Co-Creating Safety: Police & Community in Longmont

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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Jennifer (narrator) 00:02
Carol, 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 00:19
Welcome to Beyond the band aids. This is a podcast about modern policing and how police and community can come together to help communities be safe, to experience well being in communities. So we come from both the citizen side, the community leadership side, the civic responsibility side, service mindedness and, most importantly, self leadership. We’re going to talk today with Mike Butler and Kristin daily around being in that position of police leadership and rethinking what police can do with community. There’s so much in the media today around the narrative of policing, and I think people stereotype and generalize and bring their own biases and prejudice to to understanding what actually happens behind the desk and on the ground with policing. And so we’re going to, we’re going to talk to Mike today, and we’re going to just kind of shoot him questions. Kristin and I are both going to just pick up the conversation and say, But wait, what, how, what, how, when, where, and why, in terms of when you came into this position. And this is, this is for everyone. This is for the citizen who’s going, What can I do with my police department? What? What can happen in my community? I think so often individuals get activist oriented, and they’re like, I have to start another movement instead of, let’s work with what the let’s work with the tools that are already here. And then the patrol officer that’s in a neighborhood, and what can I do? And then the the deputy chief, where can I help my patrol officers? And then the chief, how do I work with community? How do I bridge these gaps and build trust? So all of those things we’re going to dig into. And first Mike was the police chief in Longmont, Colorado, from 1993 on Mike, I just want you to say, you know, talk about what it felt like to come in and then say, just kind of go into the story about how you assessed. What did this community need when you got here?

Mike Butler 02:45
Okay, well, what I felt was, I felt like I was going to hit the ground running. I didn’t have a lot of anxiousness, or a lot of what do I do now? Kind of of thinking, I had a, I had kind of a I had a game plan, I had a perspective and that I wanted to bring to life and so and that required me and kind of answer your second question, just is to engage in conversations with just about everybody I possibly could, including our staff, including our community. And every chief will tell you. Anybody who’s in a leadership position will tell you that conversations are the best way to learn and the best way to understand and the best way to kind of be able to take next steps, because they’re if your conversations are handled well, so to speak, they’re not just about you, but there’s an act of listening on your part, and there’s a sense of, I really am curious about what’s happened, why it’s happened, and maybe even more so what we both can do together, so to speak, and to people in the room and the conversation can move forward, can create something different than what we have. And so I was very open to that. And so in the community, kind of answering your question, I made myself available to anyone and everyone and so, and I had a list of questions that I was kind of going with in terms of what I wanted to know. It was their questions based on curiosity about what happened, why it happened, and what’s your view, what’s your story, and what’s your story with our police department prior to my arrival, and what would you like the story to look like, and what part are you willing to play? A lot of people want to say, well, here’s the story, and I want to complain, and I want to declare my own innocence. But then there’s and at some level, there’s a lot of people want to do that, and then expect you as the kind of the government servant to take care of everything and and so. But I made it very clear that if you want to engage in these conversations, you’re going to have to become the author of your own experience as well, the author. They’re of the destiny that we’re all trying to reach here and and so, so that’s part of where we went and and there were a lot of things that happened with the community that opened up the community’s perspective, opened up their desire to kind of be part of moving forward.

Carol Engel-Enright 05:20
Okay, so apparently you were comfortable with conversation.

Mike Butler 05:25
Well, very still, have been for decades, and love to engage and so yeah, very much

Carol Engel-Enright 05:34
for those out there going, I would never open myself to a conversation with people that I know are going to be maybe not happy with me or not friendly.

Mike Butler 05:47
I ran across a lot. Most everybody had an experience that wasn’t good, that they wanted to share. And there was a history at the Longmont in the city of Longmont that people wanted to talk about in terms of, you know, we’ve put this history. We haven’t necessarily allowed that history to kind of bubble up to the surface. We’ve We’ve kept it under wraps. We just kept it kind of hidden and dormant and and that wasn’t healthy. And so that history had to get revealed, have be talked about, and had to be named and and each person had a different perspective of what that history was. And that was the beauty of those conversations, is that you ran across these variations of history and but kind of singular but similar kinds of ways of seeing what happened in Longmont and what happened with the Longmont Police Department, and what happened with the relationship between the Longmont police department and the community?

