Seeing Through the Lens of Goodness

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] (1:00 – 1:40)
Welcome back to Project PACT’s Beyond the Band-Aids. We’re here today. This is an exciting topic.

We’re going to dig into the lens of goodness. Now, a lot of people may not understand what that means, but hang with us for this time. And I know that you’re going to love where we get to in terms of police and community working together.

So I’m Carol Engle Enright. I’m a human science researcher professor that worked in professional development for years, and I’m going to go around. And Kristen, would you introduce yourself?

[Kristin Daley] (1:41 – 2:00)
Sure. Hi, I’m Kristen Daly. I am the executive director of an organization called New Blue, which is a fellowship program for forward-thinking police officers.

And I’ve spent 17 years in police policy and training. And I’m also a victim advocate and crisis counselor for sexual assaults.

[Mike Butler] (2:00 – 2:27)
And I’m going to add right off the bat that Kristen and I are both board members on the Law Enforcement Action Partnership. I am a former public safety chief in the city of Longmont, Colorado, about 100,000 people I know who were assaulted by police and fire. Also co-founder of the School of Statesmanship, Stewardship and Service, and very excited to be part of Beyond the Band-Aids.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (2:28 – 5:26)
Okay. And I was counting up years of experience, because we talk about experiential wisdom, with our School of Statesmanship. Mike and I founded that, and we used that curriculum for our Project PACT to train professionals, both on the community and the police side.

And I came up with, I think, Mike, you’ve been in law enforcement for almost 50 years, in terms of- 46, officially, but also then working on several boards, including restorative practices. Kristen has been in the field for 20, can I say 20 years? Almost 20 years, yeah.

Almost 20 years. And I’ve been in professional development and leadership training for 25 years. So I just want to say this is a century of experiencing the life of how do you move forward?

How do you help somebody become a better person? How do we work with community? How do we develop all of human goodness as it is?

So that’s what we’re working on today. We’re going to talk about how you see, through the lens of goodness, what is happening. Now, I want to preface this.

I come from a design background. I was an early academic in design thinking. People didn’t like that.

They wanted critical problem solving. Let’s identify the problems, let’s create solutions to solve the problems. And design thinking says, here’s what we have to work with, and we’re going to create something that doesn’t exist yet.

Very different way to look at it. So you tell me, listener, as you’re listening to our goodness talk, would you rather have somebody always fixing the problems that we’ve already gone through? Or would you rather have people working together to create something that’s better than what we have now, that doesn’t exist yet?

So on that framework, we’re going to talk about the lens of goodness and how we can see that through policing and community relationships. And Mike, you built your entire department in Longmont based on the lens of goodness. That’s where you started.

It wasn’t that way when you came to this town. And I’m a community leader in this town, so I can back that up. I saw the change as it happened, the transformation.

And Mike, I just want you to talk a little bit about how you came up with a framework, a worldview of seeing goodness versus what we were dealing with, especially in the age of modernity of problem solving.

[Mike Butler] (5:26 – 11:57)
Yeah, thanks, Carol. Great question. And so it’s kind of a lifelong process for me.

And I saw a lot of police departments before I became a chief try to figure out how to fix their issues. And many of them kind of stayed in autopilot, if you will, in terms of how they were responding to things, same slogans, same rituals, same symbols, so to speak. And basically, the problems didn’t necessarily go away.

And there was always a negative cup is half empty kind of approach to seeing things as a problem. Now, we had a previous podcast where we talked about, do we see our police departments and communities as problems to be solved? Or would you see them as possibilities?

And therein lies some of that answer for that question. We talked about that. But I also began to see that not only myself, but other people really responded to, you know, other other saying to them, hey, I recognize your gifts, I recognize your talents, I recognize your expertise and your resources.

And and also from raising five daughters, that my daughters more responded more to that sense of, here’s what’s good about you. Here’s what’s right about you. Here’s what I’d love to see more of.

Here’s what I’d love to see expanded. And here’s what seems to make a difference. Here’s the difference you made in my life, as what you did in the last 15 minutes or in the last six months.

