Police Roles: Past, Present, and Future

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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[narrator] (0:02 – 0:58)
Welcome to Beyond the Band-Aids with Project PACT, the podcast where police, public safety experts, city leaders, and engaged community members explore how to create real meaningful change in our communities. Each week host Dr. Carol Engle Enright and Chief Mike Butler have conversations with experts and visionaries who are transforming public service. Discover how innovative leadership, compassion, and restorative practices can bridge gaps and build stronger connections between community stakeholders and police officials.

If you’re ready to rediscover your purpose within your community, enhance your leadership, and make a lasting impact, Beyond the Band-Aids is the podcast for you. Whether you’re a police officer, city leader, or committed community member, join us to unlock new possibilities for a safer, more connected future. Subscribe now to Beyond the Band-Aids and be part of the movement for change.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (1:02 – 2:19)
Welcome to Beyond the Band-Aids. This podcast, it’s going to move us into a conversation beyond the Band-Aids of the past, how we’ve tried to fix problems around police and community. And Project PACT is the project that we’re working on.

PACT means police and community together. So we’re coming from both sides of this conversation, how do police work better with community, how community works better in partnership with police, and how we create safe communities that have a sense of well-being where people feel free to move forward. We talk about evolving civility and creating a society that everyone can flourish in.

And so we’re going to start there. I’m Dr. Carol Ingle Enright. I’m the president and co-founder of School of Statesmanship, Stewardship, and Service, SOSUS.org.

And I’m going to have Mike and Kristen introduce themselves real shortly, and then we’ll get into the topic of today. It’s going to be fascinating. You’re going to love this.

[Kristin Daley] (2:19 – 2:26)
Hi, I’m Kristen Daly. I’m the executive director of New Blue and a board member of the Law Enforcement Action Partnership.

[Mike Butler] (2:27 – 2:45)
And I’m Mike Butler, another co-founder of the School of Statesmanship, Stewardship, and Service. And I was a long-term public safety director in the city of Longmont, Colorado, overseeing police, fire, emergency management services, and also part of the Law Enforcement Action Partnership.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (2:46 – 3:43)
Okay, so our topic for today is how police roles have evolved, in a way, from the past into the present and what we hope for in the future. We’re going to start with this historical perspective of… We have so many different names for police.

We call them, if you have kids around you, they’ll be called cops. I just like to say cop came from Ben Franklin, talking about the constable on patrol, learning from London. Police and peace officers used to be used in the past, up to the 1960s.

So, Mike, I’m going to have you talk about this historical overview, what you’ve seen in terms of police and where it changed over to kind of this law enforcement versus community caretaking.

[Mike Butler] (3:44 – 7:26)
Well, thanks. First of all, this is a topic that I think we hope we get some feedback on and would love some more conversation about. But there is an historical context for how police came to be, what their role is today, what their functions are today, and the historical context has more to do with a law enforcement, the actual enforcement of laws and the actual working with people in ways that had more to do with invoking the criminal justice system.

Now, there have been some ebbs and flows with that as well. I mean, some people will say, well, didn’t at one point police officers kind of walk their beats without before cars? Didn’t they get to know people?

Yes, and ask the case. But typically, they were there as monitors, there as kind of people who, if they had a law enforcement issue, that someone would come up and let them know that the law needed to be enforced. And even prior to that, I mean, the enforcement of laws, it goes all the way back to, you know, maybe the 1840s, 1850s, 1860s, where police officers in this country were more tied to slaveholders.

And part of their initial assignment was to go out and to round up slaves who had escaped. And therein lied some of the beginning of the actual organization of police in this country. And that that stayed that way for many years.

But the role itself became very much hooked into the enforcement of laws, as our country became more gravitated more towards ledges, trying to legislate fixes to our social health issues, it passed a lot of laws, and stiffened a lot of penalties in ways that required more police response in an attempt to try to fix those social and health issues. And so the police became very wrapped up in the enforcement of various laws, you can name a social issue, and there probably is a law, whether it’s a federal law, most likely a state law or local ordinance, and kind of covers that social or health issue. And so it got it got wrapped up into that and began that began going down that path and stayed there for quite a while.