Kristin Daley 06:46
Yeah, it’s a really important step to give people the space to talk about share their experience. I’m wondering when you heard some of that more more negative experience with your now department. What was your initial response, and how did the community receive that

Mike Butler 07:05
I was I was I was delighted that they were willing to share what they thought, their, their, their, their own perspective. Kristin, I was very delighted and and happy that they felt safe and comfortable to say something. And so my whole goal was to try to create that sense of safety, that sense of openness, a sense of approachability, that they felt like they could say what they needed to say. I just felt like them naming this with me was a very important first step, but that that began the conversation about how we move forward, and we didn’t stay stuck in the past. And I asked people not to stay stuck in the past, and and we had to heal it. We had to kind of figure out a way to to kind of bring, you know, apology and forgiveness into the equation, if you will. And, and I often said that I am sorry you experienced this, I am sorry that you went through this, and I’m sorry that that happened. Are you willing to, in some ways, and this is shortening that conversation, but are you willing in some ways, to find a different path and and to move forward in spite of the history that you have, and, and, and I’m and what I can promise you is we’ll do this together. And are you open to a new future? Are you open to looking at possibilities and opportunities? Are you open to being part of that? Are you open to making that and being making that investment, and being a co creator of something that doesn’t exist yet, that’s something that’s new, that we can both share in and move forward with.

Kristin Daley 08:47
Yeah, I think that’s really important too, to not not erase what happened in the past, but to acknowledge it, and, you know, kind of make amends for it and find a path forward.

Carol Engel-Enright 08:57
Absolutely, absolutely apology and forgiveness are not those are two words you don’t often read in the news, in the media, in the narrative. I just, I want to go, okay, so, so, so you, you do this listening path of all the kind of stakeholders in academia, we would call that stakeholder theory or in design thinking, we would be talking about the needs of the that person, that human centered needs of what a community needs. Where do you go next? Like most communities are so problem ridden that they’re like, all right, and I’m overwhelmed. So, so what’s my next step? What happened first? So

Mike Butler 09:46
for the other thing I just want to talk about too, is, you know, we talk about, well, you have to be transparent, and we do, but I think you need to take it another step. I think you need to reveal your own vulnerability. And what we do. Did was we invited people into our into our midst. We invited connection. We invited relationships. We invited people to see who we were, and they got a front row seat to our pimples, our weaknesses, our humanness, so to speak, including mine and and and and that kind of vulnerability is important in any relationship, I believe, and and so and so a police department having that kind of vulnerability, I think, opens up something different than just being transparent, so to speak. There is a an emotional attachment and connection that can happen that sustains that relationship over time. It’s just not that well, we know the chief will be transparent. He’s not just transparent, or she’s just not transparent. They’re also very kind of human and vulnerable. And so people got to see who we were, and so we invited them in. We invited people to be part of us. They became part of all the things that we did. And as we’ve talked about before on this podcast, we developed a a strategic planning process that took all of that in, and all of these, you know, all the things, all the the history, the present and the future, all had to be addressed through the strategic planning process, which took 18 months and included 1000 people, 800 people from the community and 200 people in our staff. And it took that long because we had to get through all of this. Yeah, sometimes healing take time. Sometimes healing is just a remembering the past in a more forgiving way, if that makes sense. And sometimes that’s what people had to do. It happened. But how can we get past where we’re at? And those conversations had to occur, and so that’s why it took so long. And by the way, there was also that also had to occur within the police department, because there were police officers who felt and staff, not just police officers, but communication specialists and other professional staff, that felt like their voice didn’t count and their thoughts didn’t matter and that their humanness wasn’t valued. They really felt that way, and that’s one of the reasons why they were that way with the community. They were somewhat faceless. There was not, not a lot of personal kinds of things happening. There were few, if any, really sustained partnerships. There was that, that there was just not going on. And so we had to be that way within our own organization, so that our staff could begin to see. Well, this is what this can look like. Even though I had the kind of the chief power position, so to speak, I was willing to very much open up the all the decision making and all of the processes, and invite everybody’s perspective in terms of how we create something that’s going to work for us now and into the future. And you know, people, some people baby stepped into that, some people jumped into the deep end. But people had to experience that on their own. They had to come to that kind of emotional kind of equilibrium on their own within the organization. And once they reached that sense of, hey, my voice counts, my thoughts matter, my humanness is valued. They were willing to offer that gift to other people, people in the community, but they had to experience it on their own. And that’s the sequence I keep talking about. You have to make that happen internally first that gets into that shift in culture, that shift in how we are and who we are and what we do and how we do it, that whole cultural kind of ethos that has to kind of present itself in ways where people can see that this is real and this is this is meaningful. And so once we got to that point with internally, people were willing to be in the community and connect and form relationships and themselves be vulnerable, and themselves say, Hey, your voice counts, your thoughts matter, and your humanness is valued to people in the community. And so there’s that aspect of how that flows, so to speak. And so that took a while. That took a while. It took three years, probably, for all of that to begin to occur. And then it took a number of years for the community to kind of catch on to that, and I don’t want to put necessarily long years part of this, but there’s been a lot of history here. There’s a lot of decades of work in terms of how we worked, how police departments in this country worked, at work and works with our communities. And so there is a time element here that has to be considered. There’s a lot of patience that comes with people going from that sense of very unhealthy dependent like thinking and being and into a more independent, and ultimately an interdependent kind of way of thinking and being. And so we have to, we had to give that. Time and and and space and patience and love and kindness and understanding and and live with everybody’s kind of path. So to speak. Some paths were shorter, some paths were longer, and people in the community, so I think you get where I’m going with that. But that had, that had to happen. And then when that happened, people’s voices, I mean, then you open up this incredible array of all these talents and all these skills and all these gifts and all these all this expertise, both inside the organization and in the community, in ways that now you have to manage all of these ideas and perspectives and recommendations and suggestions, and that that’s something we’re going to have to talk about and this podcast, in terms of what that looks like. How do you manage that? But that 18 month strategic planning process was the beginning of that effort to get to that point.

