From Command and Control to Collaborative Community Partnerships

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

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Chief Mike Butler on LinkedIn
Dr. Carol Engel-Enright on LinkedIn
Kristin Daley on LinkedIn

The following three organizations—each committed to enhancing community well-being and policing integrity—joined forces to create Project PACT.

Law Enforcement Action Partnership (LEAP)
New Blue
The School of Statesmanship, Stewardship & Service (SOSSAS)

Beyond the Bandaids is dedicated to exploring how police officers, public safety professionals, community leaders, and community members can reconnect with their sense of purpose and inspire positive change in their local community.

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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. I’m Carol, and I’m here with Mike and Kristin, and we’re with Project pack, and we are a new organization that’s bringing together three organizations to really think about how to move forward in police and community relations and create safe and healthy communities and neighborhoods. So today we are going to be in part three. We started this, I think episode 23 or 24 in thinking about what are the alternatives to the criminal justice system, everyone complains about a system that may have some prejudice and may affect others differently, that there are advantages and disadvantages to certain citizens in our country, and so we’re really working on what is it that can shift and and lead us to different perspectives around the criminal justice system. Last week, we talked with Mike about what happened in Longmont as he took over as Chief in 1993 to give some some understanding of the timeline, and he was talking about the deep listening that he had with all of his officers and all of his staff, not just one times, but really community and the community really deeply listening. And we, I think Kristin and I both got so excited about what it means to really develop that trust in that relationship by listening and understanding, gaining understanding of what people are, are really what they’re they’re dealing with, what they’re thinking about, how they’re performing their jobs, and definitely how that defines the culture. And much of what we do in Project pack is around shifting the culture and creating something that is new, something that takes us forward and something that gives us a future that we want to live into. So thinking about that shift, Mike and we’re just going to start in again. We didn’t get to these alternatives last episode, so we added a part three. But talk about what happened. How did you how did you set up the next steps of so you did the listening. You got to know your department. Well, you got to know the community well, and you knew that you wanted to move from a command and control patriarchy to a partnership, not just within the department but with the community. So tell us what happened next?

Mike Butler 03:20
Well, I’m going to make this kind of short because I think we want to get into the alternatives to the criminal justice system. But we began and were successful and effective at collecting a lot of data on what we were doing around recidivism, around victim satisfaction rates, around crime rates, and that data very quickly took us to this place of what we’re doing isn’t working, and by the way, it’s the same thing for every community, long months, no different. We’re 100,000 people. We’re fairly diverse, 30 to 35% Latino. We have a spectrum of economic classes and and so and so there’s, there’s quite a few things going on in Longmont that go on everywhere, but what we were doing wasn’t working. And so I had to tell that story, and I didn’t want to do something that wasn’t working anymore. I I’m frankly, tired of that. I was tired of that way back then, of why would we want to continue to do things that just don’t flat out work, aren’t effective, and so what can we do that’s different? And so I began having those conversations with people in the community and definitely with our staff. Had to start with our staff, because we certainly had police officers that were trained, skilled and taught in the arena of an old, tired, worn out model, let’s go arrest people. Let’s go put the bad guys in jail. We’re the thin blue line kind of thinking and and that, you know, this is how we’re going to continue to do business. And the community had this expectation that, you know, that if they if, if the life is. Leaders passed a new law or stiffened a penalty that the problem would be fixed. Those things never happened. And so I began having conversations to say, we need to do something different. And I began to open that up a little bit, and had an ideas began to kind of surface come to the from the community, from different people the community, from different people within the organization, our staff, our police officers, and we began to explore, and we and we carved out a lot of room for conversations that were different than conversations we’ve had in the past. And we had to, and those conversations led us to a number of different ways of seeing how we could be more effective, or at least try some things. And by the way, some of these things we did, we were first in doing them, whether it was in the state or the country, I’m not 100% sure of I can guarantee you that in a state, we were definitely first in the state of Colorado. And this doesn’t come from an ego perspective. This just came from a perspective of we want to do something that works. We want to do something that’s more effective. And I would encourage any police department or any community to start asking those questions, because right now, we’re still not asking the questions we need to ask about the effectiveness of police the effectiveness of our criminal justice system, the effectiveness of our in terms of how to keep our community safe, from our communities perspective, from a citizens perspective, we’re still operating off old, tired, worn out ways of doing business.

