When Community and Police Co-Create Culture

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

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Connect with the co-hosts of Beyond the Bandaids:

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

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

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

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

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[Narrator] (0:02 – 0:18)
Welcome to Beyond the Band-Aids with Project PACT, hosted by Dr. Carol Engle 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] (0:20 – 1:05)
Well, welcome back to Beyond the Band-Aids. We’re excited to have this episode. I’m Dr. Carol Engle Enright, and I’m here with Chief Mike Butler and Kristin Daly. Again, this is brought to you by the Law Enforcement Action Partnership, LEAP. Kristin and Mike are both board members, and a partnership with SOSUS, the School of Statesmanship, Stewardship, and Service, of which Mike and I are co-founders. And Kristin is with NewBlue, a forward-thinking police research and, well, Kristin, talk about NewBlue.

Sure. She’s the executive director.

[Kristin Daley] (1:06 – 1:18)
Yes. NewBlue is an incubator for police officers to collaborate directly with their communities and build capstone projects that change agency policy or practice in a way that builds community trust.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (1:18 – 2:45)
So for all of you out there who’ve been listening to us, and I hope you have started with part one, episode one, and we’re now up running into kind of the philosophy, the attitudes, and today we’re going to talk about the attributes of what it looks like when a community and a police department truly partner together. Project PAC, that’s what the name of our project is, Police and Community Together. Not one or the other, not one pointing the finger at the other, not one feeling divided or polarized from the other, but really creating healthy communities, an ecosystem of public safety together.

And this is part three of what we’ve been talking about in shifting culture. And Mike, you’re the best at talking about transcending culture, making a new culture. You did it in your own police department 26 years ago, 20, 30 years ago as you came in.

So this is not a new topic for you. This is something that your police officers understood right from the start. So let’s talk about what does it look like when you truly put in an initiative, or however you want to talk about it, of creating a culture that includes the community with the police department?

[Mike Butler] (2:46 – 6:07)
Yeah, sure. Thanks. And good morning, everybody, and welcome.

And Kristin earlier used the word, New Blue is an incubator, and it just kind of jogged something for me. I’m always incubating, and we’re all in an incubation mode whether we realize it or not. We’re never there at the end, so to speak.

But the other part I want to talk about, it’s not just a philosophy or a theory. There’s clear, distinct practices that are evident when a community and a police department are working in partnership. And as I said earlier, we’re working on all cylinders, and there’s this level playing field of the sense of, hey, we’re all responsible for our safety.

And it’s not when something goes wrong, well, let’s call the cops. The cops are responsible, the chief’s responsible, the police officers are responsible, or government’s responsible. This gets away from that kind of patriarchal thinking that says someone else is responsible for me, and someone else is responsible for my safety.

This is very much aligned with, I am responsible for my safety, and I am responsible for the experiences I have in my neighborhood and my community. And while there’s a role for police and there’s a role for government, don’t get me wrong on that. There is, and there will be for many, many more decades and centuries probably.

What Project PACT is about is shifting that patriarchy to a patriarchal relationship to one of really an authentic, true partnership, where there’s joint accountability. And that’s the purpose for this Beyond the Band-Aids, because most of what I hear even today, and I’ll just say today’s date is first part of April, 2025, I still hear that sense of, we’re responsible for everyone’s safety, from police officials and police experts, so to speak, and even government at all levels, that there’s this level of responsibility, there’s this level that I will take care of you, there’s this level that no one else is, you don’t really have to be responsible, just call us and we’ll take care of things. It’s still very much alive and well, that culture’s still very much alive and well. Well, we’re convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that safety and the sense of joint accountability and responsibility go hand in hand, and that there is that idea, an ideal, that we’re not really going to be safe until we choose to be accountable for our own safety.

And that comes in many, many different forms. And so today’s session is very much about what that looks like from a police department’s perspective, and from a community’s perspective, around what does that? This is the ideal, this is where we’re headed, this is what we want to be able to accomplish, and how do we know when we’ve gotten there, so to speak, and what are the practices, what are the conversations like, what are the actions of various people involved in keeping a community safe, whether it’s individual citizens, a collective neighborhood, or the police department?

So I’ll just start off with that.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (6:08 – 7:10)
Okay. Kristin, as you work with police officers in this kind of incubation, and last episode we talked about co-creating and creating a vision for what you want, a shared vision. And talk about how people come up with the idea, because I think we have to start from that visionary point of view.

