Beyond Arrest and Citations: From Punishment to Partnership

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
Well, hello. Welcome back to the podcast beyond the band aids, a place where we have a conversation about the transformation, not only of police, but of communities themselves. And today, we’re going to dig right in to beyond arrest and citations and so, you know, I just want a little background and foundational kind of information definitions I looked up, where did the term criminal come from? What does it mean? And two Latin words, one that means to set apart, you know, somebody that I think sometimes we don’t even think what is crime, and we just go into this criminal part and an identity of who is a criminal or who could become One. And then we get to the police part. And I was telling a grandchild, I looked up Constable, the formation of that it actually is a noble term from France. The counts of the stable were the Watchmen, the people that protected the kingdoms and and then it went to constable. So just, just to think about what the meaning in words and what happens when we utilize the criminal justice system. What is it? How? How does it work? And why is it not working so well? We and maybe I want to do a round table just right from the first with Kristin and Mike. Of what do you think needs to change right now between police and their the communities that they serve. They are in the community. They protect the community, they provide safety, but we’re stuck in this criminal justice system that seems to favor some and disadvantage others, and and then the police get blamed. So

Mike Butler 02:37
let’s just let me start off. That’s, there’s, that’s a big that’s a huge question, that’s, that’s 10 books long in terms of the answer. But on the other hand, in terms of of how we got stuck in this mode of invoking the criminal justice system more often than perhaps, I believe we should be doing and have done we, we’ve been stuck in this idea that we could use this quick fix, one size fits all criminal justice system to kind of help us mend and cure our health and social issues. And so this goes all the way up to elected officials, and they’re part of the issue, my opinion, or part of how we do business around well, if we have a social issue or health issue, let’s pass a law. Let’s stiffen a penalty, as if doing that will serve as an insurance policy that’s going to protect us, in some ways, from the complexities of the human condition that’s out there, and that’s where we have gotten stuck, because the human condition is complex. It is messy, and using this very simple approach of arresting and try and thinking that we’re going to fix people by arresting them or somehow fix the circumstances that caused the issue in the first place. It could be issues. It could be larger social issues like poverty or hunger or education or employment or mental health issues or substance abuse issues, all these things that we’re dealing with. Well, let’s just arrest people or ticket people and hope that somehow there’s a cure along the way through the criminal justice system. Just hasn’t worked, and we know that because recidivism rates, the recontact rates, are so significantly high in terms of being somewhere between 15 70% depending on where you live in the country. And so the idea that we can continue on down this path of continuing to arrest and or ticket or invoke the criminal justice system is a change that we need to strongly we have we need to have a different kind of conversation about how we’re going to deal with that, and that’s what project pact is, as is intending to do, is not only have a different conversation, but what steps and methods and strategies can police departments, community. Use that are much more effective in terms of dealing with the messiness of the human condition. And this is not original stuff. There’s a lot of people maybe watching this are going to say, of course, we need to do that, but we don’t, and so we end up with a criminal justice system that is overwhelmed because that’s what we continue to do. We use that one step, one size fits all approach, and we keep keep on arresting and ticketing people to the point where court dockets are months and years long, where prosecutors are triaging cases and have to deal 90 some percent of the cases that come their way, and where police departments are prioritizing, where they can use our limited resources, and so we have this triage mode that we’re in by the criminal justice system that’s used by those three entities, the police, the prosecutors and the courts, to try to deal with something and people. It’s like a giant assembly line. It’s like a giant cattle pen where we just keep on sending things through, not knowing necessarily what’s on the back end. Well, the back end is, they’re back in the community. And guess what? People are being re victimized, or victimized in terms of and the criminal justice system is, well, we arrested somebody, they’re back out, and we got to go arrest him again, versus, kind of moving upstream and saying there’s a lot more we could be doing on the front end here, folks, without necessarily and keeping recidivism rates lower, we contact rates lower, and most importantly, keeping people from being victimized by crime. And so there is a kind of a short, 30,000 foot version answer to your question, Carol, but I think everybody realizes, but you know, here’s what’s funny, here’s not funny. This is actually tragic and sad. We’re not asking those questions. We’re not asking we’re not having those conversations. We’re just continuing doing what Einstein called insanity, doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results. It’s insane. What we’re doing, and project pact is now saying, Enough

Carol Engel-Enright 07:12
what leads someone to criminal behavior? What if you got all the way upstream and started