Carol Engel-Enright 06:33
So don’t you think people are afraid to ask the questions because they don’t want to hear the complaint. They don’t want to hear what’s wrong. They don’t want anytime

Mike Butler 06:43
you want to make a change people, people default to what’s comfortable, what’s safe and what’s familiar. That’s a natural human thing to do. We get that and so and so we had to kind of transcend and overcome that sense of always wanting to kind of tiptoe, or always wanting to kind of be in the shallow end of the pool, or always not wanting to shift or change or anything, because we didn’t know what was in the deep end, and we didn’t know and so being being kind of a first and not having models, and not having people that went before, so to speak, this was you had to have the kind of the mindset of of pioneer, of a frontiers person that was exploring unexplored, you know, on, you know, uncultivated ground. And so it was. It was not easy. I give that, and I’m not gonna say to anybody, but there is, there are examples now, where the ground has been cultivated, where the exploration has occurred where data does exist to suggest that there are new models out there, there are new ways, or other ways of doing things outside of our criminal justice system to deal with the human condition that are effective and so so that fear probably isn’t as shouldn’t be as great as it was, even though It could still be a major shift or change for an organization that wants to move down that different path. Kristin, you had a question

Kristin Daley 08:07
I did. So could you when you started to look at those new models back at that time? Could you give listeners a sense of kind of a short bullet point list of the questions that you started to ask about what might be effective in replacing these outdated systems for you, it’s,

Mike Butler 08:26
yeah, that’s a great that’s a great question. That’s a great conversation too. Because I didn’t necessarily know myself what would lead us, how could we open this up? But what I knew was that we had a lot of great minds and in the community and in our organization, and so I just kept asking, What could we do differently than we’re doing now? What’s that look like for anybody, and anybody’s Welcome to have be part of this conversation? I think it. I think the kind of the conversations got started when people felt safe to have conversations around things we weren’t having conversations about before and ideas were shut down. And it was kind of a you had to kind of guide and lead this conversation away, where things began to build on things. And it wasn’t just the first comment out of somebody’s mouth also, although sometimes it was, it was that comment led to another comment that led to another comment that led to another perspective. And next thing, you know, we have a room full of ideas that are kind of building on each other. We end up somewhere different than where we started, much different. And so and so. And there were other people, you know, we had the Longmont Police Department. I had a research and development unit, and that person, those people, were charged with looking around this planet, not just this, not just the state of Colorado or the United States of America, but what were, what were other folks doing? And so that began that some of these conversations, but my questions had more to do, not with trying to challenge people, but trying to invite people. And. Inviting people to kind of think differently than we were thinking. And so that was a process of moving from tiptoeing to jumping into the deep end with both feet process and so. And so it was that. And sometimes we ask difficult questions. And so what are the Crossroads you’re confronting right now, where are you at in your job? What’s that crossroad? What does it work for you? What? What do you think could work better if we could do something different? And so people were never, kind of challenged to think that way. Kristin, they weren’t thought they Yeah. And so it’s kind of like, once that began to happen, it’s not that we let go the past easily, and it’s not that we changed that old model overnight. That didn’t happen, but people were now, some people more than others, but eventually others caught on that they were now sensitive sense of freedom, the sense of safety, the sense of curiosity. How do you bring about a larger sense of curiosity? Bob about what could be different than what’s what’s here now, and so and so, so with the thing. And then we brought in, by the way, we brought in futurists. We brought in people who could talk to us about, here’s what the future is probably going to look like five years, three years, 10 years down the road. Which also kind of accentuated this sense of we got to be different than we are now, because here’s how we’re not going to be effective going down the same road. So you know, what’s the crossroads that we’re at right now? At some level, I would even ask, what are you contributing to? What’s going what the current reality is? What’s that look like for you, because we’re all contributing to that, either by omission or commission. We’re all contributing to the reality that exists. So what are you contributing? And so sometimes that question was, could spur on someone’s thinking in terms of, you know, I am contributing. I continue to do these things day after day. I don’t ask any questions. I’ve never been given that opportunity. I’ve, you know, I just kind of stay in my safe zone where it’s comfortable and familiar, and just kind of hang out there, and then at the end of the day I find I go home. And so, so anyway, it was that kind of dynamic that was in play, so in the invitation, thinking about possibilities, you know, the idea that we all own, the current reality, the gifts that people had sometimes that were they didn’t realize what those gifts were. And so what are your gifts? What are your talents? What are your reasons? What do you bring that’s unique to anybody else in this organization? What’s that look like for you? So those kind of questions sometimes spawn different perspectives. So

Kristin Daley 12:40
there you have it. And I really want to emphasize and echo your point about diverse perspectives being so important, and not just getting kind of a homogeneous sample from the community, but really getting into it with all stakeholders and inviting them to be a part of the conversation in order to look to the future.

Mike Butler 12:57
What was what was great? Christy, that’s a great point was when you had citizens and officers and other staff and other city department staff and elected officials, sometimes all in the same room, and you talk about opening up something, Whoa, that was amazing. And so and so, we had activists in the community that were used to having their voice heard, but we also had people in the community that were kind of kind of shy and and so they felt like they could have their voice heard. And it was amazing where brilliance can come from. By the way, same thing with our staff. Some people were a little more shy than others, and so so the idea was to open this up and create an environment where there were no bad ideas, but we didn’t necessarily, you know, but we all we also wanted to kind of find consensus on how we wanted to move forward and so and so, these ideas just built off one another until we got to a certain point, a different point.