Mike, you just spoke to that of what is it? What is it you’re after? Are you after…

I am always attuned to how we use language, harm reduction, crime reduction, you know, these reducing instead of this wellness, this health, this whole community- Adding to. Adding to what is good, yeah, and crowding out what doesn’t work. So talk about how your officers feel like they have some agency to create vision for their communities.

[Kristin Daley] (7:11 – 9:12)
Yeah. So I think when they come to us, they apply to the program and they go through an interview process where we determine, essentially we don’t expect them to come in with a set idea for a project. We want to determine that they have the right mindset, that they want to build community trust, that they’re deeply invested in their communities.

At that point, when we’ve admitted them, they go through a few foundational courses within the curriculum and we touch on some sort of pillar topics of justice system transformation. And at that point, they’re starting to think about who their community partner might be. So once they’ve chosen a community partner, and that can be someone from a local grassroots organization, someone they’ve worked with in the past, a social worker who’s done some work within the police department, it’s a partner of their choosing.

And then they start to talk together about what is working well, what the community sees as not being ideal, and what could they potentially work on together, taking into account the community member’s perspective and expertise and the police officer’s ability to create change within their agency. And once they land on kind of a broader category for their solution, they start to drill down on what is the issue, what is the root cause, and what will the solution ultimately look like. And I think it is really important to note that these officers are coming in with a mindset of, I want this project to build community trust, and I want it to be collaborative.

We are creating it 100% with the community member, and they are equal partners in this project. And I think that’s a really important tone to set, because the community member doesn’t always feel an equal partner in public safety. So that’s something that we want to establish really right off the bat.

Okay.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (9:12 – 10:43)
Let’s dig into the relationship that exists between community and police. And, you know, in the School of Statesmanship, we teach a course around respect, thinking about, you know, most people come into knowing each other, they tolerate each other. Now, if there’s curiosity and there’s discovery of who that person is, and I like to talk about it from an it relationship to a you relationship.

So right now we kind of look at our police departments as task oriented. They’re supposed to go around and catch people doing crimes. And they probably feel the same way about the public, right?

We’ve got enough to deal with, we’ve got enough paperwork, we’ve got enough bureaucracy, we’ve got enough. How do I form a relationship? Mike, you formed relationships, I meet your officers all the time that have worked with you in the past.

And as a chief, you couldn’t mandate to go out and develop relationships with the community. So how did you encourage and promote this sense of curiosity and discovery as officers would go into neighborhoods, groups, community organizations to start forming partnerships?

[Mike Butler] (10:43 – 17:18)
Sure. It was for sure a process because the vast majority of police departments in the police department I inherited and law mine operated from a very patriarchal perspective. In essence, you know, saying, maybe not saying it this way, but it kind of an unsaid way of being was that you’ll be better because we know better.

And changing that perspective from, well, we’ll all be better if we all contribute and participate, that process was a long process, frankly. And as I said before in previous episodes, that, you know, we had to start with our police and police department in terms of giving them this great model of what a partnership looked like. And that started with me at some level in terms of what does partnership look like when you’re talking about people are responsible for outcomes, everyone’s responsible, everyone’s jointly accountable for how things are going in the organization, this idea that there’s right to say no, this idea that people can express their reservations, their doubts, they can express also their sense of here’s how I think things should work or could work. We’re also, you know, the conversations had to shift so that the actions could follow those conversations. And you’re right, I chose to mandate as little as possible.

I chose to force as little as possible. I chose to not policize everything as little as possible. There’s somewhat of a kind of a throwback now to the whole accreditation process that’s nationwide and I understand that for some police departments, but I think we have to be careful with a kind of creating that kind of legislation, that internal legislation that wants to kind of bring about accountability instead of developing cultures of accountability in which people choose it.

It’s not legislated or policized, it’s not demanded, it’s not purchased or forced. So all of that had to happen. And so then once they began to see that their voice counted and their thoughts mattered, that they could express reservations or that they could come up with their own perspective of how things could get done, there was some tiptoeing with that.

And there were some people who jumped in the deep end with both feet and all on that continuum from both one end to the other. But eventually we reached that critical mass where people said, hey, this is who we are, this is how we do business. Our rituals, our symbols, our slogans all began to match that.