Mike Butler 07:19
what I’m talking about? We’re talking without specifically getting into individual cases, that’s what I’m talking about. What needs to happen in families, what needs to happen in neighborhoods, what needs to happen in communities, what can happen that can provide a different kind of soil, if you will, to not necessarily grow something that’s going to hurt other people or hurt other aspects of the community, but can grow up healthy and can make better decisions about how they are with other people and what relationships mean, and all that we can we can talk on that for like. It’s a, it’s a 10 to 20 book conversation,

Carol Engel-Enright 07:57
all right, well, let’s keep talking. Kristin, you. You were drawn to this work. So, so what do you think you know? Like, where do we go with this, with criminal justice? And I mean, to put those two words together is just kind of fascinating anyway. And then to be entered into a system where you’re always identified as a criminal, and then, you know, you wonder, how many people start to believe it about themselves? And that’s the behavior that they continue, the path they continue.

08:29
Percent in between,

Carol Engel-Enright 08:31
there are the police. They are the portal. They are the gateway that into the system. So how do we how do we look to change and go beyond arrest and citations?

Kristin Daley 08:44
Well, I really strongly connect with what Mike is saying about the human condition. You know, people are flawed. People make mistakes. A lot of times, police are encountering someone on the worst day of their life, and you’re not always in a great, great place on the worst day of your life. I think the things that we need to strengthen or build are, number one, mutual trust between police and community members that they serve. Number two, compassion, and again, mutual compassion. And then three, I think resources we need to get communities reliant on resources outside of the criminal justice system. And I like that you, you said, it’s interesting we combine those words, and I know that there in a lot of circles, community circles, there’s a move toward referring to the criminal legal system rather than the criminal justice system, because they don’t feel they’ve gotten justice from the system. And I think that’s that’s interesting. I think we really need to focus on how we can help people, how we can support communities, and how we can get people what they need. To be, to feel safe, to feel healthy, and that is not usually getting them into a system of getting arrested. You know, as Mike said, recidivism is a is a huge issue. We need to think about how we can actually address root causes and get people what they need, so that they are not in that system, and so that our communities as a whole are safer, more functional, healthier,

Carol Engel-Enright 10:29
right there? Yeah, so, so a repeat offender would not be back out on the street with the same mindset I just we do so much work with Sosa’s school statesmanship in changing the mindsets, changing the perspectives, changing the and not changing really expanding so that you understand the cause and effect. You understand the consequences. I I think project pact is doing some really wonderful work in terms of getting the podcast out and having the conversations, but we are right behind this. We’re going to be coming up with the training, and at any time, you can have a collaborative session with Mike or Kristin and thinking about how your police department is working, and what can you do to to bridge that gap with the community?

Mike Butler 11:26
You know, Cara, I talk to a lot of people in a lot of communities, including their police professional staff up and up to and including police chiefs and sheriffs and and I’m going to make, I’m a couple comments here. First the conversation needs to start around how we’re going to really effectively deal with these complex social health issues differently than just through trying to legislate the fix, as if we can legislate the future or legislate the healing, or legislate morality, I mean, or legislate accountability. None of those things work, folks. And if someone wants to send me some research and say, well, here’s how we legislated our way into fixing a complex social issue, I’d love to see it. So you need to start having those conversations about, you know, are there other alternatives? And I’m not saying throw the criminal justice system out, because there are people in our communities who need to be separated out and brought into the system, and in some cases, kept there for long periods of time, maybe the rest of their life. We know that, but we’ve never had the conversations about who those people are, what are the circumstances, what are the criteria, what are their backgrounds, what are their records? What’s their social repertoire look like? We’ve never had those conversations around who really needs to be in the system and and to kind of, kind of kept there in a way we’ve never had that. The other part. The other statement I want to make is police departments need to and this is where this is, this is, this is potentially controversial. They need to say, You know what, we’re so darn attached to the hip of this criminal justice system because that’s all we do. We make arrests and we issue summonses. We really don’t have a lot of other alternatives or tools or options to work with, and that’s what we that’s what our training supports. That’s what our and so that’s what we’re kind of in this the modeling we’re using. And so we need to have conversations within our police departments about how to kind of disentangle ourselves from the hip of that criminal justice system and to really kind of connect ourselves more with the heart of our community. And by that, I mean what’s going on? How do we become a part of neighborhoods? How do we become a part of the community? How do we get to reconnect, or to connect with our communities in ways where they know us and we know them, where we can actually begin to utilize the community, or the community can begin to utilize the police in ways where this partnership becomes more healthy, more valuable, more transparent, more trusting, all these kind of things that we these attributes we Use. Those are the those are the conversations we need to start having. And so once we realize that we’re more connected to the heart of the community, I can almost guarantee any police department, any police chief in America, that will what will come to your mind, or other ways of seeing how we can respond to the human condition. But a lot of police departments think they’re just so wrapped up into the their connection with the criminal justice system, it’s almost like sacrilegious to think that they can do something different than arrest or summons, and that’s the crazy part of all of this. We’re just going to continue going down that road of doing the same thing over and over again. And with a criminal justice system that’s triaging everything, as I said initially, so we are, we are just incredibly ineffective in what we’re doing, in our utilization of the criminal justice system, and and, and, and because of that, people and more and more people in our communities are being victimized. And so what do we do differently? Becomes the essence of this story. What kind, what kind of different conversations do we need to have that are deeper conversations around, what are the possibilities, and what level of commitment are we willing to make to those possibilities that can be, that can be more effective to bring about some level, a higher level of safety for our communities, because that’s where we’re at. This is about safety in our communities. It’s not about coming up with a here’s the here’s the uniqueness of project pack. That’s fine, but it’s about, how do we bring safety to our communities? Yeah,

