Police and Community: Are They Problems to Be Solved or Possibilities?

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

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

[Carol Engel-Enright] (0:59 – 1:23)
Welcome to this episode of Beyond the Band-Aids. We are Project PACT. I am Dr. Carol Engle Enright, kind of a researcher, creative person. I enjoy neuroscience and thinking about how to bring a new vision to the future. I’m gonna let each person identify themselves. Mike.

[Mike Butler] (1:24 – 1:58)
So, hi, I’m Mike Butler and welcome to Beyond the Band-Aids, where we’re going to discuss what we believe are more in-depth, plausible solutions to what we’re encountering in our communities and how we can engage our communities and our police departments together. I was a public safety chief where I oversaw police and fire in a community of 100,000 Longmont, Colorado for 25 plus years and bring some practical experience to these conversations.

[Kristin Daley] (1:59 – 2:17)
And I’m Kristen Daly, executive director of New Blue, which is a national incubator for police policy change. I’ve spent 17 years in police policy and training and train and consult law enforcement and other organizations on best practices for trauma-informed and survivor-centric policy.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (2:19 – 4:31)
So, Project PACT is a new organization. We have a website up at projectpact.org. I hope you’ll go and visit that.

We’re working between three nonprofit organizations, Law Enforcement Action Partnership, Kristen’s New Blue organization, and the School of Statesmanship Stewardship and Service. We believe that the future can be shifted. We can create the future we want to live into.

And so we’re working really hard with both police and communities, not just one or the other, to bring about the concepts of well-beingness, healthy communities, safety, and belongingness in communities. Today’s episode is going to discuss policing. Is it a problem to be solved, or is it a possibility?

Because, you know, it’s interesting. Mike and I have been traveling for the last three weeks, almost the last month, and as we go around the world, we were in Asia, Southeast Asia. As we go around the world and listen to our own news and try to keep up with what’s going on, of course, we’re, you know, I think every day if you turn on the news or open a newspaper or open your phone, you’re going to see something that happened relating to crime or violence.

And I think a lot of people start their days off with feeling like the world is not such a friendly place, that we may not have aspects of safety. So police are necessary in civilized society. And I want Mike to just kind of go through how policing works in a community, how it’s organized within a community, and how it’s different between communities, because we don’t have one set standard on policing.

[Mike Butler] (4:32 – 7:45)
No, we don’t. In fact, in this country, we have close to 19,000 police departments, and literally there is very little national coherency amongst 19,000 police departments in this country. And each police department does things a little bit differently.

There’s no national standards to bring about that kind of coherency. Whether we need it or not is a different kind of question. But on the other hand, each police department does it differently.

Each community has its different relationship with their police departments, and they’re somewhat of an evolutionary mode there in terms of how those relationships are going. And sometimes those actions by police departments and the role that police departments play can be politicized locally, whether it’s a local politicalization, whether it’s a statewide politicalization, or a national politicalization, in terms of how police departments operate within their own communities. But most police departments operate, I believe most police departments operate somewhat in a vacuum.

They’re somewhat faceless in their communities. There’s not a lot of personalization, or as much as we think in Project PACT there should be. And that there is somewhat of a separation between police and communities.

And oftentimes, you’ll hear police departments say, and their leaders say, if you need us, call us for anything. And for the most part, communities have taken them up on that in terms of being unhealthily dependent on their police departments. And so there’s this almost patriarchal-like relationship in which the police department kind of is in charge of safety, and takes the lead in terms of what safety is going to look like, and what they’re going to do.

And the major role that police departments play across the country is one of enforcement, and that enforcement is necessary. But we also believe that enforcement is something that communities can have a voice in, in terms of what kind of enforcement are we talking about? And should it be a little bit more judicious?

Can it be a little bit more refined? Can we focus more on really what the real harms are in a community versus a one-size-fits-all approach to how we enact policing in our communities and across the country? So Project PACT, and this podcast, Beyond the Band-Aids, will be focusing on that in a great deal, significantly, in terms of as we move forward with these programs.