Carol Engel-Enright 13:55
I just want to mention that Mike is a great facilitator. I don’t know how he learned all the skills he learned, but he’s he’s a great coach and a great mentor and a great advisor. I’ve watched him in rooms of Thank you, Carol of you know 25 homeless people who want to complain and talk about how horrible is, and he will sit and listen and then ask that most powerful question. And I do say that the training and the whole idea behind project pack is to bring that forward for police chiefs, for the deputies that work with them, for the city managers that are interfacing with the police department for the community, then the nonprofit organizations that want to make a change, but they feel like they can’t cross that line, this concept of being able, being a really effective communicator, being a great listener. Sure. So you started, I don’t know which which pilot, and you don’t like to call them pilots. Which program started first, but you had a diversion program, you had a co responder program, you had a substance abuse policy, and you had, you worked with the gangs, you worked with domestic violence, you went into the schools and created that partnership. So which one do you want to talk about first? When you look up emerging trends in policing, that’s what you see. One

Mike Butler 15:34
of the Yeah, one of the ones I think we need to focus on that would be helpful to all communities, is what happened in neighborhoods and those neighborhoods are, are a little bit more complex, a little trickier. They each have their own personality, their own sense of level of social capital. They’re all unique. There’s, there’s, there’s, there’s a variety of personalities, some strong personalities, some maybe not quite as strong, but in neighborhoods where there were either crime disorder or traffic related issues, or sometimes gang related issues or drug related issues, or whatever those could be, or all the above, so to speak, neighborhoods were where I think we really kind of got started on this, and people began to see the benefit of working in partnership, versus saying, Hey, we’re going to come in and fix you, and we’re going to bring a number of people and we’re going to arrest all the bad guys and just kind of leave it at that, versus a way of doing business In which we went into the neighborhood and said, Okay, we didn’t go into the neighborhood. Often, without an invitation, we wanted to be invited to that neighborhood. And often that invitation looked like, you know, we’re going to go to our city council and complain because our neighborhood is not safe for us. That was an invitation. Or, you know, there’s people are going to get killed in this neighborhood unless something different happens. And we’re hearing this, they’re telling us this, that that was the beginning of an invitation, or we we heard, look, we’d like to have a conversation about you, with you, about what you can do differently in our neighborhood, because we don’t feel like we’re getting a police response we deserve and need. And so that wasn’t, that was an invitation. And so we, most often, almost 95% of the time, didn’t go into a neighborhood unless we were invited, and because we wanted the neighborhood to feel like, you know, they had some ownership here. And we just walked in and said, We’re here to we’re here from the government. We’re here to fix you. That sets up a different dynamic and or versus saying, you know, we’re listening to you, and so based on your invitation, we’d like to have more conversations with you. And so we became conveners, we became inviters, we became facilitators, we became idea people with ideas. We became kind of galvanizers, and we also were enforcers. There’s no question about that. We had to be enforced, but we mixed in all of those kinds of ways, those roles of being in the neighborhood and the neighborhood could select what they wanted to work on. We talked to them about their gifts, their their possibilities, their their sense of what they needed to do. We talked to them about envision, what kind of neighborhood you’d like to live in. What’s this look like for you? How safe is it? I mean, do you get do you get to know each other? Are there connections? Is there is are there people who know now that you know here’s here’s everybody in my neighborhood, and here’s the gifts they have to offer as well. And so what, what do you want out of this? What do you want? We know that there’s drug activity. We know that there’s gang activity. We know that, you know, you’ve had X number of car break ins or X number of house break ins. We know all that. But what is it, you well, we want to be in a safe neighborhood where we can go around the neighborhood and and feel like our kids can play in the street, and we don’t have to worry about speeding cars, and we don’t have to worry about, you know, gangsters drive by shootings. We don’t have to worry about drugs being sold out of a particular house, whatever that look like. We got all of that. And by the way, there’s not hardly a community of any size that doesn’t have that those dynamics in certain neighborhoods, in their in their community and so, but the idea was to let this neighborhood direct and guide and take ownership and kind of lead the way towards a different kind of neighborhood. And we would be kind of like the goalie in a hockey match. We kept a puck in play, so to speak. We, you know, we didn’t end the game. We wanted to keep the conversations going, and we wanted people to kind of come together and and there were sometimes these neighborhood meetings would last, you know, over six months, not one meeting, but several meetings. And so there were, there were often a a, you know, kind of a series of meetings. And sometimes people got, oh, nothing’s happening. And every Okay. What needs to happen next? What’s what steps are we going to take here? And the police didn’t shirk their role as as, here’s what we can do. In terms of, here’s the role we can play if there, if there is drug dealing going on, we can work on a particular house, but it’s going to take some time. If there’s some gang banging going on, here’s what we can do, and we’ll talk more about that in terms of what we did later with some of these other ideas. But in essence, the neighborhood selected the direction they wanted to go. They selected their pace. We helped nourish and kind of cultivate neighborhood connectors and people who kind of took the lead, so to speak, because remember what we’ve said before, that our, our effectiveness as a police department was very much attached to that, our the need that they had for us. And so our idea was, if we’re no longer needed, we’re being effective, and that the neighborhood is now self resilient, self reliant. They don’t call the cops on any every little thing. They call a neighbor or they call a neighborhood meeting. And so that began to happen over and over and over again. And so that’s where we got, kind of got our feet wet. That’s where we started, I think, and in some ways, to kind of sense that here’s how partnerships could work,