Carol Engel-Enright 15:57
I love that. You use that word, Mike, and I, you know, when we first started working together, and you were still the Public Safety Director, it was such as strange, you know, it’s like, Don’t you say you’re the police chief and you, you always stayed with public safety. And I just want to, you know, remind everyone from the academic point of view that Maslow said, right above shelter, food and something to put on your body, right above that is safety and belonging, and when you think about what it takes to to feel comfortable in this world, You know as a human being, those are the two things, safety and belonging. It wasn’t just safety and it wasn’t just belonging. It was those two together. And so as we look at crime or criminal behavior or criminal action in a community, the police are in this. I You always call it the cat seat, right? Is that? What you use it to the cat bird seat, in a position where you can look over the whole community and talk a little bit about, or maybe both of you talk about the discernment that it takes as a law enforcement officer to look at a situation and say, yep, this is danger, this is offensive, this is against the public, or this is a social this is something that’s that’s happening with this person because of something that they’ve been through.

Mike Butler 17:39
Well, that’s part of what I spoke to earlier, and that is police officers, when they’re out on the street on a day in, day out, night in, night out, week in, week out basis, they don’t have that information. They have not been trained to this point now. They know certain people in the community. I’ve arrested you 10 times in the last three years. There’s some experience there that they can fall back on and say, I’m going to arrest you 11th time now, because that’s the only thing I have. That’s the only option I have, and they don’t even think about it instead of being said told, You know what? And so what are we going to be doing differently with this person? What are the criteria? What are the options? I’ll just go back into a little bit about what long my debt long created a a very complex spreadsheet in which we looked at variables in one individual, any individuals background to say, Are these folks, people that Need to be separated out from the community in a longer term way, or these folks that, because of one decision, one bad day, or one set of circumstances, did something and they probably aren’t, probably going to be doing it again. We never made. The vast majority of police officers don’t have that kind of specific direction or training or information to go out into their neighborhoods and into their communities and make those kinds of decisions around how to make that kind of discernment, how to make that chaotic, utilize that kind of discretion. That’s part of what we’re talking about here, in terms of what’s that look like. And unless they said, Well, I’ve arrested him 10 times, or I’ve this first time. We’ve there’s no criminal history, they can check that out pretty quickly. And so those are kinds of things that they have, but we need to get better at creating and some people are going to say, well, that’s profiling. Well, no, it’s really not. It’s operating off a lot of information now that you have. And then we worked Longmont, we worked with the DA and we worked with our judges to say, Listen, you know, we don’t bring as much to you as maybe other police departments through the criminal justice system, because we have all these alternatives and options that we use. But when we bring somebody to you in terms of making an arrest, the prosecutor and the and the judges, you know there’s, well, this came from Longmont, and this is they’re serious about this. We need to take a stronger look at this case and not use plea bargaining or utilize an aspect of the system that we need to utilize, like jail or prison to say this person needs to be kept out of society for a length of time, and sometimes the rest of their lives. And so we just haven’t gotten to that point yet where we can do that. And so I’ll leave it at