And communities, we want to see our communities step up and really be partners in bringing about that sense of safety that they want to see. And we believe that safety really won’t happen in a community or across our country to the level that we want to see it happen until our communities are more responsible, take a larger role for that responsibility around safety in their communities.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (7:46 – 8:41)
Yeah, Kristen, you’ve spent 17 years, 20 years, all of your adult life working in kind of policy and research around policing and around community safety. And what are you seeing? How are you seeing this shift that’s happened maybe over the last 10 years?

It’s been a little bit of an up and down. We talked in the last episode about defunding and refunding when people want to get tough on crime or when they feel their society is at risk. So talk a little bit about what you’re seeing in terms of the possibilities that, because we’re going to stay focused.

We’re not going to talk about today about the problems. We’re going to talk about how to create a future. So what do you see as possibilities going forward?

[Kristin Daley] (8:42 – 10:25)
Exactly. So I really agree with what Mike said about kind of there being this patriarchal view of policing over the years. And there has been a shift probably within the last 10 years, maybe more, a little more, a little less toward a real focus on community organizing and having the community have more of a say in what public safety looks like.

And that has maybe been setting us up for a bit of an us versus them type of dialogue where we’re saying, well, the police want things this way and the community wants things this way. And there doesn’t necessarily need to be that divide. Police are a part of their communities.

And, you know, when we think about this push for a reduced footprint of policing, a lot of those concerns are really valid. But we also do need to acknowledge that policing is going to exist in some form for the foreseeable future. And we need to focus on getting on the same page and hiring police who want to do this job in a way that reflects true public service.

And there’s a possibility there for police and community to open this dialogue, to get on the same page, to both focus on community safety and well-being, and to allow both sides to feel heard, have their say, contribute to the conversation. So for me, the possibility is bringing this us versus them debate to a close and seeing the community as a whole, including the police, and having that conversation. What does the community overall need?

What do they want public safety to look like? And how can we all contribute to that together and move it forward?

[Carol Engel-Enright] (10:26 – 11:53)
Yeah, I want to encourage our listeners to go on our website, projectpact.org, and download or request a copy of Safety in Our Hands. Mike put together a pamphlet with three other national authors and people who’ve worked with society and community organizations and neighborhoods their entire lives. And one thing that I noticed, I was rereading this morning, is that the concept of safety is truly unique, individual, within each person.

What can you do in your neighborhood, on your block, if you’re walking down the street? How do you present yourself in terms of safety? I want to ask Mike, in terms of that, how did it get to where we are kind of…

You said words like faceless and the personalization. We don’t tend to… And I suppose in a small town, you might know the police officers in a very small community because you might have more contact with them just on a social basis.

But what happens as you move into medium-sized cities and urban centers in terms of connecting with the police and the community?

[Mike Butler] (11:54 – 16:51)
Well, let me just say that the name of this particular program is policing communities, discussing are we trying to… Do we see them as problems to be solved, policing communities, or do we see them as possibilities? And up until now, I think we’ve…

Our approach to trying to work with the police profession, the institutional policing, and police departments across the country, and our approach to working with communities in terms of trying to bring about safety, is that we’ve seen them as problems to be solved. And our communication, our conversations, interactions have been kind of reflective of seeing them as problems to be solved. I wanna say that when we get into problem-solving mode, and we have to, I get that, but we typically are solving the past or the present even.

And we’re doing very little outward looking towards the future in terms of what the future can look like. And that’s where the word possibility begins to surface in terms of what kind of conversation and what kind of action are we taking? So that to me is the essence of this program.

And we’re that way with all of our institutions, we’re that way with a lot of our conversations, we’re that way with how we are in our relationships, we’re trying to solve problems, we’re trying to work with the past, and that’s okay to a point. But we’re suggesting in Project PACT is that we try to figure out how we can create a different kind of future. And we have to have different kinds of conversations.

And so when we try to, when we look at the police department or the police profession as a problem to be solved, we get into modalities of creating new programs, or adding technology, or doing things with policy, trying to change policies, or oftentimes rearranging an organization or even changing the leader of an organization, thinking that these things are going to really shift and transcend the culture of that police department. And my own experience says that those things don’t work because we’re in problem solving mode.

We’re not necessarily gotten into the mode of how do we create a new future for our police department? What’s that look like for us versus just trying to solve the problem? And so in our communities, when we look at our communities as problems to be solved, and by the way, our police departments typically look at the communities they’re working in as problems to be solved and not as possibilities.

