What Authentic Police-Community Partnership Looks Like in Practice

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, Kristen Daly, and Chief Mike Butler, where we explore how police, public safety experts, city leaders, and dedicated community members can work together to drive meaningful change.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (0:19 – 1:38)
Welcome to Beyond the Band-Aids. I’m here with Mike and Kristen, and we’re going to jump right into some of the heart of the matter of what’s happening with police every day in every community and all across the nation. And I just, I want to say, if you’re a policeman that’s out there today listening, thank you.

Thank you for your service. Thank you. I know police don’t always get that.

Thank you. Veterans always do. I’m always surprised that the first responders don’t always get thanked for their service because they are out there.

So this is for you. We’re going to talk about Project PACT and what we’re trying to do. We are really trying to bring into reality, into our today’s kind of ways of doing business, the habits, the mindset, and the practices that can lead to greater community safety, greater partnerships with community.

And today we’re going to focus on authentic partnerships. So Mike, I want you to kind of just address what does a partnership look like within a police department and then how does that expand out to community?

[Mike Butler] (1:39 – 4:39)
Yeah, I used to, thanks Carol. I really want to echo Carol’s sense of gratitude for those first responders that are out there in unpredictable ways and doing the work that you’re doing and and many times putting your life on the line for folks you don’t even know. And so thank you for your service.

And as a former police officer and someone who oversaw police and fire, I get that. I get that at the very heart of what that means. But partnership, it’s a word that gets thrown around a lot, but I’m not 100% certain people really understand what it means.

And we say our motto in Walmart was policing in partnership with the people. But we had to mirror that within our own organization in terms of what’s partnership look like between management and police officers or line level staff. And we had to figure that out.

And one of the things that we talked about was that everyone’s jointly accountable for the outcomes. No one could kind of say, well, someone else is accountable. All I do is show up.

So partnership means everybody’s accountable. Another attribute of partnership is the right to say no or the right to express reservations or doubts. An aspect of partnership that sometimes people wonder whether or not they can’t say no, especially line level police officers.

Can I say no to my boss? Or can I express a different opinion? Or the community?

Can I say no to the police department? Or can the police department say no to the community? Probably more applicable.

And then the idea that everyone needs to be absolutely honest in everything that they’re doing and above board and transparent. That’s a big part of a partnership. There can be no hidden agendas and nothing that says that my way is going to be the way that works.

And so partnerships are very much a part of accepting the perspectives that everyone have. And then kind of trying to figure out how you can find common ground in those various perspectives. And this is idea of that our purpose has to be kind of talked about as a whole as well.

It can’t just be the one person saying, here’s our vision. Here’s our purpose. Everyone has to accept it.

In a partnership, everyone has to engage in terms of determining what our purpose is, what our mission is, what our vision is. And so those are aspects of a partnership that are not necessarily easy to pull off because we’re operating from that perspective that there’s a dependency going on right now. Dependency from community with police and sometimes dependency with police officers and line level staff on their chiefs and their upper level management.

Those are part of a patriarchy. So anyway, that’s my initial take.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (4:39 – 4:57)
Yeah, I’m going to get to that later and we’re going to dive deep into that. But Kristen, you talk about shared vision and mutual trust a lot in your work. And just talk to me about that, about the partnership and what you’re seeing within the police that you’re working with.

[Kristin Daley] (4:57 – 6:24)
I think all of those things are interrelated. So Mike mentioned transparency and you can’t get to a place of mutual trust without that transparency. A partnership also can’t be surface level.

It can’t be, you know, this is going to make our department or our community look good. I mean, that’s obviously a wonderful benefit, but it can’t be the main goal. The goal of collaboration and partnership has to be getting on the same page and creating this plan for moving forward with public safety.

And that has to be aligned. It also has to come from a place where the partners are equal. So I think a lot of the problem that we run into within the police department, in different ranks and between the police and community, is that maybe there’s a perception of a power imbalance.

