Replacing Lost Federal Grants with Community Ingenuity

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 Bandaids with Project PACT, hosted by Dr. Carol Engel Enright, Kristen 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 – 2:22)
Well, welcome to Project PACT. We’re excited for this conversation today to be here with Mike and talking about some new developments on the horizon in terms of how police departments and communities are going to work together in the future and create something better than exists today. That’s our whole premise with Project PACT is sustainable transformation.

I’m Dr. Carol Engel Enright, and I just want to give a little background on, you know, we’ve studied what people are interested in, and the number one thing that came up was police reform. Now, I just want to say reform is changing what currently exists, just reordering what’s happening within departments. Transform means that you’re going to create a structure that doesn’t exist yet.

And so I really kind of want to kind of hold those two terms. As we move forward, we’re going to talk about what’s happening in terms of a lot of funding that is being cut. Some of it’s being, some of the programs being cut by the Department of Justice, some of the programs being cut from the federal government that we’re going to police to really work on some of the social and health issues in community.

And what does it mean when you cut things? Well, that just opens doors for new opportunities. And that’s where Project PACT comes in.

We’re working with communities to develop roadmaps for, where do you go with this community partnership? So, Mike, I want to just, you know, I just want to kind of launch into this. You put a lot of social and health programs together at the Longmont Police Department with the city of Longmont, but not the city of Longmont as the government, the city of Longmont as the community, the citizens of the city of government, the city of Longmont.

[Mike Butler] (2:22 – 2:25)
Absolutely. Absolutely. Thanks for making that distinction.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (2:26 – 3:00)
And it wasn’t that you went to the federal government for grant money. And we have to rethink or think again into how you, and I’ll give some examples, and I know Kristen’s got some great examples too, but that’s what we’re going to be talking about this episode. So, hang in there with us to kind of figure this out as we go together.

So, let’s talk about what did you, you know, how did you come up with an idea for something around health and wellness and what’d you do next?

[Mike Butler] (3:00 – 5:39)
So, let me just back up and say the current conversation is along the lines of feeling threatened or feeling left out or feeling cut off or feeling like things are going to stop or feeling like there’s, as you said it, Carol, no opportunities anymore and that things are just going to dry up and social and health issues are going to get worse and people are going to, all the way up I’ve heard conversations, people are going to die as a result of all this.

And I get that absent, maybe strong substitute kinds of ways of doing business, unless we do other things, you know, there’s going to be some downhill stuff that occurs. And that’s the nature and essence of what we want to talk about here. We want to see, instead of seeing this as a threat to communities or to our country or to various social or health issues, including things like drug addiction, including things like mental health issues, including things like homelessness, including things like, you know, kind of supporting programs within police departments, that there are other ways of being able and substantial ways that doesn’t require, and I’m going to use this word folks, doesn’t require dependency on another source.

And I think anytime we become, a community becomes dependent on a source outside of itself, it almost sets itself up for a future potential, future failure, because these sources, you don’t know if they’re going to dry up. There are lots of federal grants over the years that have dried up and gone away, where communities have had to figure out other ways of either getting another source of money or trying to figure out within themselves how they’re going to respond. And I think this, this, this is an opportunity.

And that’s what I, that’s what the message is we want to get, get across here is there is an opportunity here. And by the way, in Longmont, where I was the public safety chief over police and fire, we didn’t become dependent on the federal government, especially for ongoing funding. There was some one time funding, that’s one time, you get it one time, that’s all you get it, that helped us buy some computers and helped us buy some technology, and maybe helped us buy some other kinds of things that we needed to operate.

But on the other hand, we never relied on ongoing funding for anything in terms of what we did.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (5:40 – 5:49)
So just to clarify, that was operational, you didn’t depend on the federal government for operational, federal or state government.

[Mike Butler] (5:49 – 9:11)
We made, we made the case that whatever our community needed, they should provide in terms of what the police and public safety department needed to be as effective and as efficient as possible. So it was up to us to make the case that that was, that was the case. And so, so that’s the essence of this.

And that what’s that look like? And what opportunities does it avail itself? And so we dealt with, not like every other community, we dealt with chemical substance addiction, we dealt with mental health issues, we dealt with homelessness, we dealt with domestic violence issues, we dealt with gang issues.

And we chose to resolve those issues within the community. And we also, by the way, before the word repurpose became popular, we repurposed people within our organization to deal more effectively with those issues. And if we needed more budget money, we went to the city budget for that.

And so and so over time, we maybe didn’t get it right away. But over time, we ended up having getting resources. So it was maybe a stepping stone, progressive process.

And so, so what we didn’t do was we we didn’t say, well, we’re not going to do something because we can’t get money from the government, the federal government, we chose to find other alternatives, we chose to be more resourceful, in our opinion, we chose to be more creative in terms of how we brought resources to our community that could deal with these health and social issues, where we didn’t become dependent on another source outside of the community, especially the federal government.