Kristin Daley 15:59
What I’m hearing is that you can’t build trust and openness and participation without vulnerability and transparency.

Mike Butler 16:07
Oh, without question, Kristin, they just, it just doesn’t happen. Yeah, you can’t. People have to feel that sense of, you’re approachable, you’re safe, your sense of, you know and you know, and you got to stay away from you can find that with others too. And so in that trust, sense of trust, because sometimes these the trust and vulnerability and transparency are deeply, deep, deep, deep things inside of each human being. And there’s a lot of things in people’s histories that you’re just not aware of, whether it’s child history, whether it’s trauma that happened in another way, however, that might play out for people. You know, it’s there, and so you have to kind of be gentle. But there’s also a sense of, we got to move forward. To move

Carol Engel-Enright 16:54
forward. Okay, that’s I want to kind of address, two things. I want to say beyond the band aids is called Beyond the band aids because it is not specific programs that worked in one place that we’re going to teach you to apply in another place. And I also want to say I’ve sat through with my with several we call them thought leaders, but published authors who say the institutions can’t be changed. The systems are in place. They’re hardwired and and also would say, Well, Mike was unique. He came in as a leader. And I’m going to say no, he had the gifts of of connecting both himself and others. You know, my academic experience is in this social networking into in terms of bringing together people that can do something together, that they cannot do alone. And so if we could say one thing about Project pack that is our purpose, it is helping you develop what it is that you need within your own department, within your own community, to bring those together. So I just want to get into some of the specifics, examples, the stories. So Mike, you got approached by someone that was that was working with young people who were a little bit at risk, who weren’t measuring up, and I think you just described the social maturity and what it takes to bring a whole department into kind of being able to go out and become this interdependent network of people, but you were approached as somebody who was really working on, I want to do something for these youth at risk. You were also from the community side, dealing with truant teenagers that could cause a little more harm.

Mike Butler 19:03
We had a significant gang issue then, and these were, these weren’t people that, that person you’re mentioning wasn’t just they weren’t a little at risk. They were greatly at risk. There had been homicides, some suicides, wayward behavior that was violently felonious and so, and hurting other people. And so that was all part of the mix in our community. And so that’s what this person that’s where this person was coming from,

Carol Engel-Enright 19:33
and, and, and she came to you with an idea she did, yeah. And so I say that because I’m speaking to the citizens. You have an idea, and you think, Oh, I’ve got to do this myself. But I’m saying the co creation, the collaboration, the working together, of of public, private, whatever, however you want to talk about. That there’s the answer, and it’s unique for every location, every situation, every department of police officers, every Sheriff’s Office, whatever your whatever this happens. So talk about what happened when Beverly came to you, and how that became this system of understanding that has expanded into that’s a huge one, right?