And so certainly I think there is that element to it when the police are working with the community, the community feels like, you know, the police are the experts in this. But I think they have to take a step back and realize that every community member has something to contribute, has a perception of what the community needs that should be shared. So I think the most important thing is to come into it with an open mind, a sense of we are going to dig deep and make this a relationship that’s mutually beneficial and that we are equals in what we’re creating here.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (6:24 – 7:13)
Yeah, I looked up authentic today. It means someone who’s genuine, who’s true to themselves, and acts in accordance with core beliefs and values. Now, you know, I come from academic research and postmodernism, you know, as it moved in, it said, oh, well, we can all have different values.

But I think there is common ground in creating values around what safety looks like. So I want to talk about what does it look like, this authentic partnership, and what does it feel like? And I’d like just, you know, a couple of things from both of you, of what that authentic partnership both, and let’s start within the department first, maybe, and then we’ll do with the community.

[Mike Butler] (7:15 – 9:01)
Sure, I’ll throw an example out there. And so the relationship between a supervisor and a line level police officer between management or between the police chief and a line level police officer, one of the things we did was open up all of our meetings. In other words, not only it was we used to have meetings where only the command staff could show up, and agendas were never talked about, and minutes were never written.

And so people didn’t know what these meetings were about. They were somewhat mysterious. So we opened up our meetings.

And everybody’s and the rule was for everybody, including me, was your voice counts, as long as your agenda is bigger than your self interest. And so if your agenda is about how we could make our police department better, how we could deliver services more effectively, how we could make something more efficient for the community, or whatever that might look like, your voice counted as much as anybody’s, including mine. And that took a lot of getting used to, especially by those on the command staff.

But it also took a lot of getting used to by police officers who are line level staff, people who came in and typically kind of sat around and just kind of listened. They had to get comfortable with the idea that their voice counted. But they also realized that there was an accountability for their voice, that accountability came with that.

And that’s a big part of a partnership is that you have to be able to choose accountability. You can’t just say, well, I could just say something and someone else can make it happen. You have to say something and say, I’m responsible for making that happen.

Those were big transitions for people.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (9:01 – 9:24)
So Mike, tell me, when you opened up those meetings, I’m a school teacher. So that’s like opening up your classroom and saying, okay, you’re welcome to hold up your hand and ask a question, or how did you facilitate, and I know you’re an expert facilitator in meetings, how did you facilitate those people coming in and starting to have a voice?

[Mike Butler] (9:24 – 11:39)
Well, yeah, first of all, there was a lot of setup work. There was a lot of conversations that occurred around how these meetings would look for people. And I did a lot of written communication.

I did a lot of oral communication about the nature of meetings and nature of gatherings and nature of conversations and what those would look like. And that brilliance came from anywhere. You didn’t have to have officially sanctioned rank to have wisdom, to have brilliance, that everybody had brilliance.

And we began to say things like everyone has unlimited capacity. Everyone has a perspective that’s important for everybody to hear. And so that was new information, new language, kind of new ways of thinking.

And it took a while for that to kind of catch on. And initially there were 70 to a hundred people at our meetings because there was a mysteriousness around the meetings themselves. And so we had almost demystified the sense of what these meetings look like internally.

But we also had, and so that kind of was, there was a trickle aspect to that. And so one of the things that I really focused on was how to make it safe for people to realize that their voice counted, their thoughts mattered, and that their humanness was valued. What did that look like?

And so when someone said something, if I found a top-level person saying, well, that’s not right, I would kind of minimize. I would say, no, that person’s voice is important here. And so I had to do a lot of that in terms of, because people were kind of used to thinking only their voice counted, no one else’s voice is counted.

There were only eight or nine people at a meeting. Now there’s 70 to a hundred people. And so whose voice counts and how does that count?

But you also had to be responsible for your voice. And again, going back to that agenda, it couldn’t be about you being a victim. Couldn’t be about you being a cynic or you being helpless.

You had to come in and say, the agenda I have is about the good of the whole. It’s not about just what I want. And the other part that even though your voice counted, your thoughts mattered, didn’t mean you got your way.