Carol Engel-Enright 21:16
just the logistics on this. Did they happen in houses? Did they happen in churches? Did they happen

Mike Butler 21:22
if there was a common area like a church? Okay? If there was a common area like a church or sometimes a school, sometimes we met at a at a park. I remember many summers meeting with our officers myself. Sometimes I would go, would meet in a pavilion at a park, summer evening, typically, and but if it was cold outside, it was inclement. Every now and then we’d meet it, someone would open up their home. And that was always nice, because people provided food, and we broke bread sometimes, and, and so that was always good as well.

Carol Engel-Enright 21:55
We forget about the power of coming together, especially over a meal. I just

Mike Butler 22:00
want to talk about one neighborhood. It was a, it was a, it was an apartment complex. And many of these places took many of these places were consisted of high density housing, mobile home parks, apartment complexes, where you would think people don’t want to take ownership for their neighborhood. Well, they did. They wanted it to be safe, and so and so. That was a big part of them come wanting to come together. They wanted to save for their kids and so. But I remember one, one place called Stonehenge, and it was, it was subsidized. It was housing subsidized by the government. There were several 100 apartments in this in this complex, it was located next to a park where there was gang activity. The owner of the of that complex lived on the West Coast, didn’t live in Colorado, and so there was this absenteeism, so to speak. The management there was a little bit iffy, and turned sketchy in terms of their own integrity. And so we that’s what we encountered initially, I’m gonna make a long story real short here, but eventually, what happened was stone hedge went from like 150 to 200 calls every month to less than five every month over a period of like six months to a year. And everything that I talked about previously began to happen as neighbors and people began to take more ownership and buy in. And the absentee landlord was given a call and said, Listen, here’s what’s happening. And they had no idea. They weren’t even aware, because management wasn’t telling them that they flew out. They spent a whole week here. They decided to give public safety an entire department to create what we called a substation in our community. It wasn’t just a substation for that apartment complex. It became a substation for that part of the community and so and then there was a sign put outside said Longmont Police Department, a policing in partnership with the people. And at that point, we had a lot of graffiti in our community, because we had a lot of gang activity, and that sign was never once graffitied. It was interesting. I thought it was that first night it was going to get it was never once over the years I was there and so but it went from almost 200 calls a month to less than five, from very serious issues with gangs and drugs to nothing anymore. People you know, they found money to build bigger, more complex, funner playgrounds. The owner put up this incredibly beautiful wrought iron fence between that park that I talked about and the and so, because there was just a lot of people walking in to their neighborhood, so to speak, and they use it as a through way. And so it wasn’t just people causing bad action. They were so anyway, that was a big part of that. And so, and so he, and this name, this owner, ended up spending some money to make some things work, repainted things. And got, you know, we’ve, we’ve, you know, just kind of make, made the place look a lot nicer, with vegetation, spruce to. Up so. So anyway, long story, real short, and that happened probably in close to, I want to say, 40 to 50 neighborhoods over a period of maybe three to four years. And we created models and so, and the idea was, okay, we’re no longer needed. We have five calls. And those calls were like, Well, someone parked in my parking spot and or someone’s playing music that beyond 10 o’clock, or whatever that might look like, all the other serious crime just went away, and so and so that was huge. And there’s I, I’ve written something that there’s actually a template and a formula for all of this, in terms of how you move forward with neighborhoods, how police departments can do that so that they’re no longer as needed and so and by the way, if that doesn’t appeal to you that the effective, your effectiveness is tied to you’re no longer needed, then I think we’re in the wrong business, because we can’t sit there and say, We want you to become more dependent on us. We know that going from unhealthy dependency to interdependency that’s Healthy is the way to go in our own personal lives, in our families, in our neighborhoods, in our communities. And so that’s, that’s the that’s our take on that. So that was

Carol Engel-Enright 26:15
neighborhoods. Do you remember what year that was?

26:18
Mike, it was around 2000

Carol Engel-Enright 26:21
Okay, so, and last year, I was invited by a city council member to go to a neighborhood meeting, and it was that neighborhood, and it was in the basement of a church and and they had one table full of people who only spoke Spanish, but they had somebody Who was there as a community connector to translate the patrolman, the officer that is still working that neighborhood. It’s not like the police left the neighborhood. They are there, and they they, they have a relationship with the neighborhood. And there was also their their not complaints, but their concerns that evening were that some of the teenagers were staying out a little late, and so they talked about keeping the lights on and starting to engage in conversation with the teenagers so everybody knew who they were. It way, it was a beautiful conversation, yeah, and I think we dismiss community conversations.