And then of course, with the onset of, of patrolling and cars, the police got out of their walking beats kept stayed in their cars that created a little bit more of a, of a barrier between them and the community. And so and so and it’s still very much in that role today, if you were to ask people, what do they do, in terms of police departments, they say they they’re law enforcement, they enforce laws. And that’s a large part of the identity of police in our country today, in terms of what they do.

And it goes all the way down to the kinds of folks we hire, the profile of the person we’re looking for in terms of making sure that they can enforce laws that they can back up their fellow officers that they can engage in physical conflict, and when they have to, those are all important things. And I want to minimize that. But I we also believe that there’s a new role that police can play as we move into the future.

And we’re going to talk a lot about that today.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (7:28 – 9:00)
Okay, so, so some of the things that that that brought to mind. So in the late 1800s, if if the police law enforcement was working in the south, they were also called peace officers in the West, right in the 1860s, because they, they just kind of kept order very, very kind of different roles around our nation. And I just, I point that out, because I think, you know, where where you are, in terms of the geography of the United States, you may have a different perspective around policing.

I also want to point out that policing is local, it is locally funded, it is locally managed, yet police are asked to maintain and enforce laws that are at the national level at the state level, and then also respond to their local government. And so Kristen, I want to talk to you, you know, you’ve worked and research on how how laws get moved through different types of community. And of course, urban communities are different than rural communities.

But reminding our listeners, that police are local. Let’s talk about, you know, the present day situation in policing. What are you seeing today, in terms of the relationship between community and policing?

[Kristin Daley] (9:01 – 10:27)
Yeah, so I think that most of the police that I work with, you know, law enforcement is absolutely very literally a part of their job. And there is a place for that, especially when it comes to laws that protect people from harm. But I would say probably most police officers think of themselves more along the lines of public servants.

And you mentioned earlier, you know, cop coming from the British of Constable on Patrol. And that made me think of Sir Robert Peel, who’s thought of as the founder of modern policing. And his kind of famous quote was, the police are the public, the public are the police.

So kind of erasing that line between the two groups, and making it very clear that police are a part of their communities, they’re there to serve their communities. And the police officers that I work with are very much in that mindset. And I think that’s a mindset that most agencies can and should want to adopt.

Because it is a mindset of we’re here to make the public safer, healthier, make sure that community needs are being met. And that’s the role that I would like to see the police playing in their communities. And I think that’s the the role that most community members want to see them playing.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (10:28 – 11:18)
So, so police in modern policing, and in communities and local communities where where they they they exist in a dual reality. They exist on this side of public servant. And Mike, I want you to speak to this because you, you have 41 years in enforcement and, and, and leading officers.

They have this dual role. And then they also have to be available at a split second to protect lives, to deal with an emergency situation. And how do you manage?

How, as an officer, how do you manage being available at both both of those ends, both the extremes of those?

[Mike Butler] (11:18 – 18:53)
Well, interestingly enough, Carol, as you were describing that, that’s, that’s actually part of the draw, I think, in terms of people, whether they’re men or women who want to become police officers, there’s great variety. And in reality, there’s great variety in the work that they do. And it’s just not about enforcing laws, or not about just saving lives, or not about just arresting the bad guy, or whatever that might look like.

It’s just a combination of so many different roles and functions that police can play. And part of what I want to do today is to talk about whether or not we’ve overloaded the police with too many roles and too many functions, because they become very highly, we become to be very dependent upon them, communities have become to be very dependent upon them. Elected officials don’t necessarily think about what will be the residual to the police if we pass a law, or if we stiffen a penalty, in terms of the new, a new role that the police are going to have to play.

And we just keep on doing it, we just keep going down that path. Right now, Colorado, where I’m at right now, the the General Assembly is is in session. And that’s probably true for all 50 states right now, in terms of they go in session once a year, and one of the goals of the session is to pass laws.

And sometimes the badge of honor for an elected official is they’ve passed laws. And they’ve wrote a bill, they passed it, and the governor, their governor signed it, and no one necessarily thinks about the residual or the impact that that law might not only have on the police, but on the community. And so, and so, but in essence, what’s happened over the years is that a lot of things have been piled on the police profession to kind of fix, to take care of, to respond to, and to make sure that something bad doesn’t happen.

And so part of the role that, and function that we want to talk about, is how that role, how those, how those things that have been kind of piled on the police, how those can be shared more, and what has to happen in order for that sharing to occur. When I talk about sharing, I’m talking about sharing between the police and the community. Because as we’ve talked about on former podcasts, there is an unhealthy dependency in just about every community in this country on their police department.

