History of Policing and Host Philosophies

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

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The School of Statesmanship, Stewardship & Service (SOSSAS)

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

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

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

[Carol Engel-Enright] (0:58 – 2:21)
Welcome back to Beyond the Band-Aids. So this is a podcast from Project PACT, police and community together. We have brought three nonprofits together, SOSUS, the school statesmanship, New Blue, a new training for police, and LEAP, Law Enforcement Action Partnership.

We are sponsored by LEAP and we’re very grateful for that sponsorship. Today we’re going to talk about the background, the history of policing, and then how each of us, coming from those three places, looks at policing, how it shaped our, how our background, how our experiences have shaped our philosophy towards how we see the future of policing going forward, and how Project PACT is working police and community together. So I want to start first with Mike Butler.

Of course he has 41 years in law enforcement and six years before that in the federal, the federal level. Mike, tell us about, just give us an overview of policing through history and kind of where we’re at today. Why do we even talk about a Band-Aid and what we want to move beyond?

[Mike Butler] (2:21 – 7:04)
Okay, thanks Carol. It’s great being with you, it’s great being with Kristen, and I know this is going to be a, this is, this should be an enlightening show for us and for those who are listening. The one thing I want to start off with is by saying that right now what seems to happen is that the police get blamed for a lot of things in terms of how they operate, what they do, how they do it, where they do it, who they do it with, and there’s, I think some of that is, the vast majority that I believe is not necessarily justified, but there are reasons for why things happen.

And so, and so, but there are some things that I think the police profession can do to move itself out of the role that it’s currently playing that I think is hindering its, its effectiveness, its viability, its sense of trust in communities, its capacity to work in partnership with communities, and so we’re gonna be talking about those things quite a bit over the next many shows that we’re gonna be putting together. But there is some history here and there are some things that have happened societal wise, political wise, political wise, government wise, community wise, that I think is important to understand and know. And I’ll be interested in hearing feedback from the people who are watching this show in terms of what that means to them and what it looks like to them.

But, you know, first of all, I just want to say that for a long time, and I’m only gonna go back decades, you could go back all the way back to the Civil War and even before in terms of kind of talking about the history of police in this country, the Civil War happened in the 1860s. You go all the way back to that point. I’m only gonna kind of move back in terms of a few decades in terms of the more modernization of why police are responding the way they are today.

And so I just want to make sure that our audience understands that that’s how far back we’re going. And so I just want to say that often what we ended up with was we ended up with elected officials and community at large believing that if we could legislate, somehow pass legislation or stiffen penalties, that we could somehow solve our social health issues, that we could heal our woundedness, that that legislation and the stiffening of penalties could serve as an insurance policy that would protect us from the human condition. Well, the human condition is quite messy.

And so those short-sighted approaches resulted in a lot of laws and a lot of ways of doing business that believed that every time we had a social issue or a health issue, it could be homelessness, it could be addiction, it could be mental health, it could be substance, it could be domestic violence, it could be crime that involves kids, that if we just pass the laws and stiffen penalties, that somehow we can fix these issues, that we could arrest ourselves. The more we invoke our criminal justice system, the more we’ll be able to solve these issues.

Well, I’m here to say I’ve not seen that work and I’ve been in local policing for 40-some years and one of the things that I really tried to guide our local elected officials and even state officials in Colorado was saying that one of the axioms of government is to do no harm. And sometimes when we pass these laws, we ended up causing more harm than perhaps we should have. And so that’s one of the things we got.

And some of the slogans that came out of that era, and then we’re still in that era by the way, is that three strikes and you’re out, or get tough on crime, or we created what we called the war on drugs. In essence, we declared war on a lot of social issues. And I also want to say we lost all those wars.

Those social issues weren’t going to be, or health issues, weren’t going to necessarily be resolved by more legislation or the stiffening of penalties. And so that was one thing that the police were involved in. And so when they pass these laws or stiffen these penalties, they expected local police departments all over the country, state police departments, even federal agencies, to go out and enforce those laws.

And believing that if we could somehow make more arrests and invoke the criminal justice system, put more people in jail, or expose more people to the criminal justice system, that these issues were going to get fixed. I’m here to say that just didn’t happen. And by the way, we’ll talk about it more, but recidivism rates are still 50 to 70 percent, depending on where you live in this country.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (7:04 – 7:11)
So Mike, hang on, I want to just clarify, because I’m the layperson in this.

[Mike Butler] (7:11 – 7:11)
Sure, sure.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (7:12 – 7:46)
So when you pass a law, whether it’s local, state, or national, the enforcement agency is not, let’s say a national law, let’s say something happens in the Congress, there isn’t a national police department, there is a local police department. And were legislators passing laws in hopes of the fear of breaking a law would prevent somebody from going down that road?