And that sense of, of seeing the cup is half full, seems to have a lot more sustainability in terms of what would happen in the future as well. And so that’s kind of where I came from. And, and being wanted to be treated that way, by the way, too.

If I had a boss who came up to me and said, Mike, you’re just a problem to be solved, and treated me that way. The conversation was different, different people. My boss saw me as kind of air prone.

And I got this feeling in a sense that there was something wrong with me that I did need to be fixed, that I was air prone, limited and weak, almost in terms of the nature of the conversation that a boss or supervisor would have for me. But when I every now and then rarely found a boss in policing who would say, Hey, Mike, I really love the talent you have. And I would really love to see it utilized in a way that could be of greater value to our organization to our community.

That was something that just kind of lit something up inside of me. And something that I really responded positively to. And so I was just kind of a recognition that that cup is half full and hopeful approach just seemed to kind of be more of a spark and had more sustainability attached to it than saying, Hey, you’re a problem to be solved.

And you’re you’re, yeah. And so we’re gonna figure out how to fix you, which is the way a lot of patriarchal like leadership plays out. And so when someone began to see me as a potential partner, when the level level, when the field was level and seemed to be full of opportunities for my voice to be heard, my and realizing my thoughts mattered, that generated something more inside of me that said, I want to bring all of that I am into this workplace, and I want to bring something more into the community.

And so and I began to see also how legislation for the community, just because we legislated something didn’t mean we fixed anything. Just because we stiffened the penalty didn’t mean that we solved any problem. Just because we made arrest over and over and over again.

And just because we issued a lot of tickets didn’t mean that people stopped being victimized by crimes. But when we began to use alternatives, and options to arrest and tickets that people began to see that, you know what, I am valued, I am recognized, we began to see differences, we began to see differences in recidivism rates dramatically, people stopped repeating crimes. And we began to see differences in terms of how victims healed in terms of what they believed that they had to offer.

And then we began to see differences in our community, who began to see that, you know what, I can have influence on outcomes. My voice does count, my thoughts do matter. And so it doesn’t mean that we don’t, by the way, just because we’re talking goodness and gifts in this particular podcast, that doesn’t mean that we don’t solve problems.

That doesn’t mean that we don’t enforce laws. That doesn’t mean that at all. We’ve talked about that in previous podcasts.

But there’s a lean here, an L-E-A-N lean that says, we’re going to look at things differently. And by the way, that’s where we’re coming from with Project PACT. As we as we work with organizations and or with police chiefs, mayors and city managers, we’re going to come at it from the perspective of what are your gifts?

What are your talents? What are your resources? What do you have to offer?

What do you want to see more of? What do you want to see expanded? What do you want to see something you want to see?

And so that’s the approach we’re going to be taking. And as we’ve talked about before, we’re going to come at it from a perspective of seeing through the lens of what’s good. And so knowing, and this is what happened with my children and the people that I worked with over the years, I saw a lot of things get crowded out as the goodness within them grew, as their sense of who they’re feeling valued and them feeling recognized expanded, that that almost automatically kind of crowded out some of the things that my kids that I was hoping would get crowded out in terms of behaviors or kind of thoughts that I didn’t want to, that seemed to be detracting from them as human beings, or from the organization actually detracted from their capacity to perform partnerships with the community. And so anyway, that’s, those are my initial thoughts.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (11:57 – 12:59)
Okay, I want to get to Kristen, because Kristen, you you’ve worked. So when people think about crime, when they think about violence, when they think about people taking advantage of other people, or taking advantage of property, that doesn’t feel good, right? And yet you’ve worked, you’ve worked around sexual violence, sexual assault, trauma care with officers.

And now you’re in this new, this new forward thinking fellowship organization. So how do how do you, how do you see this goodness, this lens, this paradigm of goodness starting to take over? I know we’re talking, we’re talking before any of this is showing up all over the place.

We’re talking. We’re still out in a world that identifies the problems that says, here’s what you have to fix. But how have you seen it in your work over the years?

[Kristin Daley] (13:00 – 15:25)
I think it can be a challenge initially on the part of the community and the police to focus on that goodness and on what’s working well. It’s a real shift in perspective, especially when people are hurting or struggling or feeling afraid. I want to, first of all, acknowledge the validity of those feelings really explicitly.