And in terms of how we, our thinking, our practices began to match that. And so over time, people began to see that this was their police department. And by the way, for a police department, this was their community as well.

And so we began the process that way with lots of conversations, how we had those conversations and talking about the idea of inviting people to be part of this, inviting dissent, inviting this perspective that we could each be responsible for coming up with our own sense of what’s possible, the sense of ownership, I’m responsible for what exists now and I’m responsible for the future that I want to create, the sense of commitment without condition. All those conversations began to happen.

They also happened through questions that we got good at asking. We began, got better at asking questions than just providing answers. And so there’s a lot of dynamics going on here that we’re not going to go into on today’s show, but once they got that sense that this was their organization and this was their community and their voice counted, our thoughts mattered, and that when they go out into the community, then they could begin to mirror that partnership-like environment that they came from with the community themselves.

And so then they began to have different conversations with people in the community that, I’m not your dad. I’m not the one responsible. We’re all responsible.

But there was a tiptoeing process as well with that in terms of starting off with the sense of communities being dependent, neighborhoods being dependent, specific citizens being mostly dependent on police departments and police officers. How do you shift from that sense of dependency to that shift of interdependency was a big part of what we had to teach from a practical experiential perspective to a theoretical philosophical perspective. And all that had to be mirrored in our actions and what we said and what we did.

So in essence, that’s what began to happen. And so conversations started off with, well, I’m calling you because I pay your taxes, citizens saying that, and you’re responsible for the safety in my neighborhood, to a different kind of conversation in terms of how I’m responsible, citizens saying how I can be responsible, how I can invite, how I can begin to create a new possibility, how I can take action, how I can have a level of commitment, not only by myself, but with my neighbors.

And so neighborhoods began to shift over time. And as I said before on previous shows, we had 40 or 50 different neighborhoods in our community that were troubled initially, that were the issue of safety was very much alive and well in these neighborhoods. And so we started with those neighborhoods and so we began to see, and I just want to say over time, for anybody listening to this, we ended up with almost zero neighborhoods that ended up the same way that they started.

And as we got neighbors and even people in mobile home parks, people in apartment complexes, high density housing began to show a different level of commitment. And it also had to do with something like, they didn’t know if they belonged to our community. They didn’t know if they belonged anywhere.

And so we worked on that whole piece as well in terms of, yeah, you belong to this community. You belong to this neighborhood. You belong to this mobile home park or this apartment complex, whatever that looked like.

And so we’re all responsible for that. That sense of belonging brings that. So there’s a process here with a sequence attached to it that works and that it works in our lives.

It works in our organizations. It can work in government’s relationship with the people that they serve. It can work with police departments and the communities and neighborhoods and citizens they serve.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (17:19 – 18:19)
Yeah. All right. Kristin, you’ve worked in helping police departments through trauma training and easing off the pressure.

Mike, one thing you said on the policies that I heard, and I experienced this in educational institutions too, people sometimes, the relationship gets lost for the data point of some standard that is artificially set. And Kristin, I’d just love some input of what is an authentic relationship as police officers go out and work with the public because they are working with all sectors of the public. What is authentic, meaningful relationship look like for the officers when they can open up and develop that kind of trusting relationship?

[Kristin Daley] (18:20 – 19:54)
Well, I think Mike nailed it when he said it starts with breaking down that patriarchal mindset internally within the department. Because as he said, if officers are going out with the idea of, I know best, I know what you need, it’s a barrier to building an authentic relationship. What people want to be doing is asking, what do you need?

What do you see as the things that are working in this community? What can we do better? What do you see as the best possible vision for the future of public safety?

And those are big questions, big conversations, and they don’t all have to happen right away. But it starts with police changing their internal mindset and breaking down sort of that perception that police hold all the power, because I think that is a roadblock for community members to get involved. And once they’ve established this is an equal partnership, we are all responsible for this community, they can start having those conversations about, well, what do we collectively want to see?

What can you individually contribute? Where are we going in the bigger picture of things? And again, Mike is absolutely right.

You can’t force or mandate participation in that. You can’t force or mandate trust. You have to earn it and build it.