And the police have been part of bringing that unhealthy dependency to life by using mantra like if you need us, call us for anything. To the point where a large percentage of the calls for service that police go on, a significant percentage, doesn’t have a crime attached to it. Or there may not even be disorder related to it.

It’s just that somehow the community has gotten into this mode of saying, if I need somebody, I want to call the police. Because, and especially at nighttime or on the weekends, because no other government entity or very few other government entities except for fire services is even available. And people don’t think to call the fire for a lot of these things because that’s been the police role.

And so the police role and function has gone, they’re up way over their eyeballs in terms of the work, the amount of work they have to do. And so I constantly hear police chiefs and police officers talk about how we don’t have enough police officers, or we don’t have enough apparatus in the criminal justice system, we don’t have enough prosecutors, we don’t have enough judges, we don’t have enough jail space. That tends to be kind of the drift of the discussion in terms of how we’re going to move forward.

Well, Project PACT wants to create a whole nother path in terms of how we can move forward and how the community can begin to take on some of these responsibilities and become more accountable for the outcomes that are happening in their communities for these social and health issues that we’ve passed all these laws for and have mandated the police enforce. And so that’s a big part of it. I was talking to someone the other day and they were saying, how come the police only dealt with part of the situation and not the whole situation?

And it turned out that what happened was that police officer went to that call for service without going into the details. Other things happened that they just sort of kind of said, well, maybe another time, but it probably should have been handled at that point. But what we learned was the call load for that city that day was so high that that police officer felt compelled to do the minimal amount of work that was necessary at that point in time so that they could handle other calls, very serious calls, or help back up other police officers whose safety may be compromised because they only had one police officer.

We constantly talked in our Longmont Police Department about how many times we could only send one officer to a two officer call or a three officer or four officer call. And that was because we were inundated with all of these things that over the years have accumulated in the aggregate for the police to do. And so it just became our role.

And so this mantra of, if you need us, call us for anything, has been a mantra that maybe at one point served us okay, but it’s a mantra we have to change. And it’s a mantra towards, hey, we need to figure out how to become jointly accountable and responsible for all the things that are happening. And if we want to say we want to work in partnership with the community, and by the way, relatively speaking, in terms of time, that’s a new kind of philosophy in terms of working in partnership.

But true partnerships mean joint accountability. It means absolute honesty that the police department can say to the community, we can’t do this. We don’t have the resources.

Here’s our capacity. Here’s all we can do. But you don’t see police chiefs or sheriffs easily saying that because they’ve been saying for too long, if you need us, call us for anything.

Or the capacity in a partnership to say no. And so all those attributes of partnerships have not necessarily lived out in our relationship between the police and the community. And what Project PACT is highly recommending is that we begin to live that partnership.

We begin to activate that partnership, where there is a high level of joint accountability between the community and the police. And where we begin to wean the number of calls that the community calls the police on. And instead of calling the police, what if they called a neighbor?

Or what if they had a neighborhood organization that could work on things? Or what if they could figure out how between them and other citizens, they could resolve something versus just dialing 911, which is what a lot of people have gotten used to. So that’s where we need to talk.

We have other roles and functions that the police can play. But in order for us to get to those roles and functions that are going to be of great value to our community, we’re going to have to kind of find that level playing field of balance and responsibility between the community and the police. And that’s what Project PACT wants.

The message that we want to send is just that.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (18:54 – 19:52)
Okay, so Kristen, I want you to talk about the present day situation and how legislators kind of started to address social emotional issues around, well, let’s just take away the drugs. Instead of let’s, let’s figure out other solutions. I, I’ve raised five kids.

I know Mike has raised five kids. And, you know, we’ve been around a lot of youth through the history, through the most recent history of, you know, people not feeling their sense of well-being, their sense of safety, and they turned to other things. And then Mike’s right, legislators said, well, we’ll just, we’ll just enforce this.

And so what happened when we went down that, that, that road?

[Kristin Daley] (19:53 – 21:36)
So I think first and foremost, I just want to say, you know, you can’t arrest your way out of a public health problem. So substance use is not something we can kind of eradicate by punishing people. And, you know, people who do need help or treatment need to be given those resources without cycling through the justice system.