[Mike Butler] (7:46 – 9:40)
That might have been part of it as a deterrent effect, but I also want to say that there are federal police departments, if you want to call them that. There’s the FBI, there’s the DEA, there’s the ATF, and those departments themselves, those federal agencies, are quite involved with state and local agencies. And so, and then there’s a whole U.S. attorney apparatus, and then there’s the Department of Justice. And so all those things kind of play into the national passing of legislation, in terms of national laws, that national police departments like the FBI, the DEA, and the ATF get involved with. They’re prosecuted by U.S. attorneys that work for the Department of Justice, and then we have federal courts that review those cases, and then we have federal prisons where people end up if they’re found convicted of these crimes. So there is a whole national apparatus enforcement entity that exists in this country, that if a law is passed by Congress, that’s where those things would end up.

But most of what I’m talking about here, Carol, is most mostly done with local, community, cities, municipal entities. That’s most of what I’m talking about. Even though the war on drugs, the DEA, the war on other social health issues, the FBI has been involved with a number of those.

The ATF, in terms of firearms, you know, we have over 600 million, between four and six hundred million firearms in this country, and we’re going to make the case that the arming of people, or the disarming of people, isn’t necessarily the best solution. The best solution, as we move forward here towards a more civil society, is the level of civility that exists amongst each other. What can we do to enhance and uplift that?

So anyway, I don’t know if that answers your question, but that’s kind of where we’re coming from.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (9:40 – 9:47)
Well, I just wondered about whether legislation can actually prevent a crime from being committed.

[Mike Butler] (9:48 – 14:05)
So that’s a great question, but we didn’t see that. We didn’t see that all of a sudden, you know, most legislation is directed towards a social or health issue. Much of what the law, many of the laws that are passed, are results of a residual of a social or health issue that exists.

Whether it’s, whether it was the war on drugs, we, in terms of the illegal substances, whether it was mental health issues, that people were struggling with mental health issues and committing crimes, or whether it’s, you know, sometimes now we have the whole issue of homelessness. It’s a big social issue that kind of goes back and forth in our country, in terms of how we’re going to try to resolve, you know, they’re, you know, close to a million people being homeless in this country. And so it’s been, it’s kind of moved back and forth and kind of pinballed between enforcement and services.

And sometimes there’s a combination of both. But what I’m saying is, these laws are not necessarily done to, they’re done in a way, they’re passed in a way that they’re designed to try to fix social and health issues. And that’s the point I’m trying to make here.

So the next thing I wanted to talk about was that we’ve taken the effort to kind of commodify the needs and deficiencies of people. Somehow believing that if we could commodify those needs and deficiencies of people, we could create a cadre of professionalisms, of professionals, an expertise-like response to meet those needs and to kind of respond to those needs. And that we could heal the woundedness.

And so everything that we did was, well, we need experts. We need people who understand these social and health issues to be able to solve them. And as a result, you know, the citizens in our country kind of became consumers of these services.

And we’re kind of not allowed or not expected or not permitted sometimes to really involve themselves. I can’t tell you how many times I heard a professional expert say, we need more access to this professional expertise in order to solve these problems. Not necessarily thinking that the community at large could be a part of solving that problem.

And so in many ways, our citizens became passive consumers of institutional services. And so we developed a consumer-like society when it came to dealing with a lot of these social health issues. Believing that we needed more experts.

And I’m not saying we don’t need experts. We do. But in many ways, and what we’re now beginning to realize through the neurosciences, is that the more people who are struggling with these issues have healthy loving relationships in their lives, the more likely they are to heal.

Versus just saying, well let’s just go to a, let’s just go to a session for 15 minutes every week or whatever that might look like for them. And so part of, and that included the police, and the police often took that role of, patriarchal role of saying, we’re the experts when it comes to crime. We’re the experts when it comes to crime prevention.

We’re the experts when it comes to fixing these social health issues in our community. And oftentimes, well maybe not necessarily an overt slogan, but behind the scenes there was this thinking of, you’ll be better because we know better. And so there was a lot of that that happened.

And by the way, these things were all reflective of something larger in our society. They weren’t necessarily caused by the police, but the police got kind of pulled into this way of thinking. And oftentimes that’s the way, that’s what happens in a community.

If there’s large amounts of crime, or if there is, if there’s a crisis that has something to do with safety, they say the police department has to solve all of this versus saying, hey, well the police in the community can help do this together. And so, so that was a big part of that problem as, and part of our history. And then as a result of kind of morphing, go ahead, did you have a question?