And I think that really starts with asking questions, being curious, and active listening.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (19:56 – 20:31)
Yeah, that discovery. So, you know, I’m sure the listeners are like, man, I wish something could happen in my community. Or the police out there is like, I wish, you know, the citizens just show up to complain, condemn, they criticize us.

They show us hostility. How do we break this down? Who moves first?

And Mike, I’m going to ask you that question. Do the police go on an outreach first? Or can a citizen, can an average everyday citizen walk into a police department and say, I have an idea?

[Mike Butler] (20:32 – 23:24)
The answer to all that is yes. The answer to how is yes. Great book written by Peter Block.

And so for any citizen watching this saying, I wish we could be this way, well, then my response back to you is you have to be the change that you want to see in the world. But I also understand the nature of the traditional relationship that Kristin talked about in terms of, you know, here’s how things work. Here’s how things go.

Here’s the traditions. Here’s the customs. Here’s the rituals.

Here’s the, here’s how we, here’s the expectations. And so shifting and changing those expectations becomes part of, part of it. And so, yeah, there is a sequence, but I just want to say that part of what, what one of the signs that we began to see in our neighborhoods that people were really kind of taking on the responsibility of their sense of safety for themselves and their neighbors was we weren’t called as much.

We went from 150 to 200 calls in a neighborhood down to fewer than five. And I’m talking some interesting neighborhoods where a lot of gangbanging and drug dealing and, and a lot of other kinds of SWAT operations would happen and in these kinds of neighborhoods where it just disappeared. And again, in a previous episode, I made it clear to our officers and I would make it clear to anybody watching this, any police person, any government person that I think our metric for effectiveness has to be somewhat aligned with that we are no longer needed and that there are people in our communities and our neighborhoods and citizens who are saying we have the, we’re no longer going to delegate, defer, or call the cops or call government. We can take care of this.

We can do this together without becoming vigilante like. And, and so there’s all the, always these balances that are going on. And so there’s, but that relationship, that partnership sustains itself that we’re here if you need us and here, here.

So we got good at saying when these things happen, call us absent these things, you know, you can, you can manage and handle a lot of these things on your own. And so people began to, frankly, they began to take us up on that and they began, they got excited and they got this sense of usefulness, a sense of that they were worthy, that they could do this, that they had the capacity. And that is exciting to see folks.

That’s exciting to see in a neighborhood or in a community at large. It’s exciting to see in citizens. And so it began, that began, that was one of the initial signs is that we’re, no one needs us now.

This neighbor is not calling us anymore. That could be a scary thing, but believe me, it was a good thing.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (23:24 – 23:29)
When that happened, you created some other good things happening, right? You could, you had the energy and the time to.

[Mike Butler] (23:30 – 24:51)
No, we, we would devote ourselves to another neighborhood or to other perspectives, but we, but we took on this, we, we utilize that legitimate platform that just about every police department has in America in our community to say, how do we build the resilience? How do we build the self-reliance, the self-sustainability of these neighborhoods? That needs, that’s where we get beyond the Band-Aids, that we’re not necessarily legislating, trying to figure out how we’re going to pass laws or stiffen penalties to fix a neighborhood, or that we’re not going to invoke the criminal justice system over and over and over again, thinking that if we can arrest our way out of these circumstances or arrest our way into safety, not saying that there’s not a part for that, but it is one size fits all approach of invoking the criminal justice system is the Band-Aid, is a large Band-Aid that we need to figure out how to, how to minimize that, that aspect as we maximize this sense of surfacing and activating the incredible, but often dormant social capital in our neighborhoods, in our communities. And so one replaces the other, we’re adding to, we’re not reducing anything.

As you said earlier, Carol, this is not about reduction of anything. This is about adding something that doesn’t exist yet, that can kind of take over and crowd out the things we don’t want to see.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (24:52 – 25:21)
Yeah. The World Happiness Report, you know, talks about sharing and caring is, is what makes people really the happiest, their, their satisfaction in life. And, you know, imagine a municipality with citizens who are really satisfied with the way things are going and don’t have to criticize, complain.

I’ll bet their youth don’t get into trouble quite as much because there’s a little more accountability. They know the neighbor’s thing.

[Mike Butler] (25:22 – 26:53)
I just want to say too, that humanness is, you know, the human condition doesn’t disappear. The humanness of people is still alive and well, but there’s a lessening of that as we add something that’s different and we add the goodness, we add the sense of meaning and purpose, we, we, we, we create a playing field that’s level. There’s this partnership.