And I think we all certainly acknowledge that. But at the same time, when we get laser focused on what isn’t working without thinking about the things that are working or that could be expanded, we’re kind of doing ourselves and our community a disservice because it’s going to be harder for things to change if we’re so focused on the problem that we aren’t looking toward building new organizations, new methods, new practices. So I would say we need to acknowledge the challenges, recognize that they’re not insurmountable, and then start looking for what’s working, what we can expand, what we can do better.

And it’s a lot more efficient and effective to build solutions from the seeds of goodness that already exist, build them up, and help them grow. And so to me, goodness really begins with patience and compassion and being open, being willing to listen, willing to engage with perspectives that might be different from your own, and ultimately standing up for what’s right, working to protect people’s well-being and their safety. And, you know, for me, I think we hear a lot about empathy, and empathy is a really beautiful thing.

And it’s certainly become a bit of a buzzword, and it’s maybe not always the perfect word to use when we’re thinking about police community relations. For me, compassion is a more impactful word because with empathy, we’re expected to understand what another person is going through. And to me, you don’t necessarily have to understand or empathize with what someone is dealing with in order to treat them with patience and kindness and dignity.

You know, you may be completely misaligned with someone’s mindset or their circumstances in life, but if you’re a public servant, or really if you’re a human being who wants to connect with other human beings, your goal should be to still treat that person with respect and support them in every way you can. Okay, beautiful.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (15:25 – 17:06)
I think it gets down to, I made some notes before, it gets down to people, not policy, not programs, but people, the interrelationships of people. And maybe that’s our biggest issue, our biggest work is how we reunite. I think in the past, I was looking through the three stages of policing, that there was a political era in the 1840s.

And that was really working with government to achieve what government needed in this country. And then a reform area in the 1930s, which was a reaction to the political era, where more social, more political. And now in the 1980s, it said we’re moving into this community era, where police are connecting with neighborhoods, where they’re looking at specific, you know, how do I create a relationship?

So I’m going to go to both of you in exploring, you know, your history in getting goodness and seeing goodness present in people, in organizations, in communities, in neighborhoods. How did you identify champions that also would come along? I think people think about change, and it’s like, I’d like for things to change, but I’m just me, you know?

But how do you find other people that can believe in goodness? Mike, I’m gonna have you go first. What did you see in your department as you started to integrate?

[Mike Butler] (17:06 – 22:46)
Actually, it came down to as much of my mindset as it did anybody else’s. Someone might come in and be very resistant, or so I might talk to someone who might seem initially very resistant, be kind of a very cynical, or maybe a victim felt helpless, or even a bystander. We’re going to talk more about how to deal with levels and kinds of resistance.

But in the conversation, if I stayed with them and kind of confirmed their victimization, or confirmed their cynicism, or confirmed their wanting more data before they could feel like they wanted proof that it worked somewhere else before we would try it here, I would acknowledge that and say, yeah, I get that, and I understand that, and I have those feelings and thoughts as well. But on the other hand, saying, what works for you? What’s worked for you?

And talk a little bit more about how to kind of move that along in terms of moving out of that sense of resistance. I did that often by making invitations to people and letting people know that we needed their gifts. Sometimes people have to think about that.

I’ll go back to what Kirsten said. Yeah, there is an acknowledgement initially. This almost seems counterintuitive, but it isn’t, in terms of saying, we’re not going to operate from the sense of, here’s what’s wrong, or here’s the problem that needs to be solved.

We’re going to operate from the perspective of, here’s what works, and here’s what we want to see expanded. That’s a different model for people. But in terms of finding champions, I found champions in people who initially were resistive.

Initially, were even sabotaging and undermining things, and just hung in there with patience and kept on making an invitation. But there were also folks who you could almost tell immediately were willing to say, I am so happy that we’re willing to figure out another way of doing business, because we have been stale. We have been stagnant.

There hasn’t been change. We keep on doing the same things over and over again, expecting a different result, and that hasn’t happened. There are hungry people.