[Carol Engel-Enright] (14:05 – 14:54)
Well yeah, so when you say consumer, I just, I just think, you know, like if I’m not getting along with my neighbor, or my neighbor is not doing what I want him to do, I call the police because I can, I, I, I contribute to money for the police. So instead of, I can go talk to my neighbor. Did we, did we start into that realm or, you know, with the youth and, and thinking about drugs and mental health issues, do the kids just, you know, start talking to each other and, and everybody calls the police to come fix it?

Is that, is that, is that kind of what you’re talking about?

[Mike Butler] (14:54 – 20:46)
Yeah, exactly, yeah, in some ways, yes. I couldn’t put a percentage on it, but I could, I could, I think the vast majority of police officers might say that instead of calling 911 or the police, if you called your neighbor, that you might get, you might become more effective in terms of creating a neighborhood where you both, everybody wants to reside. Safety in a neighborhood wasn’t a function of the number of armed guards you had, as much as, as it was the coalescing and the coming together of a neighborhood.

What we discovered is that, that the more, the closer a neighborhood was, the more they knew each other, the more they understood each other, the more they got to kind of look out for each other and became friends at some level, or at least acquaintances, that neighborhood almost always became a safer neighborhood versus saying, well, let’s just call the police, let’s just call the cops, let’s just dial 911 and we’ll get, we’ll get our armed guards out here. It could be anything from traffic related issues to neighbor, neighbor related issues to kids issues, those things are always things that can, can be resolved, a lot of those can be resolved by neighbors and, and so in doing this, in creating a, this, well, maybe great communities are, are, are a function of great leadership or great expertise or improved services, that’s kind of the model that we used. And, and so as a result of that, what we ended up with is, we ended up maybe wittingly, maybe unwittingly, creating an excessive amount of what we refer to as unhealthy dependency. And so we would create these models of saying, if you, if, if, you know, you’ll be better because we know better, and the police would often say, if you need us, call us for anything.

Well, our communities took us up on that to the point where a large percentage of calls for service didn’t have any kind of crime or disorder or even traffic issues related to it. And so the police ended up going on thousands of calls in, in any, in any community, in any given year, that maybe a neighbor or another way of handling it would have been more effective. So we’ve created an incredible amount of unhealthy dependency, and that unhealthy dependency still exists.

And, and so we have to get out of the mode of, of, of saying that you have to be unhealthily dependent on us. And so our project PACS, not a motto, but a way of thinking is going to be that great communities aren’t necessarily made up of good leadership or better government or improved services or more expertise. Great communities are made up of great citizens.

And so that’s a going to be a big role for us as, and we think the police departments and all across this country can play a role in, in helping its community become less unhealthily dependent in terms of its relationship with that, with the community, what it says, how it acts, and the things, the things that a police department do. We’re going to talk about that in later shows about what that might look like in terms of going from the, in the continuum of unhealthy dependency to interdependency, a more healthy interdependency where citizens are engaged with each other, they’re more entwined and integrated with each other, and they’re more working in partnership with the police and not so much being told by the police, here’s what’s going to happen and when it’s going to happen. The other part of this then, the other part of history here that I think is important to talk about is kind of the modality of the kind of the heavy-duty patriarchy that prevailed in, in, in our, in, in our, from our institutions, with our institutions and relationships they had with those that they served.

They called them clients, they called them, you know, this is who we, this is who we, we oversee so to speak. The police became protectors, the guardians, the warriors, and I know that this is not going to sit well with a few people, but they became what they called the thin blue line that separates kept evil at bay, and that thin blue line kind of mentality, which may not be very popular with people and police are hearing this right now, but that thin blue line is kind of a, is kind of reflective of a patriarchal model that says we know better and you’ll be better because we know better. The police became the caretakers of people in the community, and by the way, there’s a big difference between caretaking, which is a patriarchal model, and caring for.

It’s one thing to say I’m going to take care of you, it’s another thing to say I’m going to care for you, and so, and so when they got into that caretaking model, it didn’t take long for the police to see and realize that this was almost impossible, to care, to take care of everybody, but in that essence when they say if you need us, call us for anything, I can’t tell you how many tens and tens of thousands of times we’ve heard that sense that if you need us, call us for anything, that that, that, that, that line in and of itself, that kind of request, or that kind of here’s how we’re going to serve you, here’s how we’re going to take care of you, has created that sense of unhealthy dependency, and so, so now what we have…

[Carol Engel-Enright] (20:46 – 21:07)
So Mike, when you talk about dependency, and codependency, and this caretaking model, that says that the citizens themselves either do not feel like they have the power, or do not want to take responsibility for their own safety.