There’s a sense that people can have more responsibility, are willing to take it on. And, and, and every neighborhood, we found that there were initially one or two, three, four or five people that would say, yes, we got to go this direction. Of course, there were always others who were disconnected and isolated and felt like they just needed to stay in their homes to stay safe.

That had to kind of tiptoe in a, in a, in another way to this way of seeing things, but it almost always happened. And, and so, and so that’s part of the human nature. The human condition is, wants to get better.

It wants to make things safer. It wants to create something that doesn’t exist that’s better for all of us. That’s part of our nature.

And we have to somehow tap into that. And every neighborhood was a little bit different too. I want to say that.

Every single neighborhood has its own sense of who it was, how it was, the relationship it had with the police department, the, you know, the timing of things. There’s no one size fits all, but police departments are really good at kind of customizing and tailoring a lot of their services, depending on what has to happen, when it has to happen and, and what has to happen.

[Kristin Daley] (26:55 – 27:04)
And when people feel more personally invested and feel like they can actually do something, that changes the whole dynamic. Yeah, it’s a complete game changer.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (27:04 – 27:45)
Yeah, I think despair happens when you’re just frustrated and irritable and there’s nowhere to go with it. And I think we’re seeing that a lot in society today. So, so both of you talk about your experience with police in, in terms of bringing citizens in to, to some of the boards, some of the governance around, you know, certainly city managers are involved with the police department, city councils and mayors.

But how do citizens themselves become involved? Do you have any, Kristin, do you have any examples of that?

[Kristin Daley] (27:46 – 28:45)
Yeah, I mean, I think citizens can be involved in a variety of different ways and a variety of different points of entry. You can start getting involved by going to your local city council meeting and starting to take more of an active, active interest in what’s happening in your community that way. You could, as you said earlier, walk into your police department and say, hey, I have an idea, or I’d like to talk with someone about this.

You could join a community organization that’s doing work around issues related to policing, like, you know, potentially a restorative justice organization or, you know, an organization that provides resources that prevent recidivism. There are all sorts of different points of entry to get involved, but I think it starts with taking an interest in what’s happening in your community day to day, looking at the larger issues and talking to your neighbors. I know we’ve talked about that before, but it really does start with communication and conversation and getting on the same page with the people who are living around you.

[Mike Butler] (28:45 – 29:15)
Yeah, and I can’t really say much more than what Kristin just said, but I will add the idea of leaders in government, including police departments, have to get really good at inviting and really good at creating a place that’s safe for people to know that their voice counts and their thoughts matter. It starts with their police officers and their staff. There’s a lot of professional staff in our police departments that are part of this too.

I just don’t want to kind of limit this to police officers.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (29:15 – 29:18)
And they’re the face to the public often, right?

[Mike Butler] (29:18 – 32:39)
Exactly. Well, they are. I mean, there’s a lot of police departments are taking positions that used to be only police, a person with a badge and a gun and authority to arrest and use force, and now utilizing what we call professional staff, citizens that are part of the police department but aren’t a police officer.

So I don’t want to exclude them because they’re a big part of all of this. If we probably haven’t done a good enough job in terms of emphasizing the value that they have, not only in a police department, but in a community. But this idea of inviting, this idea of creating that space is critically important.

And I’ll go back to what Kristin said earlier. You could start anywhere. Start with just knocking on your next door neighbor’s door or just walking your neighborhood or just walking around and seeing who’s outside.

I mean, how many times has anybody who’s doing washing has done that in the last year, so to speak, or in the last month or the last five years maybe? And so that’s a big part. The other part that I want to mention that Kristin talked about was this idea of becoming associational.

There’s so many different associations that have so many different causes and things that are they’re doing that are related to safety or related to wellness or related to kind of helping to heal the wounds of a community or dealing with the social or health issues in a community. There’s so many of them. Begin looking for those.

And if something piques your interest, make a call. Stop in on them and say, I’d like to figure out if I have a place here with you. And so there’s all, it’s not an infinite number, but it’s a huge number of places and entry points, as you said earlier, Carol, get started.