Mike Butler 20:27
It was, it was the first of many different things that we did that were beyond utilizing and invoking the criminal justice system to try to solve or heal or bring wellness to our community or to deal with the social issues or the health issues. And Beverly brought Beverly title came a very good friend, and we worked together on a number of things, including creating a school for kids that had been expelled and suspended from the school district. And at first, you know, the school district was suspending and expelling, you know, 150 people a year, 100 kids and for lots of little things. And so these kids were out of the school, unstructured. Parents are working. What can we do to help? And so we, we developed a school called ClearView, and actually within partnership with the school district, but also in partnership with lots of people in the community to try to develop an alternative curriculum approach for these students that were expelled or suspended in ways that they wouldn’t get left behind, in ways that they could graduate on Time or very close to being on time, and so that school ended up working with hundreds of students over the years, but that was the initial effort that Beverly and I and another woman named Lana Leonard put together in terms of developing that aspect, so that there was a safety net there for students that had been suspended or expelled. There were also a lot of other things going on with these students, and we had people who volunteered their services to help in terms of the emotional concerns that some of these students presented and some of the things that they were going through, whether incredibly dysfunctional families or part of networks that were not healthy for them. What could we do to kind of help them move beyond that? So there were a lot of people in the community that offered their services to assist with that. So that’s that was an aspect of that. The bigger one, though, was our movement towards restorative principles and practices in our community, which eventuated into a something we call restorative justice. But restorative Principles and Practice can, can, can apply to any aspect of our community life, any aspect of family life, any aspect of neighborhood life. And so we began going down that road of of implementing, putting structures and systems in place that allowed restorative principles to be practiced in a way, including restorative justice, and in which we began working with, initially, children, people under the age of 18 and some low hanging fruit kind of crimes for about a year in terms of dealing with that. And then I want to make a long story real short here. But we eventually worked with kids, adults, first time offenders, multiple offenders. People had committed misdemeanors, people committed felonies. So we kind of threw everything at it, so to speak, and and eventually the the numbers kind of proved out that over 7500 cases that we worked with over the years, the recidivism rates were, you know, five to 6% whereas in a criminal justice system, 50 to 70% kind of where, depending on the crime and where you live in this country, but and the victim satisfaction rate. People the centerpiece, VOICE Victims. Voice became the centerpiece. The offender could choose accountability. That’s a big part of what people don’t understand about restorative principles, practices and justice is that people have to own their accountability. They have to be staff to express their responsibility in such a way that everybody, everybody in that process, believes that they’re trying to be accountable, or they’re working towards that sense of accountability in the criminal justice system. A sacred right is you have the right to remain silent. You don’t need to be accountable, and that’s a sacred right, so to speak. But on the other hand, it’s void of that accountability feature, and that’s why, one of the reasons why recidivism rates are so high, and one of the reasons why I was drawn to this restorative approach was because of the numbers that the criminal justice system kind of reveals. And today, even though we kind of have this ebb and flow with the criminal justice system in our society. Be into. Well, we need we can’t. We can’t use these soft form and warm and fuzzy things. We got to get punitive. We got to be retributive. Well, here’s what that produces. And we did a study in our own city that what and shows you what it produced. We looked at hundreds of people that we arrested one year early on for the crimes of breaking into cars, breaking into houses and felony vandalism, and we found out that, on average, each of those people before that year had been arrested nine times. That’s a system you want to continue to use folks. And so when you say that, well, let’s go back to the criminal justice system and just start arresting everybody. That’s what that system produces and so, and I would dare say it, anybody watching out here, you’re not going to take your car to the same mechanic a 10th time when they didn’t fix it the previous nine times. Well, that’s what we were doing with the criminal justice system and in every city in America. That’s what’s going on today, folks. That’s not That’s not a number that’s unique to long mine, that’s a that’s a ratio that’s that’s everywhere in this country. And there’s lots of reasons for that that we can get involved in terms of another podcast. And by the way, on average, each of those hundreds of people had had 16 charges filed against them, and so so we use the criminal justice system over and over and over again. Well, let’s just do it again. Someone came up with this definition of insanity. It said we’re going to do things over and over again until we get a different result. And so and the results not only stayed the same, they got worse. People kind of graduated to higher levels of crimes at once. They went through the criminal justice system. So that’s why we decided to say, Wait, are there more effective ways to deal with the human condition, the messiness of the human condition, and that restorative approach was one approach,