Carol Engel-Enright 20:36
that. Yeah, that’s interesting to talk about the bottleneck, because I think everybody listening understands there’s a there’s several bottlenecks within the court system. Once you get past the citation stage, Kristin, what do you think about

Kristin Daley 20:51
how did, how do officers learn to discern? Well, I think it starts with some of the the trainings that project pact is going to offer. I think it starts with learning, emotional intelligence and active listening, and those skills that police training doesn’t always prioritize. I think, you know, officers go into their day very focused on specific things, and it’s a busy day. It’s fast paced. They don’t always stop and take the time to get to know someone’s story. There’s not always time for that. But I think if we are training our officers to learn that emotional intelligence, to learn those active listening skills, to learn to engage in a little bit of conversation with a person before automatically assuming this is someone who needs to be placed under arrest, that changes the dynamics in a lot of ways. And I think that’s just not something that’s necessarily always prioritized in your average department. And I don’t think that that is intentionally to create, you know, a motivation to arrest people. I think it’s partly that, if it’s not a priority, how do officers even know to consider it? How do they know that they are empowered to use discretion if they don’t, if they aren’t told, you have the power to make a choice in this situation and potentially set this person on a better path for the rest of their life. I think most people would probably take that opportunity to learn. How do I do that?

Mike Butler 22:30
And you know, and I want to respond to what Kristin said, because that’s the beginning of that conversation. To build on it. There are no other options. We can’t say, use discretion to do something different. Well, the officers are going to say, Well, what’s that something different? Look like? There’s no other options out there. There are no other things that they can do. And so police chiefs on dam and police departments have now, haven’t developed the community, and the police departments, more more specifically, haven’t developed those other options and other alternatives to the criminal justice system so that officers do have more choices, more more ways of dealing with and more discretion that they can use. The only thing they can do is either do nothing, make an arrest, issue a ticket, or maybe refer to case to detectives or something. But it all has to do with, most of it has to do with somehow invoking the criminal justice system, a system that is absolutely everywhere, overwhelmed, where there’s tremendous amounts of triaging going on and and so we’re, once again, we’re throwing something at something that can’t even begin to handle the circumstances because it can’t handle what it’s dealing with and what its current workload is. I’m talking about the entire criminal justice system. Prisons are full. There’s no room at the end. Judges dockets are long. Prosecutors, I can tell you, in Boulder County, three to 4000 felonies issued to the DA, the most they can take to trial are fewer than 100 more like 50 in any given year, because that’s all the prosecutors and they have you won’t hear the DA say that, but that’s every prosecutor in America that is in any any city, any city of any size, and then you got Police departments that are responding to all kinds of concerns and complaints from the community, and they’re saying, here’s our priority, you know, and here’s what we can do. And can do, because the community has kind of been schooled, skilled and trained to believe that the only way we can deal with these issues is through the criminal justice system. And so we’ve talked about this before the community is kind of it, fallen into that trap of thinking, here’s what you do, you enforce the law, you get rid of people, you put them away, and that’s all we do. And so, so there’s a lot of training that goes with community. There’s a lot of education that goes with the community, as we talked about before, in terms of what can. Justice look like differently than just this pound of flesh or this eye for an eye. We haven’t had those conversations. That’s what this conversation needs to turn into, folks, or else we’re going to continue going down like a hamster and a hamster wheel, kind of just spinning your spinning your way through the day, and next thing you know, these people are back out on the street. They’re revictimizing people. People are being victimized. And the criminal justice system continues to go down this path. And you know, and all you hear from the elected officials, from the President on down, is a more aggressive law enforcement and get tough on crime. We’re back into that era at some level again, in terms of dealing with some of the things that are happening in our communities even though crime is down. Now we’re talking about this in August of 25 even though crime is down, there’s still this human cry of more criminal justice system, more a bigger apparatus, and police need to do more. And federal government need federal law enforcement needs to do more, and so is that all we hear about. We don’t hear about, how can we effectively respond to the complexity of the human condition in a way that keeps our makes our community safer? That needs to be the conversation. Not so much. Let’s just arrest people, throw away the key. Yeah,

Carol Engel-Enright 26:19
and so often when police do invoke the system, then the resentment and the, you know, the people, people look at the police, not the system, but they look at the police person themselves as the enemy. And I think that’s why we’re still hearing, you know, things like defund the police so and not we’re just not hearing Transform, transform what, how we can heal criminal behavior and put the onus, the focus back on the individual that’s doing to the criminal behavior, not the police,

Mike Butler 27:06
as bigger than criminal behavior. I think we have to kind of characterize these more as larger health and social issues that we’re getting better at understanding the dynamics of in ways that would strongly suggest that a one, one size fits all. Kind of reaction isn’t going to help that much at all, but that’s where we’re at. We’re understanding the complexities of these of the human condition or the social health issues, but we’re still stuck in this very small way of trying to respond and react to it. That’s the point here, right?