[Mike Butler] (21:07 – 21:52)
You’re, you’re, you’re exactly right Carol on that. I think in doing that, we undermine the accountability that citizens should have, in helping heal the woundedness in their neighborhoods, or their communities, helping to resolve the social and health issues. Sometimes because we say that so much, and I’ve heard professional expertise say this, that they aren’t allowed to help out, that they don’t even know if they have permission, and then they get in their heads that they wonder whether or not they have the wherewithal to do it, whether or not their talents, their expertise, their resources, their gifts can make a difference at all, because now they’ve been kind of schooled, skilled, and trained into believing that someone else is going to take care of them.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (21:52 – 23:09)
Yeah, and do you think that people have a sense that they are less safe today? I, you know, I heard some statistics the other day, the trends are that we actually have a little more safer communities, and we probably should pull up some statistics on that, but it doesn’t, it doesn’t really work that way. Are we, are we being influenced in some way that we should be very afraid, or that, that we, and we all went through COVID, we all went through this, this fear that the world was going to kind of come apart for a while, so we’re getting past that, but do you think that codependency is just, we’ve been fed a narrative that life is not as safe as it used to be, you know, younger people, younger families are not letting their children play on streets, you know, what is happening that, that we have, we have both, both the community and the police have kind of gotten into this situation where I’ll fix it for you because you, you, you’re helpless, you can’t fix it yourself, or you’re so scared that you don’t know how to fix it yourself.

[Mike Butler] (23:09 – 25:12)
Exactly, I just don’t want to say that that applies to the police only, there’s a lot of our institutions that have this patriarchal kind of relationship, or want that kind of patriarchal relationship, sometimes that can be our education institutions, sometimes the religious institutions, sometimes the health and medical institutions, so there, but, but we’re focused on police here, and you’re right Carol, it’s a, there is this sense, and let me just say that, you know, in the community that I worked in, Longmont Colorado, a lot of people would say, yeah we do feel fear, well why do you feel fear, was the question, well because we’re seeing on TV what’s happening, and, and oftentimes, I don’t want to make this about the media either, but on the other hand, we’re often kind of led to believe that the human condition is in bad shape, and the media does like to dramatize the human condition, there is a somewhat of a marketing of fear, a marketing of fault, of assigning blame, of almost exploiting the wounds we have, either personally or from a community-wide perspective, and you know, and so they take these singular incidences, and they, and if something didn’t happen in our community today, they’ll report it from another community, and so it’s like, that’s what the news, 24-7 news cycles, and the social networks are right there with them, in terms of, there’s a lot of head-scratching in my mind that goes on around what goes on, what we read about in our social networks, that has the sense that this, the world is a scary place, here’s what we need to be afraid of today, and, and so I would invite anybody to watch any newscast, whether it’s local, or federal, or international, and find out in 15 minutes how many times they talk about, here’s what’s wrong, here’s what you need to be afraid of, here’s, here’s the latest of tragedies and traumas that have existed.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (25:13 – 25:16)
Right, here’s the one bad thing happened in our community.

[Mike Butler] (25:16 – 25:33)
So anyway, so yeah, so there, there is that sense of fear that may or may not be, and I think in many cases, not necessarily attached to the reality of the circumstances, and so, and so now we have this sense of fear that kind of leads into that sense of codependency.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (25:33 – 26:03)
Yeah, well fear, fear leads one to want some kind of protection. I want to move to Kristen, we’re going to talk about our philosophies, how we got involved with Project PACT, where we hope to go with the future of putting together, you know, building community and police together. So Kristen, tell us a little bit about your philosophy, how you got involved, how you, what you believe, what you hope for, and your vision for the future.

[Kristin Daley] (26:04 – 26:05)
Sure, thank you, Carol.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (26:06 – 26:07)
In five minutes, right?

[Kristin Daley] (26:08 – 29:23)
Oh, that’s a lot to pack in in five minutes, but so a lot of what I’m hearing, kind of the through line of what Mike is talking about is all around trust. And I was in a room with some very smart people recently, and someone said to me, progress moves at the speed of trust, which I thought about a lot later. And it’s very true.

And thinking about the narrative around police culture and community trust, police on a systemic level, and I’m not talking about individual officers here, but the system was not really designed for the way that we are hoping that it will operate. So police have played a role in damaging the trust with communities. And so I mean, from New Blue’s perspective, police have an obligation, a responsibility to participate in this narrative around changing what policing looks like, and taking accountability for the harms and working toward really community centered solutions.