Mike Butler 27:22
I can tell you that conversation, and that conversation was much different than the conversation we had initially with because we had several, we had several SWAT operations in that complex. And so it was. It was a scary place. In fact, we never sent fewer than two officers on any one call every time we went because and there’s so many different places like that in neighborhoods across America that these places have hope and the vast majority of people want something that’s different, and I think a police department can play a high leverage role in terms of making that difference.

Kristin Daley 27:59
And it all starts with shifting the power dynamics and inviting the community into the conversation and waiting for them to invite the police into their neighborhood.

Mike Butler 28:07
Yeah, it was, that was a big deal. That was big, yeah. So anyway, we had a lot of neighborhoods that were along those lines back in at the turn of the century, so to speak, turn

Carol Engel-Enright 28:17
in the century. Um, wow, that’s crazy to think we’re already a quarter of the way through. And just so that you know community is as important as police. So as you as a community builder, I mean to watch that in action, and to think about how you can, how you can build up a community to where they they feel I like that you didn’t show a prejudice about a rental situation that those people, you saw them in terms of creating their own ownership.

Mike Butler 28:51
This was their home. These were their homes. These were their families. They deserved. They deserved that sense of safety as much as anybody did and and, so yeah, there was no question that that’s anyway I go on and on about that, but that’s where I leave it.

Carol Engel-Enright 29:09
Okay, let’s move to co responder. That’s, that’s a that’s a very big topic these days. So

Mike Butler 29:15
let me, let me talk a little bit about Yeah, because every community, if you ask the community, what are your three major social or health issues? It wouldn’t be surprising to me to say chemical substance addiction, mental health issues and homelessness. Those three come up pretty much in the top four to five, six issues that people are going to identify as their biggest social or health issues in their community. And same thing in Longmont. We had folks who were committing crimes, who were struggling with their mental health, and we began and by the way, I want to kind of map to these things together, chemical substance and mental health, kind of, they’re different, but sometimes they they kind of, they’re stirred again. Other, they can be seen in one their CO their comorbid, kind of responses, and so and so, or kind of symptoms and with people. And sometimes that can be joined in with the other part of the swirling mix of someone who who’s shelterless, they don’t have a home. And so all those three, all those things can go together and and we had, we developed a process to deal with instead of just invoking the criminal justice system and arresting people because they struggled with chemical substance? There’s a longer story here, and I’m going to make it short, but mental health, by the way, these things are catching on a little bit throughout the country in terms of a different kind of response than just invoking the criminal justice system, but we made deliberate efforts this, too was early on in terms of working with folks who were struggling with their mental health or chemical substance addiction, where we developed a different kind of response, and we repurposed internally some of our people, and actually hired folks who were more had had an expertise in this arena, in these arenas more so than just well, let’s just hire more police. We hired more people who could respond to these things more effectively, and we began to work with mental health service providers, addiction treatment service providers, and said, if you’re struggling with these issues, are you willing to provide services in ways that people don’t have to pay for them. And so we had over 100 addiction treatment service providers, and we had several mental health service providers. By the way, mental health treatment was seemed to be more free from a public perspective than chemical substance addiction, but we had a lot of private chemical substance addiction treatment service providers willing to say, we’re willing to provide treatment for free. And so we ended up becoming the Longmont Public Safety Department. Ended up becoming kind of the center that if you wanted to help with these issues, you came down to our department and worked on these things. And so I’m going to make these long stories real short. We ended up developing an internal mechanism and an internal structure that could focus on this. We trained all of our police officers to think about these folks differently and educate them in terms of, you know, listen, are there things we can do differently than just arresting someone who, who is, I’m this might, this might not go well with people who’s possessing a drug, maybe just for personal use, not for distribution, but for personal use. Is there something we can do differently? Are they dealing with an addiction that you know, chances are if we dealt with, if we dealt with the need that they had, or the demand that was in their community, somehow we could inter that we could have more impact, and we did. And I will tell you about three men that I’ll name, but this applied to hundreds of people. It was Anson Rubin and subo. Each of them had over 1000 calls for service. Each of them were, were the emergency department didn’t want to see them anymore. They were not wanted anywhere. They were, they were homeless, and I’m gonna again a long story, real short here these we wrapped our arms around these folks the community. Wrapped our arms around these folks in a different way, and all three of them ended up finding jobs housing. Two of them reconnected with their families and reconnected back with the families that they were disconnected from and they found long term paths in their lives that were different than the ones that they were. So here we are criminal justice system over 1000 times each response, many, many hundreds and hundreds of arrests amongst the three of them. And everybody knows what I’m talking about, but there were different ways of helping and working with these people, and so they’re kind of the and reason why I say those three is because every now and then I would engage in these efforts as well, and sometimes, somehow, people got a hold of me. And I remember, in one case, it was Anson who got a hold of me, who was able to find my phone number and called me. So I got involved with Anson. I ended up getting hell involved in Ruben and the subios lights, but I knew there were hundreds of other people, in fact, you know, those, the hundreds and hundreds of people that walked through our doors waving their flag and said we need treatment in some form or fashion, was kind of the way that we ended up doing business. And by the end then our community rallied around this, the social capital was immense. Employers agreed to find people jobs that were in recovery. People in the community provide transportation, served as social networks, help people find housing, and so so we we did some restructuring to repurpose some of our staff, and then we galvanized the social capital in the community, and so that we surrounded these people in ways that they hadn’t been surrounded before, in ways at one point, that they were completely they saw themselves as a problem. They didn’t some of them didn’t want to even live any longer, to the point where, hey, you’re valued, you’re recognized, and we, we want to be part of your life. Safe, and so that that made a big difference for a lot of these people. And but we didn’t do it by ourselves. We were just merely a point people. And by the way, this didn’t cost the city any money. I want to make a point real clear, this wasn’t a budget item that I had to go ask for money for. This was something that we just repurposed and redid. And so instead of arresting these people over and over again and working with a system that doesn’t work, and along those lines, especially for these complex social and health issues, we changed and shifted how we responded. So that’s the short version of how we dealt with folks who were struggling with chemical substance addiction, mental health and or homelessness,