And so that was also something that we had to make clear. So anyway.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (11:39 – 11:45)
I suppose you also opened your door. People might’ve come up with ideas and meetings and then could meet with you.

[Mike Butler] (11:46 – 13:09)
Oh yeah, very much. So more than an open door, I had to have an open mind. And my mind had to have perspectives that said, and one of the things you’ve heard me say, Carol and Christa, you’ve heard me say, I don’t care who you are.

I don’t care if you’re the president of the United States or if you’re a chief in a small department or whatever that might look like. Your vision is limited. You don’t know everything.

And you have to open up yourself to the idea that people can gift you with what you don’t know. And you have to open up that perspective to say, there are just a lot of things I’m not aware of. And so here’s my vision, as limited as it was.

And that’s true for just about every leader. And so who gives you this? And so people had to get comfortable with gifting you with what you don’t know or another perspective.

And you had to make yourself feel like you were open and approachable and accessible to that. That’s kind of natural for me. I raised five daughters and I was often kind of told that here’s another way of seeing the world, dad.

And so it was one of those things where I went into it thinking that I was hoping that people would gift me with what I didn’t know. So that’s a big part of partnership is being open to what other people have to offer.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (13:10 – 13:12)
Requires a little bit of humbleness.

[Mike Butler] (13:13 – 13:17)
Presence. Being present. This presence piece is important.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (13:17 – 14:17)
No command and control as you open up. A good leader is a good listener above all. Right.

And I loved working at the university because I found the same thing. All these fresh perspectives and new ideas. And you think about seniority and how it’s really, you know, seniority comes from years of experience.

Well, that’s years of wisdom. But that’s also, you know, a different way of viewing the world. Let’s admit it.

You know, the worldview, you know, what Mike and I grew up with is a very different world than we have today. And so, Kristen, I want you to talk about your generation and how you’re seeing this new generation of officers as they move into their leadership positions and how they’re running, how they’re including their patrol people, their beat people, the people that are out on the streets.

[Kristin Daley] (14:18 – 15:39)
Yeah, I think the most important thing is to be very conscious of treating people with respect. So Mike talked about an open door policy and, you know, a structure where everyone can contribute and no one is afraid to speak up and also be held accountable for what they say. And I think that’s really important within the department and within the community.

And everyone has to approach those conversations from a place of respect. There has to be an understanding that, yes, you can say what you need to say, but you have to be mindful that other people are able to respond and you have to be respectful of other people’s opinions and thoughts and feelings. And I think that sets the tone for a more collaborative relationship.

I think younger officers are, in a lot of ways, willing to see that leadership can come from all ranks. It doesn’t necessarily have to come from the top down. And officers are willing, I think the officers that I work with, to take that initiative and to not just, you know, be the person to complain or point out what’s going wrong, but to find real ways to change it, to come with ideas and to come with contributions that make the system better and stronger and more effective.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (15:41 – 16:13)
Yeah, we’ll have a session about design thinking because I love what you just said. And, you know, my thing is, none of the three C’s, no complain, no criticize, condemn. What do you want to create?

It’s like, you know, like, come up with an idea and let’s start from there. The complaining, the condemning, the criticizing is just going to break us all down. The moral, the momentum, all of the energy that could go into embracing something different.

[Kristin Daley] (16:13 – 16:27)
Right. And people certainly have, you know, valid complaints about things that aren’t working well. But if we just get into a loop of complaining about them without coming up with or creating that solution, how are we going to fix it?

[Mike Butler] (16:28 – 18:12)
The other part of that partnership is that people tend to complain less if they feel like they’re a partner. They want to be a contributor. And so that’s a big aspect of partnership is your contribution to the whole, so to speak.

And so I found that, for instance, when we at one point in our own budget, another example of partnership, we had a $60 million budget. And at one point, there were only two people overseeing the budget. Well, we expanded that to close to 50 people overseeing the budget, including police officers overseeing certain functions.