And I love what Mike is saying about a system of, you know, a patriarchal system, and how we need to move away from that, because communities know what communities need. And we need to be asking them what they need, we need them to be fully participating, it needs to be a partnership and not a system of enforcement. So when I think about what the ideal future could look like, I think it’s really important to acknowledge that policing is going to continue to exist in some form.

You know, I know that there’s a lot of thought out there around do we need to move away from police entirely? And from my perspective, that’s that’s not really realistic for where we’re currently at. And so we need police and communities to really engage in this mindset where they, they are working together, and that they do have the power to shape what the future looks like for the justice system.

And for us to build police agencies that fully collaborate with other community stakeholders as equals, and share this responsibility for public safety. And at New Blue, we really carefully select the officers who participate in our program, we want people who are really motivated to advance policing, as this career of true public service, we want to give them tools and support networks that they that they would need to accomplish real change in their communities and work together. Because police are a part of their communities, they’re not this separate entity.

And we can really significantly expand the number of people that are contributing to this to building better public safety, and to building this nationwide network of departments that are forward thinking, and are solutions driven. So I think, including examples of police with the right mindset in the narrative around change is critical to advancing work with potentially less traditionally receptive audiences. And we need to emphasize that policing is about public service, it should be about public service, it’s not about enforcement, or being guardians or overseers.

It is being a part of the community. And so it’s a chance to influence the profession and reduce the footprint of policing in a really positive, healthy way.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (29:25 – 30:45)
And, you know, I think the foundation of all of that is you’re working one on one with these officers as they come in. And, and we’ve had a lot of talk about what, what would cause someone, what would cause a person, a man, a woman, a young person, to be, to want to be an officer in public service? Because, you know, quite frankly, they face danger.

They face a lot of unknowns. They face people, maybe on the worst days of their life, they face people that are emotionally, could be violent. So, and, and we, we who work around this subject, know that public service is this noble, very dignified profession.

And yet we have, you know, in our society today, in, in, in the news, you see a different side of that. So talk about that, that idealism, that hope that you see when you’re working in New Blue.

[Kristin Daley] (30:46 – 32:46)
Yeah, absolutely. So I think if you asked most police why they embarked on this career, they would tell you it’s because they want to help people, and they want to help their communities. And I genuinely believe that most of them do.

But I think that the system in a lot of ways sets them up to fail, because the system is not designed with that community collaboration in mind. And so I think people get into this many, many times for the right reasons and become very kind of broken down and jaded by working within the system and, and hearing a lot of criticism for what they do when they sincerely want to make a difference. And, you know, maybe they’ve gotten off course a little bit.

But I think, you know, it’s really important for us to remember, there are good people working in the system. And they want to make a difference. And they want to call out the things that they see that are wrong and the things that they see that are not working.

So we, at New Blue, want to provide them the platform to do that and the platform to get back to what the profession is meant to be, which is to make a positive difference, to keep people safe, to work collaboratively with them, to offer communities resources and not to just cycle them through the justice system. And you mentioned, you know, recidivism reduction a little bit earlier. And, and that’s the goal.

We don’t want to keep punishing people arbitrarily, we want to give everyone the resources to create a good life for themselves. And that’s a lot of what we’re focused on at New Blue is that, you know, policing can look very different from the way that it looks now. And a big, big part of that the the first and most critical step is to open up a conversation and place that trust back into the community, and vice versa for the community to start building trust in police.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (32:47 – 34:21)
Right, I think that conversation between community and police, certainly, as I came into this, working in this area, it’s like, really, they talk to each other. Because, because most people, their encounters with police is either over a day that they made a mistake, maybe a traffic ticket, or a day that they experienced a tragedy. And, and so to have a conversation to understand that a policeman is a human being, and, and that they actually have our best interest at heart, that’s how they come into it.

I, I do believe that we have so gotten away from the, the, the understanding of the benefits of public service and what it truly means to somebody, that they might, I don’t want to use the word sacrifice, but that they would stand in, they would be there for you. On one of those days. So Mike, tell us about your philosophy.

You know, you know, you’ve come into this field, you did come from a sense of public service of wanting to be there for other people. And, and talk a little bit about your philosophy, in terms of how you see the future, again, the hope, what’s possible, the goodness of policing.

[Mike Butler] (34:21 – 42:01)
Yeah, thanks. I really enjoyed listening to Kristen as she, as she outlined her perspective. Thank you, Kristen.