So I get where a lot of these folks are coming from. But I also want to make the case that there’s other ways of being able to deal with our social and health issues, outside of funding. Now, we’ve made the case in previous podcasts, that, you know, I have to tell you, with people from folks from government, and I was a part of government, I would work for the federal government for five years, local government for 40 some years, that oftentimes what you hear from government is if we want to start something, we have to figure out where the funding comes from.

That word almost comes in the first paragraph of conversation. And so and I’m saying, you know what, that’s capital revenue, I get that that’s revenue, that’s money. But there is another source of revenue, and that’s called social capital.

And we’ve talked about that as well. How can we find people in our community? How can we invite, train, and give people the resources and the wherewithal to partner with public safety in a way that can deal with these social and health issues from a perspective of leveraging the human capital in your community?

How can we take the gifts, the talents, the resources, the expertise, the skills and the talents, which every community has an abundance of, and be able to leverage that in a way that you can take what’s healthy and what’s good, and apply it to things that aren’t as unhealthy and things that could be better. And so that’s, that was our approach on almost everything. Okay, in terms of what we did.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (9:11 – 10:27)
So I want to pull Kristen into the conversation. I want to clarify that in a lot of cases, and I want to go back to you on dependency and just tell our listeners to imagine your teenagers forever and ever coming to you saying, I have a new idea, but you’re going to have to finance this. You know, and that’s kind of what we do with government, especially at the federal level.

And that when you come up with a new idea, when you innovate, when you are entrepreneurial about how you put things together, that you, you’re, you’re, I don’t like to use the word bootstrapping, but you’re taking the resources that exist around you. And Kristen, I know you’re, you’re busy with, with your cohort of, at New Blue, where you’ve got forward thinking police, a lot of senior management, senior leadership working, and they’re coming up with these new ideas and, and they’re, they’re starting to put things together, but they’re doing it with community, right? And I’m going to come back to Mike after I have you kind of just, just describe some of the projects, because I want to, I want Mike to talk about a certain project that happened in Longmont as well.

Okay, Kristen.

[Kristin Daley] (10:28 – 11:15)
Yeah. So there are a wide variety of projects that come through New Blue, but they all do involve community partnership. And a lot of them do exactly what Mike is describing, which is kind of leveraging that social capital, reaching out to organizations or community members that have something they can offer in terms of resources and figuring out a way for the police department to build that into their policies or practices.

So one great example would be Evanston, Illinois implemented a project called Care Card. And I think we’ve probably talked about it here before. It’s an incredible program where people get offered a survey at the point of arrest that figures out what resources they need, what they’re lacking, and it partners with organizations within the community to provide those resources.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (11:16 – 11:44)
And I think, clarify, these are, these are organizations within the community that are already established, probably a lot of nonprofit that, that work, that, that individually are working on different kinds of things, but you’re making the connections, yes? You’re networking the people that are trespassing or criminal, involved in some kind of criminal behavior. And you’re, you’re, you’re connecting those two.

[Kristin Daley] (11:45 – 12:01)
Yes, we’re figuring out what led them to the point that they’re in where they are on the wrong side of the law, and what resources they might need to get them back on their feet and back integrated as a productive part of the community. Okay.

[Mike Butler] (12:02 – 12:03)
Beautiful, beautiful.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (12:03 – 12:39)
Mike, I want, I want you to kind of talk about, because I know this one personally, we had issues of domestic violence, and you felt like things were a little high, and Kristen, you’re really involved with this topic as well, in Longmont. And you, you took it upon yourself to go to the community and say, we’re going to do it a little differently. And you, you didn’t go to the federal government.

You didn’t write a grant. You really just, you, you talk about what you did as you put Levi together.

[Mike Butler] (12:40 – 19:56)
Yeah. So, domestic violence, let me just back up one more time and say, if I could convince, if we could convince every community that they were enough to deal with the woundedness, that to heal their woundedness, to start bringing wellness to their communities, that would be a huge step in the right direction. But most communities are convinced they’re not enough, and that they need all these other outside resources, or they need resources they don’t have.

And what we haven’t done is really explore the, the level of that kind of human capital. People who want to be involved. As I said before, in those walks that we did around the community, those blind revolutionary walks, we discovered people had gifts, lots of gifts, talents, skills, and resources.

They wanted to offer those gifts, those talents, and those resources. They just didn’t know how. And in many cases, didn’t know if they had permission.

And rightfully so, because they were being told by the experts, by people in government, by the systems providers, that no, they were the experts. The system providers were. And, and that they, you didn’t know how to do anything.