But I think just as importantly, what enforcing those laws around substance use did was create tension between police and community. And police are there doing their jobs and enforcing the law. And they don’t make the law, but they are the people tasked with implementing it.

And that created a real breakdown in trust for community members, particularly in communities that were disproportionately impacted by these laws. And in particular, communities of color and lower income communities were impacted by laws like this. So I think the most important piece of that is that people in the community need access to services and accessible services that can help them with social and public health types of issues.

It’s not something we’re going to be able to just throw on the police’s plate and expect it to be solved magically. Because when you put people into the justice system and they’re just continuously cycling through it, they don’t ever have the chance to address the root causes or get back on their feet. And that creates a lot of unrest and distrust within communities.

[Mike Butler] (21:36 – 25:28)
So I think what Kristen said is very, very valuable. You know, we declared a number of years ago, we literally declared a war on drugs, where we tried to address the supply side of the drug issue in this in this country, and did little about the demand issue in terms of why did people even want drugs in the first place? And we’re still somewhat there with sporadic, and maybe a little bit of increase of, well, we need to deal with the demand a little bit, we need to acknowledge that this addiction happens, why is it here?

But as long as we’re going to deal with the supply side, and I’m not saying we don’t deal with the supply side. But we also have to deal very much with the demand that’s happening. And not only did we declare war on drugs, we declared war in many ways on a lot of other social and health issues.

And I want to say we lost all those wars. And as Kristen talked about, because these laws, when they’re passed, or when penalties are stiffened, and police are mandated to go out and enforce, she’s exactly right. These laws are typically enforced against the economically disadvantaged people in our country.

Those folks who have financial options, insurance options, have the economic wherewithal, either middle class or upper middle class or higher levels of economic class, they typically have options, they have insurance, they have other avenues they can go. But there’s a segment of our population that’s been screaming, saying, hey, wait a second, how come the cops are always in our neighborhood? How come they’re always arresting our friends or our family members?

How come they’re always around this part of the community? Well, it’s not that we’re always looking for it in the police side, too. We get called to those things.

But part of what I’ll make a case for is a lot of the racial tension that exists in our country, or has existed at a greater level than perhaps now, but still does exist, had a lot to do with the idea that if we just pass a law or stiffen a penalty, that we’re going to fix these issues. And as Kristen so eloquently said, we’re not going to arrest ourselves out of these health and social issues. But what we’ve done is that we have unwittingly believed, and some people believe wittingly, and I’m not going to argue with that point, but what’s happened is, the reality is, is that the police have now are engaging with the economically disadvantaged folks in our communities, in our country.

And unfortunately, some of those folks who are economically disadvantaged are people of color. And therein lies some of the racial tension that existed because, and some of the despaired impact in terms of what police, what police are doing, and who’s in our criminal justice system, who’s going through the system, who’s in our prisons, who’s in our jails. And so that’s another thing that I think we’re not taking the right approaches yet to that in terms of trying to figure out how we can deal with these social health issues in a way where we won’t need to call the police as much.

And that we can strike that balance and create that level playing field between the police and the community where the police can actually be seen as a trusted partner that can help bring value and goodness to the community in ways that we haven’t even begun to approach in terms of what the role and functions of police can be.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (25:29 – 26:57)
Oh, boy. And, you know, as an educator, I truly believe that if we start to work with the youth and let them find their own, their possibilities, their strengths, their gifts, their talents, their sense of beingness, their sense of purpose in our society, we can. And yet, we’re not, we don’t see, I worked a lot with youth leadership, and I just want it for every student, it doesn’t really matter.

Some of those things are somewhat being talked about. But let’s talk about the future and how police can take a different role in society, in community, how they can, and Mike, I want you to address neighborhoods. I want our listeners to think about a neighborhood as the micro unit of the macro local, in terms of what can you do to look around?

How could the police start to work with a neighborhood differently? How can a neighborhood go to the police and say, what can we do differently? Just to think about creating the parts of a community that come together as a whole, that creates this sense of safety, well beingness for all.

[Mike Butler] (26:57 – 35:21)
Yeah, I love focusing on the, the neighborhood. And I think you said it really well, the micro aspect of the macro community, so to speak. And, but I also just want to make, I want to kind of stress another perspective here, that the role of enforcement is not going to go away.