There are people that are hungry for that wanting to make a difference and wanting something different with how we were going to move forward, and very much interested in creating a different kind of future, a distinct that had distinction between what’s happening now and what was happening in the past. They stuck out. There’s no question.

They stuck out. The question became, how do you not only identify them, but how do you get their voice to mean more? How do you get their sense of what they want to see as well in terms of moving forward and creating a new future to play out?

We did a lot of that in terms of identifying those folks who were what we’ll call champions, people who were immediately interested in being engaged and moving forward and creating a new future. Bringing them in, having them having conversations amongst themselves, feeling that support, in many cases, in many times, not even knowing that other people were feeling that, thinking that they were the only voice that did feel that. That was very supportive, trying to be very supportive of them.

Sometimes, for instance, in neighborhoods, finding people who we would call connectors, people who looked at others and saw others as gift-centered and saw the cup as half full. They were everywhere in our community. It’s just that they didn’t know that their voice counted and their thoughts mattered.

We began to recognize them as people who could be very useful in terms of building neighborhoods or building something in a community that didn’t exist before. They were quite charged, quite happy. But they stick out.

Those kinds of folks stick out because they are gift-centered people. They do see the cup is half full. They do see possibilities.

They smile a lot, too, by the way. Their smile precedes them and you know right away. We did that.

You had to be open to it, but a lot of it was my own mindset. A lot of it was my mindset, especially with people who were resistive, who saw themselves and wore the badge of honor of a cynic. Interestingly enough, would wear the badge of honor as a victim.

I’m helpless. Or wear the badge of honor of being a bystander. I need proof.

I need data. I need statistics to show that something’s going to work before I’m going to get involved with it. Those things happen quite a bit.

Again, the power of invitation, which we’re going to talk about in a future podcast around what an invitation looks like for people, especially the resisting folks, I think we’ll see the usefulness and power of the invitation. I’ll leave it at that for now.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (22:46 – 23:08)
The great inviter, Mike Butler. Kristen, how did you see the goodness in people, especially with New Blue and your fellowship? I know they all come in.

They’re selected for your fellowship and they come in hoping to affect positive change and create something great in their communities.

[Kristin Daley] (23:08 – 25:30)
How do you identify that? I agree with Mike. Some people just jump right out at you.

They’re easy to identify. They’re the ones that are immediately willing to stand up and they do just kind of radiate this goodness. Those people are in a great position to extend the invitation to other people because most of us have something really valuable to contribute to this process.

Some people need to be encouraged, be invited, be open and curious to exploring other people’s gifts. With the fellowship, I think most of the people that we speak with initially come into it with the right mindset. They are there to amplify the good in their communities.

They’re there to be of service and to help their communities grow and expand and focus on well-being. I think in that process, it tends to be fairly easy to identify those people. They jump out.

They are willing to take that step to apply to the program and say, I want to be a person who creates change and who does good things and who works toward the betterment of our entire community. I think a lot of it is being a person who is not satisfied with just sticking with the status quo. Some people don’t have anything to lose by letting things just stay the way they are and by just letting the system keep running how it’s running.

Other people are willing to say, I want things to be even better. I want to really see my community healthy and happy and safe and well. I think there are a lot of people out there that feel that way.

What we’re doing with Project PACT and what New Blue is doing, what LEAP is doing, is building this network of people who believe in the goodness in people and in the goodness of police to be public servants. Building that network is a big step in creating that goodness.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (25:31 – 28:26)
I want to get into shifting a culture. Just a really easy, let’s just give the one, two, three step here. Here’s all you have to do.

I come from a background of fashion and it’s really interesting as you look over the history of how custom, how tradition gets embodied. I mean, everything new becomes then. I pulled up a quote that this morning about the slavery to tradition and how that affects our evolving, our progress.

The slavery to tradition provides stability and is nostalgic. It’s sentimental. There’s no profession that has more tradition maybe than police and military when you think about it.

But it stifles creative thinking, creative power, creative to move forward to something better. Thinking about the culture, I just want to go to what George Peel, Sir Robert Peel, sorry, the goal, we have one of his core ideas. The goal is preventing crime, not catching criminals.