And so, but police and government, they have to get a lot better at inviting. And I’m not just talking this kind of inviting for the low-hanging fruit. I’m talking inviting for critical issues of substance and making sure that, because I believe in this brainpower, this collective brainpower that a community has that can be just incredible for helping to heal the woundedness of our community or dealing with various social health issues.

We had great experiences with that, with dealing with people who were struggling with substance abuse, addiction, or people who were struggling with their mental health or homelessness. It was amazing how people in the community thought it was someone else’s responsibility and a shift that kind of happened in terms of people saying, no, it’s my responsibility. Here’s what I can do to help.

And so police departments, government entities have to get good at creating those structures where people can bring their gifts, their talents, their skills, and their resources. And that police departments and police chiefs and government leaders need to get good at saying there’s all these various parts out there. I’ve used this before, but all these various, how do we create something where all these gifts can begin to get integrated, complementary, unified in a way that can really bring that, create something that’s much bigger than the issues that we’re trying to confront.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (32:40 – 33:51)
Yeah, Mike talks so well. And for those listening, Project PACT will have online training for both community organizations, city management, city departments, and the police departments, where you walk through these kind of understanding of bringing ideas that may be even contrasting. Mike talks about the greatest leaders are going to be the greatest harmonizers.

How do we bring all these viewpoints together? I, as a designer, talk about 8.3 billion viewpoints. We’re all individuals.

We all have unique perspectives. And so how do you bring those around? Mike, I want to ask, you did a lot of walking the neighborhoods, and you often had elected officials and city officials as the movement caught on in the five years that you did it every Sunday morning.

How did the officials, the city people, start to understand problems a little bit, and I don’t want to say problems, situations, maybe, circumstances a little bit differently in different neighborhoods?

[Mike Butler] (33:52 – 36:35)
Well, first of all, with elected officials, some of them, many of them did walk neighborhoods, but they were running for something, if you will. They were running to be elected. And so we brought out a different kind of environment.

You’re not running for anything. You’re not running from anything either. You’re running into.

You’re kind of becoming a part of. And so we kind of introduced them to an environment that said, you don’t have an agenda here other than to get to know people and to help people believe that they belong to this neighborhood in this community. That’s our agenda.

And we called it the belonging revolution, those walks. And so there was some enlightenment on the part of many elected officials to say, you know, these neighborhoods are amazing. They didn’t come out.

They didn’t come out there with their kind of self-interest agenda to get elected. They came out there with a sense of I’m here for you and I’m here with a different purpose. And they were quite enthralled.

Many of these elected officials walked multiple times. We encouraged them. We invited them to go walk neighborhoods without Dan or I involved.

But they wanted to walk with Dan and I because we had this kind of reputation and this repertoire and a sense of structure. And so anyway, it was quite enlightened. And by the way, we just weren’t elected officials from this.

We had elected officials from our city, from the county, from the state, all walk with us and began to see things differently. Began to kind of say, hey, there is a power in these neighborhoods. There is a kind of unseen power that sometimes we just drive through those neighborhoods and don’t think about it.

But boy, if you’re walking these neighborhoods and meeting and greeting people and having conversations around possibilities or what could happen differently than what’s happening, they were quite enthralled. They were quite excited. And several of them walked numerous times.

And so that was a kind of a testament to their own kind of evolving nature around, you know, who really does have the power in a community. And that was a big part of it, too, is shifting that sense of who really is in charge. It turns out that the neighbors in a neighborhood have more power to keep that neighborhood safe than any number of armed guards or any number of new laws or whatever that might look like.

And once people began to see that they had this power to keep their community, their neighborhood safe, that sense of fulfillment about that meaning and purpose I talked about just began to grow.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (36:36 – 37:50)
That connection. And Kristin, I just want to thank you, Kristin, because you haven’t been an officer, but you’ve had this passion for justice and helping people for your entire life. Your entire career has been built on heading into, you know, how can we make all of this better?

How can we form better relationships? And I know trust is a big keyword for you. So building to that mutual trust, let’s just talk a little bit more about it, how it breaks, how do you break down?

Maybe you’ve had a bad situation. You’ve had, you’ve been harmed and you’ve got hostility towards a police based on something that’s happened in your family. What have you found that breaks down those to see that police officer as a real person?

Again, getting back to this authentic, connected relationship that develops this friendship. I just want to, I want to go into much more kind of affection for people who are serving. Absolutely.