Carol Engel-Enright 26:49
and I’m sure police officers that are arresting the same person over and over again, that I’m sure that reduces their their morale, their work satisfaction, their

Mike Butler 27:01
sense of that. But it also, it also meant it also enhances their cynicism, their sense of their rolling eyes, skepticism. By the way, prosecutors to any prosecutor, any da listening to this, you know what I’m talking about. We have a we have a district attorney system in this county that gets four to 5000 felonies a year, and the most they can take to trial on any given year is prop 50. And they have to kind of make a kind of a do a settlement with all those other cases. And so da s don’t talk about that. They don’t talk about that. And by I know, and the other thing I want to mention about the criminal, the criminal the judges, the judicial part of our criminal justice system. These dockets are years long. And by the way, there’s no more room at the end in terms of where our jails are at and and so we could build bigger criminal justice system apparatuses. Or we can decide to say, Are there more effective ways to dealing with the human condition outside of arresting and summonsing

Carol Engel-Enright 28:01
people. I want to go back to ClearView, because I’ve gotten to meet some of the people who were in those rooms with that initial group of students, and what they saw, this transformation that they saw within troubled youth that were but you did it. You’ve been made that choice to involve the police department based on your view, your general philosophy of protecting and creating more safety within the community, that if these young people didn’t have a place to go, didn’t have a way, didn’t have a method to improve themselves, to start believing in their own potential, their own capacities, that they could cause harm to others? Yeah,

Mike Butler 28:44
absolutely. And you hit you hit upon something there. Carol that I want to make clear is that what we began to utilize as a police department was the gifts of the community, the gifts of citizens, the gifts and talents, skills, resources of people with everything we did, one of the mainstay constants of everything that we did that was considered outside of invoking the criminal justice system involved our community, and that’s another big thing that I want our community members to see and realize, is that they can have great impact on the healing of their community in many different ways, and that the police department and the community together can can create something that would be just incredibly valuable for their community that they don’t have right now, in terms of what they could bring about outside of invoking the criminal justice system,

Carol Engel-Enright 29:38
right? And we could go through so many examples, you know, let’s tell the story about and I know we’ve talked about this on the podcast before, but when you when you really knew there were mental health issues, and this is part of the narrative today, this is part of the media, part of the news, there’s a lot of mental health and so we need to. To we need to send therapist. We need to send we need social workers. We need people who can go in and assist. We don’t need to send in law enforcement. And we’ve had talks this week about that, that that is like a slap in the face to law enforcement. Yes and no, yes, yeah, well, but they, they need to be there to care, to prevent, to in the in the possibility of violence.