If the police stop crime before it happens, we don’t have to punish citizens or suppress their rights. An effective police department doesn’t have high arrest stats. Its community has low crime rates.

Now, as a community member, as I read that, I went, how often do we ever hear about when crime is prevented? And Mike, I know you’ve done so many different, so many different, you’ve put together so many things in your department that helped people who are really struggling, who would have or were criminals, how they could then choose into something different. Kristen, as you were talking about New Blue, I thought, you know, doesn’t everybody want to have value and create something that’s wonderful in their life?

But aren’t we all a little afraid to take that next step? And so, Mike, can you talk about, as you looked at these crime, as you looked at your own community, and you looked at neighborhoods, and you figured out ways to do your business differently, new, innovative, with community, talk about how that resulted in bringing more goodness, more people involved, more engagement, and maybe just give an example on that.

[Mike Butler] (28:27 – 35:53)
So, yeah, let me just start off maybe with an example of a neighborhood that I’m thinking about. Not unlike every other community of 100,000 to 10 million people, every community has neighborhoods that others will consider or people in the neighborhood will consider unsafe. Or just, you know, there’s just not a lot of what we refer to as social capital or people who know each other.

And often, when I think of a particular neighborhood that was drug-ridden, that was gang infested, lots of disorder, lots of car break-ins, lots of break-ins to different apartment units and houses in that neighborhood, that their hope was that the police could come in initially, and over a period of time, their hope was that the police would come in and solve all these things for them. And so, in their minds, and in the minds of the police officers at that time, it was like, well, the more armed guards we have in that neighborhood, the safer that neighborhood will be. Well, we came at it from a different perspective.

We came at it from the perspective of this neighborhood didn’t, people in the neighborhood didn’t know each other. They were very suspicious of each other. They didn’t connect with each other.

They were kind of isolated, that kind of. They were isolated and disconnected from each other. And so, yeah, we could bring in a lot of armed guards and maybe temporarily make something go away as we were there.

But as every police department, everybody from a police department watching this knows, that’s not something you can keep up. That’s just something that’s temporary. And so, what could we do to help that neighborhood become safe?

So, we began to galvanize that neighborhood. We worked with the apartment owners and managers in that neighborhood. We worked with the residents and tenants of apartments in that neighborhood.

We worked with people we called connectors in that neighborhood. And we began to have gatherings and conversations around what they wanted to see their neighborhood look like, feel like, be like, in terms of what is it they wanted, not what it is the police wanted and how we were going to come in and just clean, quote, the quote is, we’re going to go in and clean up the neighborhood. Or often for decades, the quote was, weed, we’re going to weed the neighborhood.

And it was kind of this weed and seed program, if you will. And we were going to pick the weeds and everybody else. So, we just went in and began, we became inviters.

We became conveners. We became facilitators. We became harmonizers, if you will, of people in that neighborhood, lots of people.

It turned into dozens, in some cases, almost a hundred people showing up at meetings and conversations and gatherings. And I’m going to make a long story here real short, but we ended up getting people to get to know each other, get to care about each other, understood each other, became less suspicious of each other, began to see what the gifts of other neighbors were as people, because we had conversations about what can you offer, what offerings do you bring in order to, you know, bring about the picture that you described that you want your neighborhood to feel like, look like, and be like. And so, once those conversations began to really form and take place, we didn’t necessarily need to be there as much. And so, they began to form different arrangements and bring about, well, let’s have picnics, let’s have gatherings, let’s have our own, let’s put a playground out there, let’s get the apartment complex to put a playground, let’s have people who are going to kind of walk certain parts of the neighborhood at certain times of the day, let’s just be together.

And so, that happened over and over again in our community. And so, what we took was, we said, here’s what’s good, here’s what’s good, the people were good. Inherently, there was a lot of things going on that were good within the people that were there.

They just didn’t know that. And when we began to integrate and have conversations, that goodness began to grow. It began to integrate, began to unify, began to kind of harmonize in a way that that whole became, the whole of that neighborhood became larger than the sum of the individual people.