And so, just kind of hang in there while we take care of you and your problems. And so, what’s happened over the decades, if you will, is that communities have gotten rusty. At some level, they’ve gotten, they’ve gotten incompetent in terms of saying, here’s how we can help ourselves.

And so, we’re enough. Each community has enough. And there’s the secret sauce, folks.

That’s the secret sauce. So, we, you could, you named the issue. You talked about domestic violence.

We can talk about, we can talk about gangs. We can talk about, we can talk about chemical substance addiction. We can talk about mental health.

We can talk about homelessness. All those things we incorporated our community to really help quite a bit. But when it came to domestic violence, which by the way, in many communities, it’s pigeonholed as a problem that’s going to be solved by the criminal justice system.

The vast majority, if not all states, now have a law that says if there’s probable cause to arrest somebody for domestic violence, you will make an arrest. And so, what’s happened over the years is that that’s been the response as if making the arrest and putting somebody in jail. And I’m not saying that’s not important because sometimes victims and offenders have to be, maybe most of the time, have to be separated out.

And there’s a lot of nuances that go with domestic violence. And I don’t want to upset any domestic violence professionals here because we get that. We get that.

And we think that’s a law that was worthwhile. But that’s kind of where it stopped and said, now that we have passed a law and maybe stiffened some penalties, we have this insurance policy that’s going to help us with domestic violence. Well, domestic violence didn’t stop.

In fact, in vast majority of communities, it’s increased. And when you look at the dynamics of domestic violence, less than 20% of them are reported anyway. And so, what good does it do to pass a law when less than 20% of the cases are reported?

It’s not that it doesn’t do any good. It’s just that we have to do more. And so, we went to our community and we said, this is a community-wide issue, not just a criminal justice issue.

How do we get neighborhoods? How do we get church congregations? How do we get business workplaces?

How do we get the school district, including athletic departments and all the young men coming up through the athletic departments? How do we get all those entities become more aware and conscious around the dynamics related to domestic violence? And then how do we get, here’s a big one, how do we get men to kind of enhance their voice?

Because for years, the vast majority of voices came from women. Where were the men? We started this campaign called the White Ribbon Campaign.

I don’t know if you’ve heard of that, Kristen, but in Colorado, it was a campaign in which men became the voice for why domestic violence is not the right thing to do in our relationships. And so, we went from, by the way, in 1999, I remember the year, we had five women die as a result of domestic violence in our community. And on average, we were averaging two to three women dying a year.

More than any other set of circumstances, domestic violence in our community caused more injuries than any other, like I said, any other set of circumstances, including car accidents. And for us, it became, and we called it the number one public safety issue. Because when you looked at the number of cases that were reported and you multiplied that times at least five, 20% of the cases, and then when you took into account that kids were involved, that was a large percentage of our community.

And I can pretty much assure any community that that’s the case in terms of what’s going on with domestic violence. So, how do you galvanize a community to support domestic violence, to raise the awareness and consciousness of what’s moral and what we need to do as a community around that kind of battering between two people who allegedly know each other? And by the way, the vast majority of violence, most of it is domestic violence, is committed between people who either know each other or allegedly love each other.

And every community. And so when people would ask me, is it safe to live in Longmont? I would always say it depends who you live with.

And so that often became the case. Your safety was more a factor of who you lived with in your home than being hurt by a stranger. And that’s the case in just about every community in America, something you don’t hear about.

So anyway, I’m gonna make a longer story real short here, but we are averaging many deaths over a long period of time. Well, between the year 2000 and the year 2020, that’s the year I left, we had two women die from domestic violence in our community because of the things we did to raise the awareness and consciousness of how we needed to respond to domestic violence. I won’t go through all of the various strategies that we put together, but I named congregations and neighborhoods, other kinds of groups, other non-profits.

We created a group called the Longmont Ending Violence Initiative, which included many non-profits that in some way touched domestic violence. And so we surface activated and coordinated social capital in our community to deal with the number one public safety issue in our community. And so still two women, too many for 20 years, but that’s a heck of a lot less than of a rate of lethality and also very serious injuries went way down as well because we were able to kind of intervene through people’s awareness and consciousness rising at a quicker level in the process before domestic violence in any one family or in any one relationship became more serious or more lethal.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (19:56 – 19:57)
Yeah.

[Mike Butler] (19:57 – 19:58)
So I’ll leave it at that.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (19:58 – 20:43)
You did a lot of education and I just want to say, you know, as being the citizen member and watching what happened, the whole community was galvanized around it. It’s like the secrets came out of the closet and people were watching out for one another. They were watching for those signs, not in an accusatory, shameful kind of way, just in a caring way.

And I know you went into the schools. I know you went into all the non-profit athletic organizations, the soccer leagues, the baseball leagues. You had the network was comprehensive.

