign up for the newsletter. If you are in the profession, we are starting a new Project PACT ambassadors program. And there’s a lot of wonderful benefits to becoming an ambassador. We want this whole community as we go forward and create a better vision for policing.

So thank you all. And we’ll see you next week.

[narrator] (59:46 – 1:00:37)
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.

Your support helps us reach more listeners and continue bringing you valuable insights and stories. For more information and to stay connected, visit our website at projectpact.org and follow us on social media. We’d love to hear your thoughts and ideas, so feel free to reach out.

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.