And over time, it went from like 150 to 200 calls in a month for Belmont police to less than five. And that took a period of around six to eight months, I recall, for that particular neighborhood. And what the issues they were talking about and upset about with us, the police, disappeared, eventually just disappeared.

And so, in essence, the social capital kicked in. And what was good there began to expand and began to crowd out the things that weren’t good. And by the way, we didn’t see displacement of that.

We didn’t see displacement in surrounding neighborhoods. These things just disappeared. And we began to think that the people that were involved in some of this activity actually began to see that they wanted to be part of this as well.

And it wasn’t just that they could go somewhere else and create havoc. They began to see how they could kind of rethink who they were and kind of reset who they were so that they were part of this. It became very attractive.

And we utilized that process. And I’m going through this very quickly. We utilized this process probably over 40 to 50 different neighborhoods in a period of about three or four years in our community that shifted dramatically.

The calls for service that police department went on and how neighborhoods began to see themselves to the point where we weren’t sure. We were pretty confident that there were very few neighborhoods in Longmont that had that kind of those kinds of issues anymore. And it’s not that we didn’t arrest anybody.

And it’s not that we didn’t ticket anybody, because there were some people who were very resistant to some of this behavior and to some of this kind of movement forward. But that was, you know, it was through a process of having these conversations, recognizing what was good, integrating and unifying that in something that the people in the neighborhood could bring about and sustain. And so, as you heard me say before, the Longmont Police Department’s metric for effectiveness was we’re no longer needed.

And so, the calls went from 150 to 200 to fewer than 10, five sometimes calls for service. And so, because as that neighborhood went from a very scary, unsafe neighborhood to a very safe and actually joyful neighborhood in terms of what was going on. So, that example, I think, hopefully answers some of that question you asked.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (35:53 – 35:54)
Rarely makes the news.

[Mike Butler] (35:55 – 36:04)
That didn’t make the news. It really didn’t. And that was fine.

No one really cared. But on the other hand, it was something that made that neighborhood safer.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (36:04 – 36:31)
We are going to try to change that with Project PACT. So, all you listeners, if you see some of this goodness take place, this transformation take place in your own community, and I will say that that certainly shifted the culture. It’s kind of gone along with some of the things I’m hearing in terms of it took time.

It took being with the people, listening to what they were saying, listening to how they were feeling, letting them create a shared vision.

[Mike Butler] (36:32 – 36:49)
Initial meetings were not productive. People kind of looked across the table from each other with arms folded wondering, what am I doing here? What are you doing here?

But on the other hand, we all know how those things can evolve over time.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (36:49 – 36:53)
And where’s the program or where are the Band-Aids? Aren’t you passing out Band-Aids?

[Mike Butler] (36:53 – 37:13)
How come the cops aren’t doing this? I pay your salary. That’s your job, not my job to keep my neighborhood safe.

It’s your job. We had to kind of overcome that patriarchal-like feel of them feeling helpless, them feeling a sense of someone else had to do it for them. And all those things are alive and well, all those dynamics, and everyone knows what we’re talking about here.

We’re alive and well.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (37:13 – 37:27)
Yeah, beautiful. Okay, Kristen, I know you’ve got some examples as well with some of your communities you’re working with. Tell us about someplace where that culture just, you know, it took its time, but you were able to affect change.

[Kristin Daley] (37:28 – 40:29)
Yeah, so I think what I’m hearing from everything that Mike just said was, you need to start from a place of curiosity and build human connection. And I think, you know, I’ve seen many, many examples of that, especially through the officers that work within New Blue. One that I can think of that stands out to me in particular was recent.

It was at our June convening for kicking off our current fellowship. And at the end of the day, we had spent a full day exploring police community trust with the officers who were in attendance, the fellows, our alumni, and community members from Chicago as well. And at the end of the day, we did a session called Designing the Future of Policing, where people broke out into smaller groups that were a mix of, you know, practitioners and community members, police officers.

And they were to discuss these bigger questions around what you see in your community, what are your goals? How can we make this a system that works for everyone? And one particular group had an officer from Massachusetts, a police lieutenant, who Mike and I actually have worked with on the board of LEAP, and he is a New Blue fellow this year as well, and a community member who works at a restorative justice program in the Chicago area.