[Mike Butler] (20:45 – 20:52)
We had the male population more engaged, much more. And I know Kristen, this is her area of expertise, wants to say something, too.

[Kristin Daley] (20:52 – 22:08)
Well, I just I wanted to say you touched on three really standout points to me. One, I mean, one of the biggest reasons that domestic violence is so underreported is the stigma and kind of the feeling of shame of talking about it. You removed that.

You got the entire community involved in watching out for each other and making it something that you don’t need to be ashamed to ask for help with. Two, education is the key to prevention. You went out there, you were talking to men who are typically the offender in a domestic violence situation, and you were teaching them how to do better and do the right thing.

And then three, a big barrier to getting out of a domestic violence situation is basic needs being met. And you address that by networking within the community, leveraging resources and getting people the things that they need. So, you know, say someone can’t leave a situation because they are reliant on transportation.

They don’t have a car. Someone can provide help to get that car fixed. These are things that are that seem small in the bigger picture of this could save your life, but they’re really important to the person experiencing it.

And you provided help in all those areas and treated it sort of holistically. And that’s the key.

[Mike Butler] (22:08 – 22:48)
So thank you for that. And I just want to go back to the purpose for today’s podcast is we didn’t go out and find a federal grant and say, well, we can’t do anything about domestic violence until we have a federal grant. We went and we surface activated and coordinated the abundant social capital in our community.

And it was amazing. I’m talking to not only community activists here, but people in the system. To what point people are so willing to become engaged and to be helpful in these circumstances.

It was amazing. The momentum and inertia that we grew not only on domestic violence, but on many other social and health issues as we move forward.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (22:48 – 23:52)
Yeah. So the opportunity that exists right now and the reason we exist as Project Back, the reason we’re coming together is to bring you a new idea of you already have it. You just need to network it.

I experienced it with academia. I brought people together. And then the funny part is after you bring people together and you come up with this innovation and entrepreneurial, then you have the data that you need to go get the federal grant of which you already did the work.

And then you have to do all the reporting. So really, if you just take this on locally, if you just let your community be that source of goodwill and mutual respect and networking to come up with filling the needs right where they are. I love what you said, Kristen, about, you know, somebody needs a ride.

And Mike has talked about that too with some of the programs he did around addiction. You know, somebody just needed a ride or they needed a job or they needed…

[Mike Butler] (23:52 – 24:22)
Kristen’s right though about the, she picked up on that, that group Levi, the Long Line Ending Violence Initiative, included probably 30 other, at least 30 other nonprofits that were willing to volunteer their time, volunteer their volunteers, by the way, in terms of helping out. And boy, when you have thousands of people going kind of trying to make a difference on a particular kind of social or health issue, it’s amazing what will happen to that social or health issue.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (24:23 – 25:40)
Yeah. I also like Mike that you talked about, you did go into the churches, you did go talk to the congregations, you talked to people who are used to being willing to serve the community and citizen leaders outside of local governments and just having new conversations. Now I want to talk about how Project PACT kind of looks at this in terms of bringing the partnerships together.

You know, I think people don’t know where to start. And I want to talk about, I’m going to kind of, you know, the means before, what we’re doing here. We want to talk to communities.

If you have a health issue, you know, Mike, you dealt with a lot of addiction issues. And I think we’ve talked in a previous podcast about how you and some of your deputy chiefs just went to work and called some treatment centers. And tell the story, because it wasn’t that you asked one treatment center to start to work with people who didn’t have another way to get to treatment.

You called several.

[Mike Butler] (25:41 – 31:24)
So let’s just start off by saying a lot of people who are suffering from chemical substance addiction, especially any addiction, but we were more focused on chemical substance addiction. I’m not saying all of them, but many of them don’t have access to treatment, don’t have insurance or the economic wherewithal to seek treatment. And so, and I’m not necessarily putting all of our eggs in the treatment basket either, because there were more, there was more to the social capital sense.

And that’s where the neuroscience comes in, in terms of, okay, great. So, but we started this initiative called the angel initiative. And some people were listening to this may have heard about that, but the angel initiative was basically, we created a sense that if you are suffering from a chemical substance addiction, if you walk through the front doors of our public safety department and say, I have an addiction, you can bring, you could bring all your drugs and all your paraphernalia, no arrests, no tickets, we would seize all of that, destroy it. But we would also find you treatment. And over time, we ended up having agreements with over 100 different addiction treatment service providers who agreed to do it for free.

I’m talking residential, very expensive treatment, and maybe less expensive treatment, intensive outpatient. And so their only hope was that we wouldn’t just depend on one or two or three. So we ended up recruiting over a hundred addiction treatment service providers.

And literally over a period of maybe three years or so while we were doing this, four years almost, hundreds of people, you know, kind of metaphorically came through their front door, waving their white flag and saying, I surrender. I can’t deal with this addiction anymore. I need help.