And so they became less complaining about the budget as they grew to understand the nature of the budget. So there was an aspect of business literacy that goes with partnership, teaching the business to everybody so that they understand the nuance and subtleties. So things do become less mysterious and more known to them.

And that’s an aspect of everything in a partnership. That’s part of that transparency, that you let everybody know everything that there is to know in order for them to make the decisions they need to make. Then they more likely become more creative, more contributing in terms of their own way of seeing.

They become more resourceful as well in terms of what… And that was amazing. We were able to really leverage that budget at a much deeper, higher level of it because more people were overseeing it and more people were creative and resourceful.

So that was another example of a partnership within our organization.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (18:12 – 18:44)
Yeah. And Mike, didn’t you have situations where officers came to you and said, I’d like to go to this kind of training? Not the technical training, not the strategic kind of SWOT training, but other kinds of training.

I know you sent officers to other departments to find out what was working well and your whole budget system would make room. Everybody would go, okay, we’ll figure this out. You had this collaborative kind of atmosphere that happened.

[Mike Butler] (18:44 – 21:02)
We couldn’t say yes to everything. And part of this was when we decided, okay, training funds was another partnership. We had several hundred thousand dollars in training for 400 people and still was never enough.

And so how did we… At one point, one person was in charge of the training dollars. Now we got 40, 50 people in the room determining.

And so we did a lot of work in order to… And what partnership meant was more people know, more people understand, more people contribute, longer meetings, longer facilitation times. But we came out of there with a much better product in terms of who got the training with some exceptions.

So yeah. And it wasn’t that I just kept my door open so people could come to me. Every supervisor’s door and every supervisor’s mind had to be open.

And it wasn’t just… And so there was a lot of door opening going on in a partnership in a larger organization and a lot of mind opening that had to open up, not just for leaders. And by the way, partnerships, I found that the leaders had an easier time to deal with their end of the partnership than I did the police officers or the line level staff.

It sounded good, but when they became responsible for the outcomes and knew they had to be responsible for the outcomes, knew they had to do the work, knew that they just couldn’t be dependent on someone else to do it, there was some resistance initially to that. So there’s this stepping kind of process going on. But ultimately when people became more understanding of what this partnership was about and that their role in this partnership was, they became less fearful, less anxious about all that.

So there was a lot of things that go into that. And so anyway, but it was a process and we teach that by the way. We teach what that process looks like in terms of going from a patriarchal kind of way of system to a partnership style.

What’s that look like in terms of all the various systems and processes you have in your organization? I don’t care how big it is. It can be as big as New York City.

It works because there’s a few tenets that go with that, that apply regardless of the economy of scale.

[Kristin Daley] (21:03 – 21:15)
Yeah. And there’s definitely a learning curve, but when you trust people with important responsibilities, I think they ultimately become more invested in the organization and they do a better job. They do their best work.

[Mike Butler] (21:15 – 21:17)
Without question. I totally agree with that.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (21:17 – 21:47)
Right. I want to talk to the patrol officer, maybe even a new officer that’s listening, or, you know, if you’re a chief or a deputy or a sergeant or commander, whatever you are, thinking about that brand new person that’s out on patrol and how can they start to feel that partnership with the people that are on their beat? And I just, I want some ideas from both of you.

[Kristin Daley] (21:47 – 22:23)
So I think encouraging those new officers to get out there and really learn and understand the community that they’re serving, have conversations with not just business owners and prominent people in the community, but the average person that they can walk up to on the street and say, hey, I’m a new officer. I want to learn more about the community that I’m serving. Can I talk to you for a minute?

Can you tell me some of your concerns? Can you tell me what’s working well in your community? I think it’s really about getting them very, very familiar with the unique challenges of that community and what’s going right and how to expand on it.

[Mike Butler] (22:24 – 24:11)
Yeah. And so, listen, there’s a lot of setup going on with this too. There’s a lot of training that goes into this.

You just don’t put an officer brand new into the department on day one and say, go, go figure that out. There’s a lot of modeling that goes on by other officers and that modeling becomes important for them in terms of their field training officer, the training that they get in every aspect of the organization was enshrouded and immersed in this idea of partnership. And given the idea that we actually had these officers, we started this back in the nineties where we had them visiting just about every organization in the community that they might have to work with.