And this community member went into the exercise feeling like, I’m not going to have anything in common with these police officers. We’re not going to see eye to eye. We won’t have the same goals.

Like very, I just know our values are going to be opposing here. And when they started talking, and he was listening to what this officer had to say, and they started to engage and connect and get curious about each other’s perspectives, he said, wow, we actually have a lot in common. I really respect what he is trying to do for his community and the efforts that he’s made to see the good in people and to try to keep people safe and keep them in a place of well-being.

We actually have a lot of the same values and goals. And he expressed that a bit that day, and then actually joined one of our virtual sessions about maybe a few weeks, a month later, and said it again. He was like, you know, I just want to say that when I was at this conference, I got something out of it that I never expected to.

I saw eye to eye with a police officer and realized that we really share a lot of the same values and a lot of the same goals for our community. And that has really changed my perspective. And that was such a powerful example to me of being curious, being open, human connection, and finding the good in each other, and then working toward a goal.

Right.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (40:30 – 41:24)
Well, for sure. You know, there is, if we could all just learn to kind of drop our defenses and our biases and our prejudices. But it’s hard.

Some of the things you’ve brought up were suspicious. I heard suspicious from Mike. We just put together our fostering respect class for SOSUS that will be part of the curriculum for PACT.

And, you know, suspicion leads to hostility. And because of that isolation, but curiosity does lead to connection. So on the negative side, if you’re suspicious, you’re probably going to evade getting to know somebody.

On the positive side, if you can just be curious and ask that next question, ask a powerful question, find your points of commonness.

[Mike Butler] (41:24 – 43:23)
Yeah. One of the things I want to make real clear about this is the police can help along those lines because a lot of suspicion comes from maybe invalidated fear or fears that aren’t necessarily real or can be real. But on the other hand, police officers can help with their presence initially.

People get through a lot of that. And because there’s a lot of fear based suspicion that happens over time. And so I don’t want to underestimate the value of the role of police officers or police departments.

It’s just that in essence, you’re starting this process in terms of kind of surfacing and activating and maybe even coordinating all that’s good in the social capital. But in essence, you’re not going to be there forever. And if you think you’re going to be there forever, you’re probably have the wrong mindset in terms of being able to kind of help people build that reliance, that self-sufficiency, that sense that I can, I don’t have to be dependent on the police.

I can be dependent on myself. I can get beyond my own fears, my own suspicion and connect and relate to other people in ways that I didn’t think I could before. But initially, I just want to make it real clear that the police, almost every circumstance that I was associated with, had initially be there just to get that started, especially if it was crisis based or crime based or disorder based or people were just very unsafe in their neighborhoods, that there was something that the police brought in terms of that sense of safety initially.

But I think people get that evolutionary process from, hey, I’m here to help people feel safe to now that I know you can help yourselves feel that sense of safety too. And so I don’t necessarily have to be here as much as I was.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (43:23 – 43:58)
Boy, that’s a great point to make that bringing some authority, some structure, some level of security and protection for people to gather. Wow, what a beautiful role for policing to gain. And with that, I kind of want to go into this goodness again.

Mike, I want you to share an example where the community came in with their goodness into your department. What have you seen when that happens?

[Mike Butler] (44:00 – 49:38)
So let me just talk about, I’ve mentioned his name before, it’s Dan Benavidez. And Dan got his, he found his voice when a police officer a few decades ago shot and killed two Hispanic boys in our community. And we have a fairly large percentage of people in our community who recognize or self-identify as Latino or Hispanic and up to maybe 35%.

And so we have a fairly diverse community and Dan was Latino. And so he found his voice and was very much an activist. So at one point, I wanted to hear Dan speak.

This was after I became the public safety chief in our community. And I’d heard some things about Dan. And so I went and listened to him talk.

And so in essence, oftentimes when we brought in diversity instructors or implicit bias instructors, or people that want to help us kind of understand cultures, it was like the instructor got up in front of the room, basically said, here’s what’s going on for you. You’re kind of a problem. You have problems within you and I’m here to kind of fix you.