I need assistance. And we had people on our staff, including myself, who were trained to figure out how to connect people to the right treatment provider. And so over time, we know that we kind of, and by the way, that was all free.

That person didn’t need to spend a dime. And many people went into residential treatment. And it was amazing to what level addiction treatment centers were willing to be socially responsible enough to help.

And so we trained our staff, our police officers, who were initially a little bit skeptical about this, began seeing these opportunities, began seeing who they would see often, the frequent flyers. And I think I’ve mentioned in other conversations, we had three men in our community who had over a thousand contacts with police, frozen to the ground during the winter in their own urine. The emergency department in our hospitals didn’t want anything to do with them.

The cops didn’t want anything to do with them. The community didn’t want anything to do with them. And I’m not going to give last names, but Anson, Asubio, and Ruben were the three men I’m talking about.

There were others, there were dozens of others. And every police officer that’s listening to this, and maybe a lot of citizens know the kinds of folks, almost impossible kinds of circumstances. Their addiction, their chemical substance of choice was alcohol.

And by the way, that’s still the number one chemical substance that people are addicted to. Now, I know fentanyl and other synthetic drugs, including some others, including methamphetamine, can be much more serious in terms of its fatality, lethality. But most people who were addicted to alcohol who walked through our front doors, or there’s a combination of things like alcohol and methamphetamine.

Anyway, these three men ended up over time because we had treatment opportunities available for them, but we also brought in the social capital. We could talk about that if you want. Over time, we’re able to find housing, we’re able to find jobs because we had dozens of employers who agreed to say in our community, if someone’s in recovery, I’ll employ them.

And so they were willing to take chances. And so we had people in our community willing to drive people to treatment. We had people in our community willing to be kind of help in a way that they were social networks.

And we had people, and these people, by the way, would relapse. These three men who have first names I mentioned, there was lots of relapsing going along the way. There’s no one who kind of gets through that kind of serious addiction without relapsing, sometimes several times.

And the kind of patience and love that was necessary to kind of hang in there with people kind of created this a new sense of hope for these men who said, this community hated me, no one wanted anything to do with me. We’re now feeling this community, our community’s sense of care. And something changed within their brains.

And I know we’ll talk about the neuroscience in a minute here. But that was part of that. And so that was what happened.

But, you know, and then if I didn’t say this earlier, and if I’m repeating myself, I apologize. But we believed that close somewhere between three and $4 billion worth of free treatment was provided to people in our community. So Longmont wasn’t a community where people couldn’t have access to addiction treatment.

And so many communities are that way and are still that way. And so a lot of this goes back to early trauma that they suffered in their lives, or things that happened, or sometimes just bad decisions that they make and, you know, are a combination of all the above. So anyway, that’s in essence, a very short story around the ANGEL initiative.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (31:24 – 31:27)
Right. But a thousand calls, you know, as you think in terms of- Per person.

[Mike Butler] (31:27 – 31:28)
Yeah.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (31:28 – 32:03)
Per person. As you think of safety and wellness, and you think about walking down a street of your community and, you know, wondering about the person that you’re passing, and do you need to be fearful, you know, can you look at it from a different point of view? Can you look at it from a new perspective?

Can you look at it from an entrepreneurial point of view within your community? And Longmont’s not unique. I mean, Kristen’s working with several communities right now, you know, and Evansville is one.

I think you’re- Evanston.

[Mike Butler] (32:03 – 32:04)
Evanston.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (32:04 – 32:10)
And a lot’s going on in San Antonio, yes, or- Waco. Somewhere in Texas.

[Kristin Daley] (32:11 – 33:06)
Yeah, we have some incredible fellows there. But yeah, I agree with you. Every community potentially has their own unique challenges and nuances, but ultimately, I think we’re all with a lot of the same common themes.

And to your point about, you know, should you be afraid of someone you encounter on the street, I think every time we engage with someone, we need to engage with their entire background and history and factor that into our interaction. And that person, the type of person that’s struggling with the things that Mike just mentioned, that person is probably also operating from a place of fear and insecurity and, you know, not knowing where their next meal is going to come from or not knowing when they’re going to have a place to sleep indoors. And that’s a very horrible, traumatic position to be in.

Yeah.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (33:06 – 34:15)
Yeah, we will do a full podcast just on the neuroscience and what’s happening with the adrenal system in terms of things of safety. But getting back to social capital, Mike, you also, you identified so many neighborhoods. Now, part of it was that you were walking neighborhoods, but also that you had a way of finding a neighborhood, you call them champions and connectors.

And I, so I have a background, my research area and my expertise is social capital. Anybody that has read Robert Putnam, we understand what the social bonds do, the social bridges that connect us. And that’s going to take us to the neuroscience in just a few minutes.