That there are people in our communities that can’t help themselves in terms of harming others, hurting others, stealing other people’s property, damaging other people’s property, doing things that they shouldn’t be doing and doing it probably in a serial kind of way. And I just want to sit here and also say that I know that we just haven’t necessarily found answers to certain psychological conditions or emotional conditions, where we can begin to heal in a way that doesn’t require people being removed from our communities. I’ve encountered a number of people in our communities over the year, in my, in the two communities that I’ve worked in very closely, that frankly, if we didn’t remove them from the community, and sometimes remove them permanently, our community was going to continually be harmed.

And so that role of enforcement is going to be there. All up, all up, what Project PACT is going to stress is that we not come at this by, for arrest and summons and invoking the criminal justice system from, we’re going to punish and make this punitive and be very retributive in our approach and our mindset and our emotion, and this vengeance eye for an eye, you know, pound of flesh mindset. I think we have to dismiss that mindset, because it clouds our judgment in so many different ways, in terms of what we need to be doing.

I personally think a higher level, or perhaps a more enlightened mindset, mindset, is going to be how do we keep our communities safe, that our actions are around creating safety in our community. And that if we have to remove somebody from our community, that’s the edge there, because we’re going to keep our communities safe. And so I just want to make all that perfectly clear that this role of enforcement is going to be necessary.

I’m also going to make the conditions for enforcement that I believe we worked on in our community, that other communities are working on, that they’re more judicious, that they’re more refined. And I believe they need to be community driven, because we can get into this one size fits all quick fix mindset, that we just arrest people because they violated laws, when they’re then they’re most likely are alternatives and effective options to deal with the messiness of the human condition, beyond enforcement. Because we know that when we arrest somebody, and we put them through the system, that what happens unless they’re going to stay in jail for a long, long time, that the recidivism rate is still high.

And so the criminal justice system hasn’t necessarily fixed the recidivism rate at which is at 50 to 70% in this country. And when we say recidivate, what we mean is someone’s committed offense. But the bigger part of that is someone else has been victimized by a crime.

And so we tend to forget about that. We tend to say well people are being, they’re out there committing crimes, but what we tend to forget about are the possible future potential victims out there, that because these people are back out in the community, are going to be harmed. And so that’s something that we don’t talk enough about in terms of what’s happening.

And so now I’ve talked so much, Carol, I don’t remember exactly what your question was. So thank you. So neighborhoods.

So let me just say that there in the city of Longmont, when we first started to work with neighborhoods, there were a number of neighborhoods in our community that were considered unsafe. Neighborhoods where we wouldn’t send any less than two police officers into if we got a call for service, whether they were specific large apartment complexes or larger neighborhoods. And so typically the way this worked is we would want to be invited in by the neighborhood.

We didn’t come into the neighborhood to say we’re going to clean you up. And we didn’t like that kind of patriarchal approach to working with the neighborhood. We wanted that relationship to start off in partnership mode in terms of them making an invitation to us, the police, the government, to come in and help their neighborhood become more safe.

And when that invitation came, and typically neighborhoods will do that, they’ll call in and they’ll say our neighborhood is not safe or they’ll show up at a council meeting or they’ll want to call the police chief or they’ll talk to police officers or whatever that might look like. But typically they reach this threshold where they say we know there’s lots of things happening in our neighborhood and because of that we just don’t feel safe. Can you help?

And therein lies the invitation. And I would strongly suggest that police departments work through the mode of being invited into someone’s home or being invited into someone’s neighborhood. And then you begin to have these conversations along the lines of let’s work on this project, which could be maybe weeks, months, or maybe even years sometimes in the making in terms of together so that we can begin to make your neighborhood more self-sufficient and more self-reliant.

What’s that going to look like in terms of gathering more neighbors, kind of surfacing and activating and helping to coordinate the social capital in a neighborhood in a way where everyone in the neighborhood gets to know each other, understands each other, when they’re leaving their homes, when they’re coming back, their kids, their activities, how many people are in the house, whether they have children, teenagers, you get what their skill sets are, what their gifts are. All those things need to happen in a neighborhood that enhances the social capital. And the research is very, very clear and our experience is very, very clear that neighborhoods are made more safe when neighborhoods coalesce, get to know each other, become self-sufficient, self-reliant, and that will beat any time the number of armed guards that are in that neighborhood.