And I, I want to build on that a little bit, too. Because, you know, there’s about a million police officers and auxiliary type people that are working in our police departments in this country. And I’m absolutely convinced that those 1 million police officers can make a huge difference in terms of what’s going on in our communities all across America.

And I think that should be the police profession’s goal, in terms of how we leverage those million police officers to create that level of safety, to create that kind of future that we all kind of want to live into in terms of what we’re, what we’re, what’s happening in our neighborhoods, what’s happening in our communities. And to be able to partner with not just the citizens, but with all the other service providers, and not see themselves as kind of in their fortress-like mindsets, but to see themselves as a part of a much larger organism. And that they’re, they’re part and parcel of something that’s much bigger than they are.

But, and the one thing that I want to build on that was what Kristen said was, I’ve never known someone to get into policing without a high level of what I’ll refer to as idealism. And, and they, it’s normally couched in the phrase, I want to help people. I want to make a difference.

I want to do something that’s going to help our, help this community. Almost always, we hear that from every single police officer that we’ve hired over the years. And we’re not, we’re not alone.

Every police department in America hears that. So that idealism is alive and well and robust in our police officers, when they get into this profession. And sometimes some of the things they hear at the beginning are, you know, don’t, don’t pay attention to what you heard in the academy, or this is how it’s going to be done.

It’s not going to be done any differently. And, and just let go of your sense of the world, you can make this world a better place and make a difference. They hear that almost immediately.

And I think there’s something there that that goes on in our police department cultures that kind of allow that to happen, or maybe enforce that at some level in terms of, of that kind of subduing that idealism. And what Project PACT wants to do is say, you know what, that idealism is important. In fact, it’s so important, we’re going to call it a form of social capital, something we need to protect, something we need to enhance, something we need to preserve, something we need to expand.

And so as police officers go through their careers, their, their sense of idealism, their sense of wanting to make a difference, I’m not saying it’s not going to ebb and flow, because it’s not an easy job all the time. In fact, it’s hardly ever an easy job. But that idealism, that sense that I can make a difference, that sense that I can help someone on their worst day, needs to stay alive and well, for every single police officer.

And that’s how those million police officers can make a difference in this country. In fact, turn this country around. That’s what that’s what I tend to think is, the vision is, these million police officers can have a great impact on the well being and the wellness of our community, in terms of how they operate, if they’re working in partnership, and if they’re sustaining that idealism, and if they’re seeing people as not necessarily as weak or air prone or limited, but having great capacity to be a partner in terms of helping make the issues that they’re confronting better. And so for us, that’s what that’s what this comes down to. That’s what this comes down to.

And what we hope to do with Project PACT is to be able to develop a culture that can can support that. So that when a new police officer starts his or her day, the first time at a police department, they’re hearing, welcome, we’re glad you’re here, we know you can make a difference. And we want to help you continue to make that difference every single day that you’re here as a police officer.

That’s a part of the culture we want to see happen. And so I just also want to, Carol and Kristen, I also want to talk a little bit about one more thing around some history here, that I think is very, very important. And that is the nature of the definition of justice in our, in our society right now.

And it’s been this way. It’s been kind of based on retribution and fear. In fact, I might say that retribution and fear are probably the primary emotional precipitators towards the development of policy and practice.

In fact, we get that a lot in terms of what’s happening. And so the nature of justice has this almost primitive feel to it for me. And that it’s, it’s an eye for an eye, or we’re going to exact a pound of flesh.

When someone is victimized by a crime and someone from the media sticks a microphone in front of their face and say, what is it you want? Invariably, you hear, I want justice. And what they mean is they want a pound of flesh.

They want an eye for an eye. And we get that, we understand that in the moment. But can we do something about enhancing and creating a nature of definition of the definition of justice that’s a little bit more enlightened, that takes into account what’s going on with the victim, that takes into account how we can have offenders who’ve committed harm, who’ve committed crimes, be able to choose accountability in a way that serves not only them, their families, but also serves the victim in the community?

Can we create a sense of justice in which the voice of the community has influence on the outcome of what happens? Because right now, it’s a crime against the state. And once that crime against the state happens, very, very impersonal things begin to happen.

The criminal justice system has this rigidity about it, and everything, the professionals take over. And so that’s where it’s at now. And so we need to expand and have a greater enhancement of what justice is.

But up until now, our police officers and police departments have been operating in a society in which justice is kind of defined more primitively. Now, I’m not saying, not for a moment, or any of us saying that there aren’t people in our communities that need to be removed, maybe permanently from our communities. We know that’s the case.

Because if we don’t, our community is not going to be safe. And we’re also going to be talking about where’s the pendulum go between the rights of an individual and the rights of a community? That’s going to be a whole show down the road in terms of where does that pendulum go?