Carol Engel-Enright 35:41
and how do you? How do you, you know, a lot of community members say, I don’t want to see that person. I you know, please, please arrest them, remove them. They are littering our city, right? They are, they are. They’re ruining the beauty of our city. And so there’s this big gap between, you know, most, most citizens would say, can’t they just be arrested? Can’t you just throw them in jail? Because it feels like a big lift to to re, I don’t know, rehabilitate, restore, repurpose.

Mike Butler 36:22
It was the police department’s responsibility. We took this on of recalibrating how the community felt about people who were down and out in their community. And I get the fear factor. I get the idea that that they’re in our parks, we don’t want to send our kids to our parks, or they’re defecating in our in our lawns, or they’re they’re sleeping in in a in an area that I visit night. It scares me, and so it’s one of those things where we had to really help shift the nature of our community. Thought the of these, look at these folks, if we just looked at it, was there, just invoke criminal justice system. Well, guess what? Doesn’t work, folks, and so we had to have these conversations with people that says, I, I can run, you know, we can arrest these people until the cows come home. The criminal justice system can’t handle them, and they don’t do anything. And it’s kind of like unless we want to lock them up permanently. And some people are going to say, that’s a solution, but that’s that’s paying a lot more money than we’re paying now for a criminal justice system apparatus. And so is, are there other ways that we can work with people? And so people began to see this. People began to see that. And you know what? And I would want, I initially, I want to tell this real quick story. When we were dealing with mental health issues, it was something that spawned us. There were two incidents that occurred in a 24 hour period, including something that people know about, where a woman went to another woman’s house and cut the baby out of her. And so we dealt with two mental health major issues where the press from the world descended upon Longmont, and I took advantage of that, did a press and did a kind of a press conference, and said, We gotta do something different. But I decided to go to a lot of myself and my staff. Went to a lot of different churches, 7890 church, 80 churches in our community. And we talked to every one of these churches. We said, Listen, we need to surround these people with something that you all have, your sense of humanness, your sense of compassion, your sense of kindness, and we need to, we need to respond differently. And then I would ask a question, you know, I’d be in a church that had 1000 people, and how many people in this, in this congregation know somebody, either your family, a close friend, or someone you work with that’s struggling with a mental health issue? Not once did no one else hand go up everyone. Everyone’s hand went up everywhere. And so it’s kind of like this is an issue that’s here amongst us. And if we’re just going to say, we’re just going to kind of dovetail this and pigeonhole this into a criminal justice system and fix it, you’re we’re wrong. We know that the only way we’re going to work with this is if we all have a different approach to what’s happening, and so that we ended up changing that quite a bit. We ended up changing the culture of the mindset of our community and the police department, with their very legitimate platform and that big pulpit they have, net bullhorn that they have, can make those things happen. They can make those things happen, and that’s part of Project pack, by the way, in terms of how do you communicate with a community about shifting and changing its culture, from being so calling you for everything that they’re afraid of to saying, Hey, we can galvanize some neighbors and some people and become the answer to someone else’s problems here. And so what do we do? And so do we always depend on the experts and remember what we say, great communities aren’t made up of of the best police departments or great leaders or great governments or improved services. Great communities are made up of great citizens, and so that role of citizenship becomes a big part of all this. So anyway,

Kristin Daley 39:55
yeah, and it’s important to remember that a person struggling with substance use or. Or being unhoused, or any of those situations, putting them into the system is not going to solve the issue. They’re going to come back and be in a worse situation. So getting them the resources, the way that you’re talking about, getting them support and care is what’s going to resolve the problem.

Mike Butler 40:19
And you know what? It didn’t work every single time, but it worked a heck of a lot more than than what happened with just arresting these people over and over again. We didn’t see the Rubens, the answers, the subos anymore. I mean, you know, over 3000 contacts went to zero, so to speak, over a period of six months to a year.