So hang on, stay with us. But if you’re in a community, it’s not the city government’s job to run the neighborhoods. The neighborhoods are running themselves.

But how do you find those champions and the connectors? What did you do? What did you notice about neighborhoods that had that?

[Mike Butler] (34:15 – 39:07)
Well, first of all, I want to just say the relationship between municipal government and the neighborhood, in my opinion, should be one of a partnership in terms of how that plays out. There are people who can help guide, can help facilitate, can help bring people together. They can invite, they can convene, they can facilitate, they can help harmonize.

The government entity can do that. They shouldn’t take over the responsibility of the safety of that, of that neighborhood though. That’s where we kind of go overboard in terms of saying, we’re responsible for your safety.

And then there also should be a sense of, we don’t need to be here forever. We just come in, help out initially, make sure all the people are in the right place and kind of helping out to that point where neighborhoods can become effectively self sufficient, self reliant, and don’t necessarily need government assistance or government experts, so to speak, even police officers. I’ll say this again, but our metric for effectiveness within public safety was, we are no longer needed.

And so I can’t express that enough in terms of what’s important about that. But in the interim, there’s an interim process here where interim inviters, interim conveners, interim facilitators, interim harmonizers, where we bring neighborhoods together. And by the way, finding a neighborhood connector is pretty easy.

They’re the ones that speak up. They’re the ones that know everybody. You consider them the nosy people in the neighborhood.

They know what’s ever going. They want to organize parties. There are those folks and almost every neighborhood has one.

And so once you identify those folks, that’s where you could start. That’s one place to start in terms of bringing more people, more people. By the way, we never invited ourselves into a neighborhood.

We always wanted to be invited. We didn’t walk into a neighborhood and say, you’re a problem to be solved. We would wait for the neighborhood to call and say, we need help.

And when they got to that point, they were effectively open enough to say, we’re willing to kind of listen to what you have to say. We never invited ourselves into a neighborhood. And so there could be disorder.

There could have been gang activity, drug activity, or all kinds of other things happening, property crime, car break-ins, house break-ins. We’ve had enough. And so how can you make a neighborhood safe?

And our mantra was, the safest neighborhood is the neighborhood that coalesces, comes together, where they know each other, care for each other, know each other’s families. Maybe there’s some secrets that come out. The secrets are fewer.

And the mysteries are still there. But the sense of coming together as a neighborhood makes that neighborhood safe many more times than the number of armed guards that are going to be in that neighborhood, many more times. That happened almost every single time.

And so if you want to make a neighborhood safe, it’s not that the police can’t come and help initially, but that is a short-term process for the police in terms of helping the neighborhood become self-reliant, self-sufficient. And so once they began to galvanize, get to know each other, there was always, not always, but many times a tiptoeing kind of process. I don’t know if I know that person.

I don’t know if I like that person. And so there are all those things. Every neighborhood has its own personality with its own personalities.

And so there was always something different about it. But you had to be patient with that. And we trained our police officers to understand those dynamics.

And we had someone with the city that was helpful with us as well. But the idea was, we were going to help that neighborhood help itself. And I would say in a community of 100,000, we had probably at least 50, maybe 60 neighborhoods that were pretty, that drained police resources on a regular basis.

And everyone knows what I’m talking about. Hundreds of calls for service in any given month or maybe over a period of time. And so just lots of services like that.

And so we got a quick, those are patterns for us that we have to recognize and say, okay, what can we do differently? Well, you’ll get invited into that neighborhood soon enough. And then you begin the work in process.

Those are things Project PAC can help any police department or any community work with in terms of there is a template. There’s almost a formula here in terms of what that could look like.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (39:07 – 41:26)
Right. I’m excited. Kristen has been doing some conferences with victims as well, crime victims.

And so in future podcasts, we’re going to talk about that as well. I know that can affect a neighborhood when you witness what happens on the worst day for people or if you’re one yourself and how you can bring healing in terms of that. Let’s get back to the neuroscience.

And I just want to say, our training in Project PAC is a lot around communication. When you think about the partnerships between police and community members or citizen leaders or just somebody who wants to create a safer community, it’s going to start with conversations. Now, Mike, I was going to have you talk about the six conversations, but maybe we’ll save that for another episode and have people tune back in.

However, Project PAC is going to have the online training up and running soon. And it’s for everyone. It’s for deeper communication techniques.

We’re doing a series of conversations with our community right now. And it’s interesting to have people from different backgrounds, different biases. I’m going to use the bias and the polarizing word, you know, come together and have a common conversation.

Social capital, the definition of it is that people have this network where they can come together. They form this mutual trust in these social benefits and social bonding because they have a common purpose or a common vision. And so, you know, again, you’re going to start, you’re going to create something that you work towards.