So anyway, that’s a big part of that in terms of what has to happen. And so I just want to say our metric for effectiveness for our neighborhood police officers, which was our entire Patrol Division, they all were assigned neighborhoods, was the metric for effectiveness was you are no longer needed. And so we had to train our police officers to work with a community or the neighborhood where they became, initially, they’re part of it, they’re working with it, they’re helping galvanize, they’re helping bring more people in, they’re facilitating discussions.

Sometimes we’d bring people in from other parts of government or some other nonprofits to help, so we had a team of people. But the police officers were always there 24-7. And then we would eventually get to this point where the police did less and less and less as the neighborhood did more and more and more, where we reached a different kind of equilibrium where there was a self-reliance and self-sufficiency.

And guess what? I can count on many neighborhoods where we went from 200 to 250 calls per month in a neighborhood down to less than five. Guess what?

We weren’t needed anymore because we were able to get to that point. And then the neighborhood became safe, and it minimized our calls for service. And when we could minimize our calls for service, we minimized the overwhelming nature of the work we were doing.

Or we could work with other neighborhoods that were needed help and assistance because we no longer were in that neighborhood. So that’s the short version of all that.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (35:21 – 36:20)
You also had stories to tell about social bonding. Anyone who’s gone through a natural disaster understands what happens to a neighborhood. You become your closest friends, become your neighbors.

But how do we do that proactively? Thinking about the future, thinking about how we create safety and well-being in communities. And Kristen, I know you’re working on some projects with police officers.

So what is a proactive way to go in and say, before we are unsafe, before we have a disaster, before all these things happen, how can we start to think about how to incorporate the police as a trusted guide, resource, mentor, all of that around community safety?

[Kristin Daley] (36:22 – 37:58)
So every conversation that we have around this, I feel like I’m a bit of a broken record. But it starts with communication. It starts with extending that invitation to have an interaction, a collaboration, empowering community members to see from different perspectives, making sure that the police are coming at all of this from a place of transparency and expanding outward rather than keeping information tight and internal.

I think a big part of it is community members understanding that the police are inviting them into sort of a shared vision for public safety and wanting to really hear what they need, what they know to be true in their communities. And as Mike said, what they can offer, what are their gifts, how can they contribute to this shared approach? So all of that plays a big role.

I think, you know, at New Blue and at Project PACT, we tend to see this as a very collaborative process. So New Blue fellows literally invite community organizations and community members to collaborate with them on a project that impacts the agency, that impacts the community, and that creates something that amplifies what’s working well and addresses the things that are not working for the community. And I think that’s important to place the power in the hands of the community members and say, you’re a part of this.

We’re not here to just, you know, implement. We want you to be our partner.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (37:58 – 38:10)
Yeah, and boy, we have to get the word out. One thing that Project PACT will be working on is the goodness that’s happening in communities as community and police come together.

[Mike Butler] (38:10 – 39:28)
So let me just say that I think every community in America wants to trust their police department. They want to trust their police department, which says to that police department that our platform is absolutely legitimate. And there may not be a more legitimate platform in all of municipal government anywhere than a police department, and that they can leverage that legitimate platform into doing the things that Kristen just spoke about in terms of creating that trust, creating that transparency, because people want that.

They want to trust their police officers. They want to trust their police department. And so it’s not that they don’t want to.

They may have some history where it didn’t work, but they don’t like that history any more than a police department does. And they want something different. They want that sense of relationship they have.

They want to get to know the police officers. They want to say, hey, you know, they’ll start doing things for police officers and being and saying, you know, they’ll get to know their kids too sometimes. I mean, it’s amazing the things that can happen over time in terms of when those relationships begin to flourish.

That’s when neighborhoods become safer.

[Kristin Daley] (39:29 – 39:54)
Yeah. And what you were saying earlier, Mike, about how we’ve gotten away from officers getting out of their cars and walking around the neighborhood and having those interactions. You know, a lot of the officers that I work with do want to get back to that.

And their point of view is that community policing should not be a unit within the department. Every police officer should be a community police officer. Well said.

Wow. Yes.

[Mike Butler] (39:55 – 42:12)
Well, you know, and that’s what gets into the culture. Because sometimes community policing is considered a program inside a police department. It’s not a way of life.

It’s not part of the overall philosophical culture. It’s not philosophically integrated into all the management systems. And then, well, I’m the guy that goes out and makes the arrest.