What are the rights and responsibilities of a community? And what are the rights and responsibilities of an individual in that community? And how can we balance those in a way in which both the individual and the community’s rights and responsibilities are clear, and serve the good of the whole?

And so this nature of the definition of justice has been rather kind of, it’s been, it’s been backwards, it’s time, it’s reached a diminishing point of return in terms of its effectiveness. So we have to get into this mode of what is our role in the criminal justice system? What is the role of police?

What’s the purpose of police? And we’ll be talking about that more.

[Kristin Daley] (42:02 – 42:48)
And so I think that’s a really interesting point. And coming from the perspective of someone who’s worked very directly with victims of crime, most times victims of crime don’t feel like the justice system served them to the best of its ability, either. I don’t think a lot of victims, particularly of serious and violent crimes walk away feeling good about the process.

I think the justice system, as you said, Mike, it’s a crime against the state. I don’t think it takes into account the, the, you know, feelings or needs of the person that experienced the crime. And public safety isn’t just the absence of violence, it’s the presence of well being.

And in order to make that a reality, we need to collaboratively take care of each other.

[Mike Butler] (42:50 – 43:39)
Well said. And I’m just going to say one more thing with that, that’s, it’s been bugging me since I’ve been in this business. And that is, there is no legal provision for the voice of the victim in the criminal justice system.

There isn’t. And so sometimes there’s jurisdictions that kind of cosmetically create something. But all in all, the victim gets lost in the shuffle.

And when we talk about public safety, we never talk about, hardly, we talk about the rights of the suspect or the rights of the offender. We talk about the cops. But we hardly ever talk about either past, present or current or future victims.

And that’s the conversation that we need to elevate in a big way. So thank you, Kristen.

[Kristin Daley] (43:39 – 43:54)
I love that you said that. Thank you. So Carol, I know you have a very different background and perspective on all of this from Mike and I working directly with police for so long.

And I would love to hear more about your background and your vision for all of this.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (43:54 – 50:07)
So I come from a background of community and community leadership and with parents who were business owners in a small town. And watching a community that always came together, worked together to meet the needs, the well-beingness of the community. Neighbors, all people who could come together and put together a mental health center.

They didn’t depend on other people or the government to do it for them. They did it themselves. Or to create a thriving arts center.

That was my model. And so as I raised my children and looked for community involvement, I was service minded and worked in service organizations, worked with the youth. And I like that you brought up future victims.

Also future, I don’t want to say future criminals, but future people that don’t have others’ best interest at heart. That led me to youth leadership where I learned great things and started working with high school kids. We put a service club together and I was just thinking of this young man we did after school play things where the entire elementary school could come together, but the high school kids were kind of mentoring and playing with them.

Just unstructured play. Somebody came to me and said, hey, we got to watch out for this angel kid. He might be kind of on the fringes of a gang.

And so I pulled him in and had a conversation with him. And I said, you know, you have an opportunity to be a leader. You’re the fifth grader and there’s kindergartners here.

We don’t have those conversations in community anymore. We, as Mike says, we leave it to the service providers, the experts. And these were high school kids.

I also, I watched one time we were in a tournament and my group was playing in the tournament and a kid said, who are these kids? I said, oh, they’re community service oriented. They want to do good things for the community.

We want to make a difference. You know, high school kids coming up. He said, you mean they’re all in trouble?

Because kids that were getting in trouble were being assigned community service hours. And we lost this sense of when we say public service as a police or public service as a volunteer or into social capital, those are big, big terms that we don’t really use out in society anymore. What is the benefit of being altruistic to your community of getting in and meeting the needs and meeting people and connecting?

What does it do for you? What does it do for the community? I took that into my graduate studies and really went into social capital and social entrepreneurship.

Now, this is where my philosophy comes in. What we have today, Kristen, you said something about the rigidity of the systems, right? The rigidity of the criminal justice system, the rigidity of a police department, the tradition, the way we’ve always done things.

And you guys kick back to me if you want to interrupt, whatever. But I think I think what’s happened to us is we stand back and we let others figure it out when we all have the capacity to create solutions, to create options, to create something. And social entrepreneurship says you take all these things into consideration.

You could call it human centered design. You can call it the innovation process. You can call it anything you want.

But what I know is nothing is rigid. We are people. We all have capacity.

As Mike says, we all benefit from being socially connected. If we can live lives of emotional good self-management and connecting with others, we can create beautiful things in our community. I was thinking, as Mike talked, you know, I get to be a resident of Longmont, Colorado, and I get to understand.