And Kristen, I don’t know if you have any other examples of where some of your fellows are working towards where the vision got really big and exciting and people are jumping on board now.

[Kristin Daley] (41:27 – 42:37)
Sometimes it takes a while for the inertia to get going. It does. And I think you have to overcome a lot of obstacles and barriers with communication to get to that point.

But I think one really exciting project that we’re about to see start to be implemented is the one in Waco, Texas, where the chief and assistant chief were fellows in our program and they have created a cultural competency program. So every officer who comes into Waco will be required to take this training and go around and almost take a tour of different organizations and cultural groups and everyone in the city and gain a better understanding, a better connection with people and learn how to communicate with people who are not necessarily the same mindset as you. But we need to remove those obstacles and barriers and give people the opportunity to collaborate and to heal.

And, you know, a lot of people in all of our communities experience trauma and experience challenges, and we have to learn to address those and learn how to talk about them.

[Mike Butler] (42:38 – 42:42)
That is fantastic on the part of Waco, by the way.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (42:42 – 46:00)
Yeah. Beautiful. And that’s going to lead us to the neuroscience around.

So, you know, from the study of the neurosciences, when we meet somebody, we talked about that person that you might meet on the street that you might feel suspicious about. And I’ve watched Mike do this hundreds of times. He will engage someone in conversation, always.

And he will go on the discovery tour because he is a curious fellow and he believes in the capacity of all people, that there is goodness in all people. Now, a lot of people will go, well, I don’t agree, but I’ll tell you, if you walk around with him or if he ever walked the neighborhoods or the nursing homes or the whatever, he brings the life out of people. And I do want to re-encourage anyone who is listening, please sign up for that 30 minute consultation with either Kristen or Mike or both or whoever you want, it’s free.

And you can get to some kind of answers about your own community. But from the neuroscience, from the academic point of view, and what’s happening in your brain is when you move into discovery or curiosity, your adrenals settled down and you start into this connecting process, this social connection of social bonding and acquaintance and leading to affection and mutual respect. If you hold with suspicion and you don’t get to know somebody, it leads to hostility because your adrenals are then firing into your fight, flight, or fright.

And I think we’re living in a world today, especially after COVID, when we separated and we isolated and we started to encounter our devices as relationships more than the personal social relationships. And that breakdown occurred, that we don’t have the goodness of social. So Mike, I want you to talk about, and I know you talk about Anson.

And by the way, you can request a copy of Safety in Our Hands written by Mike and Peter Block, a great author that works with organizational development. And I got the pleasure of meeting Anson one day, and I can tell you his best friends were some of the officers on the force because he knew they loved him. And love is not a word we use very often, but I want us to start thinking in terms of those higher levels of energy that happen with social connections.

So Mike, if you can talk to the neurosciences of what that did, both for your officers and for the people that you were serving in the community. And what happens to those friendships?

[Mike Butler] (46:01 – 52:26)
Well, it’s something entirely different happens than the normal police officer. I’m trained to figure out what’s wrong with this person. I see everybody as a problem to be solved.

I see the community as a problem to be solved. There’s, you know, the world is a world where all I do is arrest bad guys kind of mindset to a world where, okay, I see this person through the possibilities that they might have. I see the community through the possibilities it has.

I see our organization through the possibilities it has an entirely different mindset. And that there is a neuroscience shift. When you think in terms of people as having unlimited capacity versus people who are air prone, weak, limited, it’s a different conversation.

And it’s a different kind of actions. And there’s the connection is very seldom made. And people live in that part of their brain, where it’s either fight, flight or freeze.

And so and that’s an unhealthy primitive part of our brain. And so what the neuroscience does when you say there’s possibility, now that doesn’t mean our officers didn’t have this sense of safety. That didn’t mean our officers didn’t come and say, you know, this person could be pretty unpredictable because of the state they’re in.

They get that they get that. But there’s another, there’s another way of being with that sense of safety, in terms of protecting yourself, protecting other people, or protecting the person you’re going to be working with. And having the sense that there’s possibilities still there that we can maybe pull out of that person or help that person grow, or bring to life, or the community or the organization or whatever that is.

And that officer themselves, we talk about officer resilience, we talk about officer wellness, what we don’t talk enough about is that sense of how do you see people? How do you see the community? How do you see your fellow officers?

How do leaders and managers and organizations see their staff? And vice versa? How’s the staff see the upper echelon of the police department?

And how does everybody see what’s going on in the community? And so do you see it as a problem to be solved? Or do you see it as a possibility?

Is a difference at night and day in terms of whether or not you’re going to have an unhealthy perspective, that’s going to wear you down, bring you into some sort of cynicism over time, because you’ve been through so many of these circumstances, and sometimes depression, or even with police officers, sometimes suicidal ideation, or wherever that might be? Or how do you stay healthy in this in this way? How do you stay this sense of people have something to offer?