Carol Engel-Enright 27:40
So enforcing a drug law, an illegal drug law, when, when we very much don’t ever ask the question about, why is the person need the drug? Why

Mike Butler 27:51
are they demand there? I mean, we, we focused, for years of war on drugs, focused on supply and the interruption of supply, as if we could interrupt the supply, I can tell you many times and every officer that’s been around, any police officer, any any any any prosecuting attorney and most judges know that you can dismantle a drug ring that’s highly large in any one area or region of the country, and within a matter of six months to a year that organizations rebuilt by newer people, because the demand is still there. We haven’t dealt with anything going on with the demand in the world of drugs, and we keep on going down that path too. I’m not saying that we don’t deal with supply issues. There’s something to that, and we could have a larger conversation around how to deal with chemical substance addiction, but we have to focus more on that treatment aspect, that sense of how and how do we get people in the community to kind of serve as circles of accountability and support and help people through treatment, help people find jobs and help people find a different path in life. It’s more than systems people that we’re going to need in order to make this to just to talk about that one issue of chemical substance addition, addiction, to

Kristin Daley 29:07
state the obvious. I mean, putting a person, an individual, who’s struggling with substance use, into the system to cycle through the system, is not going to help them improve their situation. It’s not going to get them the resources that they need. It’s going to become a cycle. Oh,

Mike Butler 29:25
and it has, I mean, the evidence just is so overwhelmingly in favor of what Kristin just said. It’s like we don’t hear it though. It’s like we don’t even listen to it. We just keep on doing the same thing over and over again.

Carol Engel-Enright 29:37
Oh yeah, yeah, we wrote down for this broadcast, criminalizing social conditions perpetuates the cycles of harm. Now, when you when you stop and really think through, who are we harming? And then what are, what are the downriver consequences of having a harmed individual in your. Community, even if they go serve a prison sentence, they may come back with the same mindset, the same neurological links, the same behavior that they went to prison with and and so what do we do? What what do we do as a community to create a sense of safety, public safety, and belongingness and and with that healing. So the first step is a shift in mindset. I want to talk that’s

Mike Butler 30:34
what we talked about. I just want to make it clear again. Let’s start recognizing that we have to have a different conversation. And let’s start recognizing that we have to kind of step back from our over or over dependence on the criminal justice system to kind of make to kind of cure all of this. And then begin to say from that stepping back process filling in those spaces with things that are how do you have conversations now about what’s effective in terms of our response, what can really be effective for our community, and to what level does community need to be gaged? What level does the police need to be engaged? I mean, and so, and when you talked about police being in the catbird seat, every community, in every community, police have this absolute legitimate platform that they can operate from that makes them more credible than just about any other aspect of government that exists. And I want to make that point really clear that I know the police have detractors. As a police person for 40 some years, believe me, I met my fair share of detractors. People didn’t like the police, regardless of what the reason was, but they’re the vast the overwhelming majority of people wanted the police to succeed, wanted them to be effective, had respect, and so leveraging that sense of what the community thinks about police is what I call referred to as a legitimate platform, and because they’re in our communities, they’re out there. 24/7 365 policing is not a Monday through Friday eight to five gig. It is a 24/7 365 in our neighborhoods, in our communities, they more. They know more than anybody else about what’s going on in our community, more than any elected official, more than the other community and social services entities that exist. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t, and they should partner with all of them, because everybody has different kinds of information, and that’s where that whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts. But those are the things that need to start. Those are some of your first steps. But like Kristin said, we train and teach a lot of this in Project packed in a way that people will have a sense for sequence timing, PACE strategy, and what that’s going to look like, specifically for your community, your police department, your citizens, in ways that you can begin to say there’s clarity around how we can Move forward this. There’s nothing overly difficult about this. It’s just that we have to change our perspective and get out of this state of insanity that we’re in, that we’re going to be continually doing the same things over and over again. Hopefully this time, it’ll work and get out of that mode into another mode where clarity effectiveness and actions that we know that we can take that are going to be healthier, can begin to occur, I