Carol Engel-Enright 40:39
Would you? Would you say, I mean, both of you have Kristin, you’ve worked a lot with trauma informed care and trauma victims and and people who have experienced, you know, violence and crime. Would you say that once trauma heals, you want to be that better person, like you can get to that better path, that higher level of thinking, making better decisions and choices, once the healing process happens and and right behind that, do you think the criminal justice system, as people are entered into that system, multiplies and expands trauma within the system?

Kristin Daley 41:22
Absolutely. Yeah, people who are experiencing trauma and need support, they need resources. They need to, you know, feel like there’s a way to make their situation better or heal, heal what they’re dealing with. And if they don’t have any outlet for that, it’s, it’s it’s a difficult place to be in, and once they gain access to that support or those resources that they need, it’s a completely different

Carol Engel-Enright 41:50
mindset. Yeah, I don’t, I don’t know that we ever talk within public safety. We don’t talk about healing. We talk about it in other areas.

Mike Butler 41:57
Well, we don’t, but that’s so continuing on the work we did with domestic violence, which is an area I know that Kristin is very familiar with. You know, we, at one point, we were the domestic capital, lethal domestic capital of the state of Colorado, per capita, Longmont was we’re a number of women dying every year. And we chose to say, You know what, we have to expand this issue. We actually turned it into what we called a health issue, and say, we can’t look at it as a criminal issue. We have to look at it as a health issue. It’s not that the criminal justice system is not going to be involved, but there’s a bigger issue here. And so, and I want to make a long story real short, and people want to know what we did, they’re welcome to call but we ended up going from several women being killed every year in this community to two over 20 years, still two too many, but because of what we did in terms of including the community, including people in other organizations, and changing and shifting the message and getting more men involved, by the way men, who were mostly the precipitators of domestic violence, weren’t involved. Their voices weren’t heard. Normally. The voices came from women. But we got a lot of men involved in this. We got a lot of churches involved. We got a lot of neighborhoods involved, a lot of businesses and schools. I remember doing a presentation, few presentations to the school district’s athletic department, and a lot of the teachers and the coaches and a lot of the athletes were there, and we talked about this, because we know that that domestic violence also occurs at that teenage level as well. And so we did so many different things, and what we did was we raised the consciousness and awareness. This is another thing police departments can do with their platform. We can raise the awareness and consciousness of what’s important. In fact, domestic violence became what we dubbed the number one public safety issue in our community. There were more people being hurt by domestic violence than any other thing, any other set of circumstances in our community, and so and so in the children were greatly impacted, and so we and so we ended up with less lethal, fewer serious injuries. And it was not that we didn’t have domestic violence. We didn’t cure the domestic violence issue in our community, but we went from the level of lethality that we had to a much lower level, and we actually help people see and understand their role as a family member, their role as a neighbor, their role as a fellow, someone congregant in a church or in the employment area, and so what their role could be. And next thing you know, we had tremendous amounts of support, not just for the victim, but for people who were perpetrating domestic violence as well and so, so anyway, a long story, real short, but using the same kind of mindset here in terms of where from the government we fix everything to know we need our entire community to be engaged, and we need everybody to understand that. Yeah, you’re responsible for the reality that exists in this community now. And the reality with domestic violence is, you know, by omission or commission, is, if we have what we have, everyone’s responsible for the reality now, how do we create a different future in this arena where everyone can be responsible for creating that different future? Became the essence of our message, and so again, in churches and businesses and neighborhoods and so. And when you look at you know, we read an article this morning about how to respond to violent crime, what’s the real response? And we know that the vast majority of violent crime occurs between people, know each other, allegedly love each other, and when people ask me, Is it safe to live in our community? I said, It depends who you live with. And so it was along those lines that we had to have these conversations. There’s very few string there wasn’t there wasn’t stranger violence. There is stranger violence. But on the other hand, the vast majority of it occurs in that dynamic where people know each other or allegedly care for each other, and so and so, what do we do with that? And that’s one of those pieces of data that doesn’t get talked about when you talk about violent crime. It just, it just gets glossed over, as if most of this is being done by people we don’t know. The vast majority of sex assaults occur in families or extended families or with new boyfriends or whatever that might look like. And so the vast majority do. Very few are string there’s very few people jumping out of bushes or behind buildings and sexually assaulting somebody. Most of the vast majority of it occurs. And so we addressed it from that way. That’s a hard that’s hard, that’s a touchy issue, a sensitive issue, especially in certain communities and certain cultures where they tend to circle the wagons around families, and so that became even more difficult. But we penetrated that kind of culture in ways that people became men, became the voices and the mouthpieces and the kind of the they got their own bull horns and said, enough’s enough, and so and so, but that’s what the police department could do more of, in terms of extending their sense of that platform and creating a much larger kind of platform in a community for people to take responsibility.

Kristin Daley 47:12
Yeah, and you and I have had some great conversations around these topics, and they’re topics that I’m deeply invested in. And I think the most important thing, when it comes down to it, is what you did was diminish the stigma around talking about these issues and make it easier for people to ask for help or come forward. And that’s huge. That’s life changing.