People have gifts, even the Ansons, the Rubins and the Subios have gifts. We didn’t, they would have never been convinced of that unless maybe a year later, in some cases, they didn’t see the results of what happened to these three. And the only reason why I bring those three up, and there were dozens and maybe hundreds of others, because those are the names I remember and I was I was personally involved with.

But so anyway, we began and so we began to shift how we did business in terms of creating new options and new alternatives to arresting people and summonsing people. It didn’t mean we didn’t arrest people. And by the way, I want to get right into the idea that there are certain people that need to be removed from the community, and maybe need to be removed permanently.

We get that what we’re not good at as a society is not being this one size fits all quick fix. We got to get out of that mode. And so we have to really figure out who can help who can we help with different options?

And who can we help? Or how do we help the community by taking someone who’s not safe to the community off the streets? So we got to get better at deciphering those kinds of decisions and making those decisions.

And by the way, Project PACT helps a lot with that in terms of who are your repeat offenders? What are their personality traits? Are people for lack of a better way of saying sociopathic or psychopathic?

We don’t have the wherewithal either through medications, or therapy or treatment to try to help folks yet. We don’t have that yet. And so they have to be removed from our community.

There’s no ifs, ands or buts about it. But there’s a lot of people that police deal with in every community, where different options can play a part. And that’s where the neuroscience, you know, I always go back to a neuroscience that we got, Carol and I got to know his name, Dr. Bruce Perry. He wrote a book called The Boy That Was Raised as a Dog. And his main conclusion in that book, I highly recommend it. Because he talks through how you go from point A to point C and all this is that the one of the most healing potent forces we have on this planet are healthy, loving relationships.

And he was able to image brains of people who went through trauma, great trauma in their lives, including a boy that was raised as a dog. And then followed their life’s path in many cases, and image their brains at one point down the road. And he could see the change in many of their cases, and learned that in those cases, as the brain image went from red to yellow, from trauma to love, that these people found healthy, loving relationships in their life.

So the brain’s capable of healing. And people are capable of not having to live in their amygdala 24-7, 365, that fight or flight freeze place in their brain, and could get more into their neocortex. And that’s by seeing people as possibilities.

Now, I’m telling you, this gets into if you really want to make your community more sustainably safe, if you really want a police department where your police officers are really acting in a way that kind of comes from this perspective where they see people’s possibilities, if you want police officers who are more resilient, healthier, see the world not quite as grim and dim and cynical and skeptical as a lot of cops see people, then this is the shift and change that has to be made.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (52:27 – 52:43)
Yeah. And Kristen, I’m going to give you the last word on this, because you also work with trauma, kind of trauma-informed care, especially with officers, and how do we make our police healthier? What do we do?

[Mike Butler] (52:43 – 52:45)
How do we help them become healthier? Yeah.

[Kristin Daley] (52:46 – 53:10)
Yeah. I think we get them more in touch with exactly what Mike was saying and give them support systems. And human connection is a really, really powerful way to heal trauma.

Every person needs and deserves to have the opportunity to feel included and seen and heard and valued. And all of those things come together when you start building those human connections.

[Mike Butler] (53:11 – 54:05)
And one last thing I want to say, this is critically important for leaders, police chiefs, their immediate subordinates, the upper echelons of police departments. Our mode of training people through Project PACT is to help people to see that becoming a servant leader, becoming more of a partner with those people in your organization versus being just the go-to guy, the director, the command and control person, or the parent or the paternalistic patriarchal person, that’s the shift we have to make as well. Let there be no doubt about it.

And if our police officers sense that they have that kind of support and care from their echelon leaders, they’re more likely to mirror that kind of support and care as they work with the Ansons, the Rubens, and the Esuvios in their community.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (54:06 – 54:07)
In every neighborhood.

[Mike Butler] (54:08 – 54:08)
In every neighborhood.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (54:08 – 55:16)
Yep. That’s a lot of conversation to be continued. But thank you, Kristen.

Thank you, Mike, for your wisdom, your experience, what you’ve gone through in terms of learning how to put community and police together in partnership. And again, please rate our podcast. We’d love to have a five-star review from you.

And please subscribe to the podcast. We’ll be here. We’ll be kind of taking on some of these current topics as they come along.

And I guarantee you’re going to learn something every time you listen. And also go on our website, projectpact.org and sign up for the If you’re interested in that free consultation, either as a community member or as a police within the police department at any level, just sign up and Mike or Kristen will reach out to you to schedule a time. It’s all free.

And we can go over just what’s happening in your community. So thank you for listening. And we’ll see you next time on Beyond the Band-Aids.

[narrator] (55:17 – 56:09)
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.

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.