I do the hooking and booking. Or I’m the person that goes out and just talks to them. And they’re typically kind of relegated to smaller units within the police department.

But you’re exactly right, Kristen. That philosophy has to permeate throughout every person’s mind and their interactions within a police department. Because all it takes is one police officer to go out and say, well, you talked to the community policing program.

I’m not that. I’m out here and I don’t talk to people. Or whatever they’re going to say in terms of kind of the aloofness sometimes that we see in police officers based in some cynicism that’s been long there.

And so that is something that we’ve talked about before in terms of that idealism when people become police officers, wanting to make a difference, wanting to help how police chiefs and cultures can help not only identify that as a form of social capital, that idealism as a form of social capital, but how to preserve and sustain it and then expand it throughout a police officer’s career. And so they know police officers, I’ve talked to many senior police officers who have said, boy, I went through a period of five to 10 years of my career where I didn’t like anybody. Or I didn’t trust anybody.

Or I thought humanity was all screwed up. And and that shows that shows up in the job that shows up in their context. And they know that they get that.

And they didn’t want to be that way. But for for some reason, that’s how that that’s what happened. And that’s what we have to kind of help with in terms of preventing that and then expanding that idealism so that it’s with our police officers.

But it requires a different kind of culture. And that’s the kind of culture that eventually we’re going to have to move towards.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (42:13 – 42:16)
It requires that friendliness on the community side as well.

[Kristin Daley] (42:17 – 42:35)
And I think it also goes back to what Project PACT is intended to do, which is to take some things off of police officers plates and have that shared responsibility with the community so that officers aren’t so overwhelmed and don’t get to that place of, you know, I’ve just lost all hope and humanity.

[Mike Butler] (42:35 – 43:24)
Yeah. And and there are ways, by the way, there are specific steps police departments can take to get to that point and to transcend and shift that culture they have that sometimes has this where the wagons are circled or this impersonal, faceless kind of approach to what they’re doing. There are steps that police chiefs, police officials, mayors and city managers can take to ensure that that’s not happening.

And it’s interesting that every time we saw an incident in this country all the way back to August of 14, when Ferguson happened, how many times did we hear, we’re going to change the culture? Well, we never did that. All we did was apply Band-Aids.

And that’s why this podcast is called Beyond the Band-Aids.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (43:24 – 45:07)
OK, we’re going to take those steps. First step, if you’re listening, first step is go to our website, ProjectPACT.org, P-A-C-T dot org. And you can, if you’re a police department official, a city official, you can or just a concerned citizen that, you know, we need to do something.

You can have an initial consultation with Mike or Kristen. That’s free of charge. We can talk about, you know, some of the steps that that we have.

If you just want to know more, sign up. There is a brochure called Safety in Our Hands. It was written by Mike and Peter Block.

Peter Block is a national author that works with community, consults all around the nation. They worked for a year kind of talking this subject through. You can have that downloaded in your email immediately and then sign up for our newsletter.

But most important, we want you to subscribe to our podcast and give us feedback. If you’ve got a really, if you’re irritated about something with police, let us know what that is. Write down that question.

Don’t hold back. We’re going to take this conversation forward. We’re going to be open around some of the raw emotion that exists out there and how we can all work together, how we can start to expand the mind around how to create, again, the ultimate goal for both police and for citizens within a community.

You know, the last thing to have a thriving, healthy community.

[Mike Butler] (45:07 – 45:31)
I also want to make that invitation very clear for any citizen that wants to know how can they how can they have this kind of relationship with their police department? I hear, I’ve heard quite a bit, we call, no one comes, or it’s we don’t, they did, but they didn’t contact us. What can we do to have a relationship with our police department?

Happy to help with that as well. So.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (45:32 – 45:41)
All right. So we hope you’ll keep listening. We’ve got some real exciting topics coming up and we thank you for tuning in to Beyond the Band-Aids.

[narrator] (45:41 – 46:34)
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 at projectpact.org and follow us on social media. We’d love to hear your thoughts and ideas, so feel free to reach out.

Pioneered by Law Enforcement Action Partnership, New Blue, and the School of Statesmanship, Stewardship, and Service, Project PACT is the culmination of three leading organizations committed to enhancing community well-being and policing integrity. Until next time, keep moving forward and stay engaged. Together, we can create a safer, more connected future.