[Kristin Daley] (37:51 – 39:46)
It starts with vulnerability on both sides. I think that everyone is afraid of hearing someone criticize them, right? Like everyone is afraid of hearing negative things about the way, especially they’re doing their job, especially in a career like policing, where most people really feel a calling to do it.

It’s hard to hear criticism of that. And I think that on the police side of things, people need to be open to hearing a citizen who’s potentially been hurt or had a negative experience with the police vent about it and listen to that and absorb it and respond not with, I would say, let your defenses down a bit and understand where the other person is coming from. And the same goes in the opposite direction.

I think citizens need to be more understanding that this is a really difficult job. Police are also experiencing a lot of trauma every day and dealing with people on the worst day of their lives in a lot of cases. And both sides have to be willing to be vulnerable and have conversation, try to understand each other’s perspectives.

And I mean, to be honest, once you’ve built a little bit more trust and a little bit more respect for where the other person is coming from, it’s a lot, you have a lot less complaints you have a lot less that you want to criticize of this person, because when you respect someone in the job that they’re doing, you can see the good and you can see how they’re trying or how they’re trying to create a better environment. It’s a lot harder to be 100 percent negative when you’ve built a relationship with someone and you trust them and respect them.

Yeah.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (39:46 – 40:36)
What you say, universal law, what you focus on expands. So we very much in Project PAC focus on goodness. What is working well?

What are the best practices? How can we evolve? Mike, I just want to give you the kind of the last part of this on transcending culture.

Mike speaks often that culture, it’s organizations are not broken. They’re stuck. And so when we say change a culture or change, you know, people go, they get very defensive.

Oh, no, I can’t change. You know, I don’t have time. I don’t have energy to change.

Speak just those last words of shifting that culture and getting to something better, evolving into something better.

[Mike Butler] (40:37 – 43:25)
Well, first of all, thanks, Carol. And Kristin, I loved what you just said, by the way. Thank you for that.

It was beautiful. First of all, shifting and transcending cultures is what Project PAC is, the essence of Project PAC and the essence of this podcast, Beyond the Band-Aids. We’re going to have to figure out how to kind of manifest different symbols, rituals, symbols, slogans, practices, so to speak.

And it’s not overly complex. There is a sequence. There is a step by step.

But more so than anything, there has to be absolute commitment to saying, here’s what we want to look like. Here’s who we want to be. You have to want to be a partner.

You have to want to say, hey, everybody’s voice counts. Their thoughts matter. You have to want to operate from the perspective of invitation versus mandate or even bartering and things like that.

You have to want to say that other people’s voices count. You have to believe—this is an important part—you have to believe that people have this virtually unlimited capacity to bring whatever they have as gifts or resources or expertise to the table. And so all of those things are kind of foundational to shifting and transcending cultures versus seeing things through the lens of their deficiencies or seeing people or neighborhoods as problems to be solved.

Seeing them as possibilities versus seeing people not so much as you’re error prone, weak, and limited, but you have a lot of this goodness. So I get that that’s a transition. I get that that’s a perspective.

But the big part here, folks, is that changing a police department culture has to begin to happen. And the institution of policing, even the institution of the criminal justice system, could be an absolute wonderful model for a lot of institutions that are still not broken, but stuck, as you said, Carol, in the mode that they’re in, operating off old models, tired ways of doing business. And so we can be that.

We can be that beacon, if you will. That’s my hope. That’s my belief.

That’s my thinking. It has been for decades that policing can lead the way in a community because of this legitimate platform. And part of that legitimacy is that the police are in the community, in the neighborhoods, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.

No one knows any other part of municipal government especially better than they know the police. And so changing our culture in a way that suggests partnership, that highly recommends a partnership, is our modality. It becomes critical to all of this.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (43:26 – 44:15)
Beautiful. Well, I just want to invite all our listeners to visit our website, sign up for our newsletter. You’ll get a weekly announcement of what we’re talking about on the podcast and then a monthly kind of in-depth of what’s happening new, the future of forward-thinking policing and community and police coming together.

We’ll be tracking some projects and all the goodness. Those who are involved in the police field that feel like you’re aligned with what we’re working on, our shared vision, our shared purpose, please check into our PACT ambassador program and we just welcome you back for the next episode of Beyond the Band-Aids.

[Narrator] (44:18 – 45:09)
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.