And so they got to know that was during their training. And so every advocacy organization, all the school districts, the neighborhoods, the business community, the churches, any nonprofit, they were visiting those and learning how those organizations work so that they could be say, Hey, here’s who I can call on. And so here’s a contact name, here’s a number or, and so, but the modeling was important.

And so when they went out in their field training officer program, they saw their FTO saying, here’s how we’re going to do this. We’re not going to come and be the answer. We’re going to come and help people try to figure out how they can be the answer so that we don’t get called back.

Remember our metric for effectiveness was we’re no longer needed. And that was a big part of our partnership. So as we built that joint accountability.

So there are examples out there that, that they, they learned from modeling, they learned from their training. So there was a big setup process to, so that they understood that they just weren’t out there. Now, what do I do?

And so there was a, there was a culture also that spoke to partnership.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (24:11 – 24:51)
Yeah. Learn to, to have transformational conversations with your, with the people that you’re serving. And, you know, I just want to say that, that that is available in Project PAX training.

The digital training is going to be coming up soon and online. And we hope that, you know, even if you’re an individual officer, if you’ll start to think about how easy is it for me to walk up to a stranger in a neighborhood that, that I know there’s some problems with and start to form those connections, those relationships that, that lead us into this mutual trust, the shared vision for, for what we want to have in terms of safety and wellness.

[Mike Butler] (24:51 – 25:06)
It’s no longer I’m here from the government, I’m here to help you. I’m here to try to figure out how you can help yourself. Needs to be more of the mantra.

And so there’s, there’s a different take on things in terms of what that can look like. So.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (25:06 – 25:58)
Yeah. And Kristen, can you talk just a little bit to collaboration? I looked up collaborative today too.

And it means when two, two or more people come together to, to work or to make something together. And it also talked about, you know, versus what one can do in a, and I love this word silo. I think we need to use it more often in terms of people trying to, you know, be task related where they’re filling out their paperwork or they’re doing their data points or they’re doing their whatever.

And they forget about the, the, and, and this is all over our training, the social intelligence that comes, that creates, that, that makes something bigger happen. And I know you’re seeing it, you know, in some of your projects that are happening, but just, just a collaboration. What does it look like for you within a police department and with community?

[Kristin Daley] (25:59 – 27:27)
I think it looks like starting out with the understanding or, you know, almost, almost making a contract for how we’re going to work together. And that doesn’t have to be a formal thing, but it does have to have some, some key points like going into every conversation in a respectful way, building trust, making sure that we understand that we’re equals and that what we say has equal weight. I think that’s really important when we’re talking about the type of structure we’re seeing in a police department or in a police working with community sort of environment.

And I think a big part of it, Mike touched on this at the end of his last answer, is culture. The department really has to make an effort to create that culture where there is openness and transparency. And we understand that everyone’s job impacts someone else’s job and these things are all interconnected.

So we don’t want to build those silos. We want to have a sense of shared accountability, openness, transparency, and lifting people up rather than kind of keeping them down. You know, I think probably in the average police department, that officer who’s brand new doesn’t feel like they’re coming into a role where they can speak out.

And that culture plays a huge role. So if we create this culture of transparency and accountability, people are more likely to step up and contribute.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (27:28 – 28:16)
Beautiful. You know, we’re going to wrap it up for today. I just want to say that Project PACT has this training available, but more important, Project PACT has a collaborative kind of interview process that we can talk with you about what’s going on in your department, no matter what level you’re at.

So please go to our website, projectpact.org. First, rate our podcast. Give us a five stars so we can start to spread this word.

I think there’s a lot of, I don’t want to say issues. There’s a lot of conversations going on around public safety, law and order, all of these things, community wellness. It’s an everyday conversation.

So let’s build it together and let’s make a different world and make it beautiful.

[narrator] (28:18 – 29:09)
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.