Carol Engel-Enright 33:25
think a bit about being a parent. And, you know, I raised five children. Mike raised five children. And when your children act up, if you if the only thing you have for punishment is an arrest and citation, spanking, and that’s what you Yeah, that’s what you continue to use over and over and over again. I just want to paint a picture for people. Well, um, it’s really exciting. This is part one of this conversation, and in terms of thinking through, what can we change and and do we have to keep going down this road that doesn’t look like there’s it’s just getting worse. So, yeah, so

Mike Butler 34:12
how do we part two will be we’ll be doing that next, and we will be having more specific conversation around what those options and alternatives, how we bring them, about how they work, and what have been some of the results where places have tried that?

Carol Engel-Enright 34:27
Yeah, I looked up criminal alternatives to the criminal justice system today, and I loved it, Mike that I knew Longmont had examples of all of the alternatives so

34:42
well, not all, but we have examples of we have most

Carol Engel-Enright 34:44
of the practical experience about what are the things you can consider in changing your police it’s

Mike Butler 34:52
not just a police department. This is a community response. I want to make it real clear, it’s not just about changing the culture. Or the perspective or strategies of a police department. It’s about how a community responds to this. If we’re going to continue to look at this, throw away the key and pound of flesh, you know, we’ll continue going down the same ineffective road. But if we can continue to, if we can say, You know what, there’s different things we can do, that’s got to be a community response as well, the police can’t do it by themselves. If they don’t have the community, all bets are off. It’s not going to work. We need the community. We need citizens. We need their gifts, their expertise, their resources, their time and their energy, not a lot. But we need that we can’t do it on our own. That’s been the mistake, that we could silo our way through these messes, and no one else needs to be engaged. So we need to break down those silos, bring everybody else on board, and begin to do this in a partnership format. Yeah,

Carol Engel-Enright 35:50
I also Kristin. I just as kind of a, kind of a lasting, or last, last talking point. One thing that happens with the arrest and the citations with criminal behavior is the victim is left. You know, the criminal enters into the system, but the victim remains. And sometimes there’s victim advocate, and there’s, you know, there’s, there’s a little bit of counseling and help, but you’ve done a lot of a lot of work, a lot of consultation, a lot of teaching around, kind of repairing the harm for the victim, and just a little bit of talk about how some of these alternatives can really, really bring healing to the crime itself. I

Kristin Daley 36:42
think, to be very frank, the criminal justice system often does not get justice for the victim. I think most, most victims would would tell you that what brought them a sense of peace was not what happened with their case within the justice system, because most of the time it doesn’t work. I think when we’re talking about alternatives, and I know we’re going to get more into that in part two, but restorative justice is potentially a process that can bring about a sense of peace and resolution for the victim of a crime, because it is focused it it’s victim centered. It’s focused on the needs and recovery, or, you know, healing of the victim. And that is, to to me, the most important piece in in a crime, when a person is is gravely harmed. So I think when we’re talking about alternatives, the victim or survivor needs to have a voice, and they need to be a part of the process, and that process needs to focus on and prioritize their needs, and that’s what some of the programs or solutions that we are going to be talking about in Part Two, get at

Carol Engel-Enright 38:00
as well as our training, and especially in person, teaching collaboratively with a department, would would definitely be able to bring some of that around. So as we talk about community, I just, I just want that voice of the victim.

Mike Butler 38:18
I just want to, I just want to add on that that’s, that’s a part that gets forgotten about. It doesn’t get talked about in the news. It’s, you know, what happens to the victim, it’s what happens the offender. We’re offender centered here, and I’m not saying that we need to minimize that centered. I mean, because we need to help that person take a different path. But victims get the short end of the stick. There’s no legal provision for their voice in the criminal justice system and and so how’s that? How’s that be? How’s the healing for victims? There are alternatives and options. There are things we can do as as communities in a society to help people become more whole and to begin to heal people who’ve been victimized.

Carol Engel-Enright 39:00
So I think we’ll wrap it up from here be come back for this next part too, as we talk through more specifics of what’s the first step, what do you do next? How can you start to think about this? How do you start to engage our communities? How do you get beyond problems into the goodness of public safety and well beingness and healthy communities. So thank you for tuning in. Please give us a rating of five stars and tell your friends about Beyond the band aids, and we’ll see you next time.

Jennifer (narrator) 39:34
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.