That was in essence, how things worked. Dan did it differently. And what Dan did was he stood up in front of a group of around 400 people in the room.

It wasn’t just police. There were a lot of people from the private sector here in the room. And he said, you all have gifts.

And here are how your gifts can make a difference in our community. And then he began to talk about what his community’s needs were. His community was the Latino and Hispanic community.

And he says, here are all the gifts you have to offer. And immediately disarmed people in the room. And so I want to kind of quickly shift to what happened in public safety as he basically stood in front of hundreds of people in Longmont Public Safety and said the same thing.

Now people knew Dan, our police officers knew Dan as an activist. And he didn’t have a lot of trust and he was very vocal about his lack of trust in our police. And here he was in front of them.

And here’s Dan thinking, I’m in front of a bunch of police officers who carry guns. And I’ve said these things and I don’t know if I can trust them. And so it started off that way.

But Dan started off his presentation by saying, I want you to know that I believe each of you have gifts and talents and resources and expertise to offer my community. I don’t come in here seeing you as someone who needs to be fixed and someone who can’t make these offerings. I see you as the opposite of that.

Immediately change the energy in that room. Because I’ve been in that room where we’ve brought in these other implicit bias or diversity instructors who basically stood up in front of the room and basically said, your problem to be solved and I’m here to fix you. And immediately people would kind of sit back in their chairs, fold their arms, roll their eyes, and stop listening.

Not this time. This changed our relationship with the Lamont Hispanic and Latino community as dramatically as I’d seen anything when Dan stood up there and said that. And so he said, you can be mentors, you can help families, you can help young people in school, you can be baseball coaches in our community.

He had a litany of ideas that police officers, and they didn’t sit back in their seats, they sat up on the edge of their seats. And the communication and the trust and the interaction was palpable. And the friendship and trust grew over that full day of training.

He did it like seven times in order to reach all the shifts within the 24-7 operation. And each and every time, because I attended all of them, that’s what happened. And the trust and the friendship that happened between Dan and our police officers just grew dramatically.

You talk about saying, here’s what’s good. Here’s what’s good about you. You can take your goodness that you have and make it work in our community.

We had lots of people sign up, become volunteers, and it was amazing how many people said, I want to be a mentor. I want to help somebody. And, you know, we had a significant gang issue in our community at the time, and that was part of helping quell and minimize a lot of the gang issue that we had as well, because our police officers began to see our Latino community differently.

And then the Latino community began to see our police officers differently, because we came at it from the perspective of, they have gifts, we have gifts, how can we merge those gifts and create something that didn’t exist before, was phenomenal. It just stunningly changed things in terms of what occurred, not only within our police department, but between our police department and our community, because Dan came in and said, you have gifts to offer. You have goodness that you can leverage that can make a big difference in our community.

And so that’s the short version of that story, but there you have it.

[Kristin Daley] (49:38 – 49:41)
Wow. That’s a game changer completely.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (49:42 – 51:16)
And that’s what we’re after. That’s what this project is all about, bringing police and community together, thinking about solutions, putting goodness as a powerful force. You know, enforcement is a powerful force.

I guess consent degrees from the Department of Justice are powerful forces, but starting right where you’re at, right with the citizens that you have, right with all the resources that are all within your community, your local community, that’s where we want you to start. And we’re happy to help. We have training, we have resource kits, we have free advising for your police department or your city management, wherever you’re at.

Just contact our website and or contact Mike or Kristen, K-R-I-S-T-I-N, at projectpack.org. Either one of them will return your email. And we’re excited about where this is going as the podcasts get out and we kind of move into a new way of thinking, a new way of looking at police and community together, a new way of public safety, a new way of creatively designing a better, safer, healthy community for you.

So thank you for listening to Beyond the Band-Aids today, and we’ll be back next week with a wonderful topic.

[narrator] (51:18 – 52:09)
Thank you for tuning in to Beyond the Band-Aids with Project PACT. We hope today’s episode has inspired you to think differently about public service and community engagement. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate, and leave a review.

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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.