Mike Butler 30:35
And so let me just say this about mental health, addiction and some other kind of, some other health or social issues that the police have been the history is that we just passed laws, legislated new laws, and then mandated police departments enforce those laws, thinking that we could heal our woundedness or kind of take care or fix our social health issues, part of our approach Now, part of the approach that we started using back in the 90s and continued was to bring in different resources. And so we began to partner and actually brought in terms of repurposing our own resources, kind of experts in the field to help with people who were struggling with their mental health, or help with people who are struggling with addiction. But we didn’t. We didn’t say, just go out there and do it by yourself. There’s always a risk with the unpredictability of circumstances that you’re going to encounter. But we didn’t lead necessarily with a police officer. Either we a police officer could be outside or in a car, or real, real close to the circumstances that if something went amiss and something more violent began to happen, a police officer could be there, or we sent a police officer in kind of dressed in plain clothes, if we thought the situation was pretty volatile to begin with, but we ended up utilizing different skill sets within our own community, and brought those in and and in a way that could help diffuse the escalate, find services, makes, make referrals, connect people to other kinds of ongoing services that they may need and and so we did. We began doing that, long before anybody else was doing it, we didn’t necessarily know what to call it. At one point, we had an angel initiative that people walk through our front doors for addiction, and we were partnered with over 100 different addiction treatment service providers and so So anyway, we hundreds of people walk through our doors and got free treatment that those are the kinds of things that we partnered with the social capital in our community. We had people employers offering jobs for people in recovery. We recruited them. We had people in the community we’re willing to transport people to treatment or serve in this person’s kind of social network, or be a part of a circle of accountability and support, but it was very community based. And by the way, our restorative principles, practice and justice approach was a very much community based system, and it’s one of the, one of the principal reasons, I will always say that crime was greatly reduced in Longmont because of the recidivism rates and because how often we used and what we used it for, and by the way, that also exposed our police officers to another way of how we could do business, that they didn’t have to be the bad guy, that they could offer something. They had an additional tool, additional option to say, we have this restorative process that the victim would have to agree to, and the offender would have to agree to, and if you agree to it, let’s go through it. And because they began to see the value of that, and they looked for ways to be able to find restorative approaches to what they did, we trained our officers in the language of how to how to be restorative, especially our school resource officers, and terms of being in those schools and how to be restorative with the students that there that were in their midst. And so part of this gets into something else. But these became our these became different ways of doing business outside of the criminal justice system that we used that were highly effective, and we could talk more about that. And by the way, I want to double down on what you said earlier, Carol, in terms of we’re not here to sell a particular program or to sell a way of doing our formula or template. We’re here to say that there’s another way of being thinking in terms of how you are as a police department in the community that can create that space where people say, hey, I want to offer my gifts, talents, skills, resources, because there’s so much in every community that’s dormant that goes underutilized. And so all we’re saying is, if you really want to partner with your community, then you have to be, you have to have kind of a. Way of thinking and being and talking and conversing in ways that says everyone’s responsible for our safety and and so that’s and so. So what that looks like will be different everywhere. Here’s the way we kind of skin the cat, so to speak. There’s 1000s of ways of doing that, but it comes from that perspective of authentic partnership

Kristin Daley 35:22
and training and education is really a key there, because if we are sending an officer to respond to, say, a mental health crisis or someone experiencing addiction, we want to equip that officer with the skill set to handle that situation appropriately and compassionately. And I think that’s that’s really what ties it all together. You’re

Mike Butler 35:43
exactly right, Kristin, and it goes and it goes even further than that. You want to hire the people that are open to doing that. And so when you start changing and shifting a culture, this gets into recruitment, the kind of skill sets, attributes, characteristics, you’re looking for that we talked about in the last week or two, last couple of weeks on our podcast. It gets how you train them your level, what’s your culture like, and are people willing to even attend this training and pay attention to it? I mean, that’s part of everything that you have to kind of pay attention to. And so you’re exactly right and and so by the way, what I’m what I’m going to make very clear is that the amount of training our police officers need in this country needs to be tripled and not or, if not, quadrupled. We need to take time to be able to train police officers to deal with the messiness of the incredibly complex human condition in ways that they had never been trained, you know, and so and so that I’m not gonna I’m not gonna miss my words. We had to take time out in Longmont to make sure our officers received training in a number of different arenas that they didn’t get in the academy, or that most police departments don’t give an in service training as they move forward. But that’s an important point. The training and education has to be there in terms of giving your officers or your staff that sense of I’m confident and comfortable in being able to approach somebody in an effective way.

Kristin Daley 37:12
Yeah, and I think the training that we’re creating and promoting here with pact and the consulting as well is unique in that it it’s accessible to both the agency, the police officers, and the community and city leadership and all of these people, taking the same training is really, really beneficial in getting everyone on the same page and creating that shared vision of public safety.

Mike Butler 37:36
Absolutely, I couldn’t agree more, and that’s an important piece, and we will have to talk about that in a future podcast, in terms of, what are the, what are the systems and processes that you need to kind of make sure that there’s a lot of philosophical integration and human integration in terms of mindsets around how we’re doing business in our organization. So so that’s that’s something we will be talking about. But I just want to make really clear that there is this. There is a many ways of doing this in terms of how we move forward.

Kristin Daley 38:12
All right, we’re going to wrap up this episode. We’ve really enjoyed picking Mike’s brain about exactly what he did in Longmont to create such a successful shared vision of public safety. And we ask all of you to reflect on your own communities. What role could your local police department expand into? How can the community kind of supplement and provide resources and get more involved? And we’d ask you to subscribe to beyond the band aids and visit project pack.org, to explore frameworks for transformational policing, and please give us a five star rating on this podcast, and we’ll see you next time.

Jennifer (narrator) 38:50
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@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. You.