I walked into a neighborhood meeting the other night with a city council person, and it was in a tough neighborhood that used to be very, very tough. And Mike worked with his group, and one of the residents that was there said, boy, you should have seen this in the 90s. And they were talking about, still, the officers are there.

Young officers were there that are trying to, you know, they’re making these connections. And I see it in action. Police and community together talking about what is possible.

But I think it’s bigger than that. I think it’s not just when there’s maybe a problem in the community. Let’s talk about how all communities, all neighborhoods start to come together, because we can be a real force for goodness in all of society.

So I look at the very big picture of what social capital can do, how the gifts, how the talents come together, and we figure it out. Nothing is rigid. Nothing is in such a form that it can’t evolve into something better.

[Kristin Daley] (50:07 – 50:31)
I like that a lot. And I would agree with you that I think, you know, connection and communication are kind of the antidote to that rigidity that the system tries to create. And the example that you gave with Angel is, you know, we can’t skirt critical issues.

We need to confront them and address them and talk about the problems in our culture if we’re ever going to resolve them. Right, right.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (50:31 – 50:51)
And if you get young people believing that they have a voice, that they can be heard, and that they have something to give, a generation will change all of it. So it’s pretty exciting. This project is super exciting for me.

I love working.

[Mike Butler] (50:51 – 54:41)
Yeah, I do want to add one more thing that I think is important to the history. I don’t think the police profession is broken. I don’t think our communities and our society is broken.

I just think sometimes in that evolutionary process, we can get stuck. And sometimes we just have to have a little bit of, we have to have fulcrums and leveragers to help us get unstuck. And Project PACT is going to try to help become a fulcrum or a leverage point where we can maybe help police departments and communities get a little bit unstuck from where they’re at right now.

But everywhere I look, I’ve been a police chief. I was a police chief for over a quarter of a century. And I was also a fire chief for about 15 years.

And in both professions, I ran across and encountered numbers of police chiefs and fire chiefs, city managers, and especially mayors, who understood very little about how to shift and transcend a culture. They understood very little about organizational development or human resource development. They weren’t trained to do that.

We have very little training in this country that helps the CEO of a police department or sheriff’s department, or I don’t need to talk about fire as much, but even fire departments, or city managers and especially mayors, who know very little about a skill set. When they’re overseeing sometimes hundreds, if not thousands of staff, hundreds of millions, tens of millions, or hundreds of millions of dollars in budgets, an untold number of management systems within the organization, and tremendous numbers of variables and factors that play into a culture of an organization, what that looks like, what the conversations look like and don’t look like, what kind of questions can they ask or not ask?

And so we’ve been kind of stuck in that mode. And sometimes when we select a police chief into the profession, sometimes we select, using a baseball analogy, the 20-game winning pitcher, the person who is really skilled at pitching, but may or may not be skilled at leading and managing the complexity and all the variables and factors that go into an organization that has hundreds, if not thousands of people. And it tends to not hundreds of millions of dollars of budget resources.

It takes a tremendous skill set to be able to shift that. Right now, what we end up doing is rearranging chairs. We end up plopping in plug-and-play programs, or we change the technology, or we add a policy, or we shift the organization in terms of its architecture a little bit.

Or maybe the most popular thing we do when a police department, when there’s something, a tragedy that happens in the community is we replace the police chief. Those are the things that we’ve done. And all of those things are, as what we’re calling this show, band-aids.

And so the question becomes is how do we get beyond the band-aids? And that’s the essence of this. And we hope that police chiefs, city managers, mayors are willing to kind of take this in and listen to a perspective that Project PAC can offer in a way that provides them with a much more in-depth understanding of the nature of organizational development, human resource development that can really assist them in shifting and transcending the cultures that currently exist in our policing profession.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (54:41 – 56:01)
Thank you for listening today for this, our second introduction of Beyond the Band-Aids for Project PAC. We hope that you will go to our website, projectpac.org, sign up for our newsletter. Mike has a pamphlet called Safety in Our Hands that was written with Peter Block, the author of Stewardship and Community and several books, a very well-known national author in organizational development.

And that’s a free copy for you. Just go on and request your copy. We’ll be announcing some of the training that’s coming up.

It should be available in January of 2025. We’re excited about putting these together. Kristen and Mike are available for advisory collaborations with departments or with city managers to think about how to put some of this training if you want it in person.

And again, we’re excited about the project. We’re excited how this is going forward into a new vision, new creation of beautiful collaboration between community and police together. Thank you.

[Speaker 4] (56:02 – 56:53)
Thank you for tuning in to Beyond the Band-Aids with Project PAC. 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.