Mike Butler 47:37
Yeah, and so it was, so anyway, it was that was domestic violence with gangs. I’ll just be real quick about that. At one point, we had 450 legitimate gang members. We followed the state’s criteria for how to identify a gang member. People had to self identify. We had 13 to 14 different gangs in this community. We had homicides being committed by and so we went the same way. I won’t go through all the but the idea of inviting this community into this, and I’ll never forget, after a homicide that was really high profile, and every news media and in the Denver Metro area came to Longmont and in a community meeting where over 200 people said, What are you going to do about a police department? What’s going to be your take on this? And at that point, everyone thought, because these were Latino young men that committed the homicide and a Latino victim, that they were undocumented. Turns out they weren’t. They were American citizens. So we had to deal with that particular aspect of it. But then, but then, during that meeting, I made it very clear. This just says this is a community wide issue, and here’s what we’re going to do to move forward, to get this community engaged in ways. And so again, a long story, real short, over a period of about four to five, six years, we went from 450 registered gang members in our community to fewer than 60, and we went from 13 gangs to two gangs, and most of those, fewer than 60 gang members, were people in over the age of 60, because they’d always been a member of this gang. And so they those gang activity dropped, the graffiti and gang gang tagging dropped considerably, but it had everything to do. And so there are templates, and by the way, there, there’s nothing original about if you call and ask, Well, what, what did that formula template look like? You’re gonna go, Yeah, that makes sense. Oh yeah. That makes sense. Oh yeah, that makes sense. That’s what we teach in Project pact and so. And I don’t care if you’re living in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, I know there’s some gangs that are rougher than but we had, we had some of the major gang players in this community, in our community, people coming up from Denver and Bloods and Crips and and and everything else. And so we had, we had major gangs in this community and and we dealt with it that way. And it wasn’t that we didn’t make arrest. The rest were part of that. There was a supply. Suppression aspect, there was an intervention aspect, and there was a prevention aspect, and all of those involved our community and so and so. Suppression, which is typically arrest intervention, which is typically someone’s in a gang and they want to get out, or you encourage them to leave, you can help them leave. Or how do you prevent younger people who maybe have older brothers or siblings in a gang from joining a gang. And so we worked with our schools, we worked with all these service entities. We worked with neighborhoods, we worked with moms and pops. Police officers became mentors, whatever that looked like, but it was part, that’s part of how we responded. And by the way, you know. And so I talked about domestic violence. I talked about Hanson Rubio and a subio. I talked about gangs. The crime rate in our community dropped 50% at a time when crime was going up everywhere in this country and so and so. There’s not a lot of magic here, folks. There really isn’t and but there is a way of doing it that every community could benefit from, and it has a lot to do with the culture of your organization, the culture of a community, and those are things that you need. Steps we need to take. I’m not going to deny these steps where things have to happen differently between the police department and the community. They have to happen differently in the police department. They have to happen different in the community and so but the police department can be that leverage point and that incredible fulcrum, with that incredible platform, it has, like, unlike any other municipal entity in their community, to bring these changes about.

Carol Engel-Enright 51:31
I just want to ask one final question, how did your officers feel about their work when they were putting these programs together, out in the community, making a difference, making an impact. Well,

Mike Butler 51:45
initially there was a process here. There was an evolution of thinking of this is crazy. I only put bad guys in jail on the thin blue line. I’m the guy that makes it yeah to to Boy, this really does work. And let we need to find, in fact, alternatives and different ideas about how to deal with the human condition began to surface everywhere. That was the nature of our culture, and we couldn’t do everything, and some things required more budget that we couldn’t necessarily afford. But on the other hand, these were the ideas that were surfacing, and so our officers became used to this idea and comfortable and actually enthusiastic about and, by the way, grateful and sense that, you know, my job has meaning and purpose, because I’m not doing the same thing. I’m not arresting the Ansons and Rubios and subos, you know, 1000 times over the period of my career and so, so it’s like, yeah, who doesn’t want to work in that environment? This is not difficult. This is not rocket scientist, folks. It’s not and so let’s just start asking questions, start having different conversations, start setting it up so that people feel comfortable being able to say, I got an idea. And the younger and our younger generations are full of brilliance. We’re all full of brilliance, but there’s a different kind of brilliance at that those younger ages that we can begin to leverage and take advantage of, because this criminal justice system needs to be repurposed and and we believe we have some really good ideas about what that repurposing can look like at Project PAC

Carol Engel-Enright 53:17
beautiful, we’re going to wrap it up for today. I know there’ll be more conversations and other things that we can talk about in terms of alternatives and and how we move forward, how we evolve both as society, as a civilization, as people in neighborhoods, in communities, in states and nations and the world and so thank you for tuning in. Please give us a five star rating. I was on YouTube yesterday and looking at the ratings and giving myself a five star rating. So thank you for that. We appreciate that, and tell your friends about Beyond the band aids. We want to we want to move into a future that we all want to live into. So thank you for listening.

Jennifer (narrator) 54:00
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.