When you look at that, when you begin to see the community as a problem, you say, well, we need more legislation, or we need stiffer penalties, or we need to enforce our laws more, or we need to figure out how to get rid of the bad people in our communities. And so those are kind of the, and the police see themselves as this thin blue line when you see the community as a problem to be solved. If we looked at our communities as possibilities, we would begin to open up the conversation and create a different kind of space and place for our communities to engage.

Because right now, our communities, many of our communities and people and citizens in our communities don’t know if they even have permission to be part of the conversation or don’t know if their gifts, their talents, their resources, and their expertise can play a role in creating a new future. And so we have the, you know, in Longmont, the community that I was in, we opened that up in significant ways in terms of creating a conversation around invitation to be, for our community to be more engaged. But they tiptoed into that conversation as well.

They weren’t sure about themselves initially. And then eventually the community became more engaged and became less dependent on police and became more responsible for the safety, which created something much different in terms of the community’s engagement, the community’s role, and created a different relationship, by the way, too, in which there’s that sense of partnership was becoming more real for them. And so we had to shift a lot of our way of seeing the community.

We didn’t, we stopped looking at it as, you’re a problem to be solved. That’s a whole new conversation. That’s a whole different conversation.

That’s a whole new response. That’s a whole new set of actions versus seeing them as a possibility and creating something where something new could occur, where we can create a future together, that future that has those qualities of aliveness and being that we all want to live into, and we all want to inhabit. And so I’ll leave it at that in terms of what those roles are.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (16:51 – 18:31)
I like that both of you are using the word create quite a bit. That’s part of my entire life, my teaching, my research. I just want to say our School of Statesmanship, Stewardship and Service, SOCIS.org, was teaching classes on democracy this summer. And I sat at a small table, and we talked about envisioning or creating a future. And some of the people, of course, these are all citizens, they said, well, I don’t even quite know how to do that. I don’t know how to think about a new vision for the future.

So Kristen, I want to ask you, you’re working with New Blue, you’re working with several different cities and some of the officers within those cities. When they come in, how do you get them into this envision of a future? I know you take them into, they work around some projects, things that they can work on with the community.

How do you get people to, and I’m just going to say, I have a design background and design and creativity happens on that side of the nervous system that allows us to expand our thought and connect to more mindfulness and new visions. So how do we get there? Because that’s what we’re all about.

We’re beyond the band-aids, we’re beyond these programs, the next technology. I’m glad you brought that up, Mike. But how do we really get there?

How can you talk to people about creating a new future?

[Kristin Daley] (18:32 – 21:14)
So I think what you both just hinted at, or Mike said outright, about communities not being sure that they even have the permission to participate in the conversation really resonates with me. I think there is this historical tension, particularly with communities that have been really disproportionately impacted by the system. And I don’t think it’s beyond repair, but we need to acknowledge the power dynamics here.

So there’s this perception that police hold all the power, and that’s in large part due to the historical kind of culture of policing in the current culture. And under a shared model of public safety, those power dynamics look very different. But that begins with us leveling the playing field and emphasizing shared responsibility and collaboration.

And given the history, that does begin with police taking the first step and listening to community needs. And in order to build allyship, all stakeholders need to feel heard and feel like they can trust the process moving forward. So for New Blue, that’s where we start.

We make sure that the officers that we are bringing into the program are forward-thinking and have the right mindset, meaning that they want to work with their communities and they want to build that trust. And then at the point that they’re actually in our program and starting to work with us to develop these solutions, number one, we want to make sure that the solutions actually address community needs from the entire community’s perspective. They start to develop the idea of what that project might look like within their community, and they work side-by-side, police and community members.

So the first step is problem identification, identifying a problem within the police departments in policy or practice that they can change and turn into something good. The second step is co-production, working with the community to develop a systemic solution, and that will eventually become their capstone presentation and their capstone project. And the third step is impact measurement.

So we want them to analyze, amplify, and ensure the longevity and sustainability of the solution. And every solution is developed in support from our research team at the New Blue Solutions Lab, and they ensure every solution is data-backed and pressure-tested and it’s viable for the future. And the community plays an enormous role, especially in that first phase of problem identification.

We want to know that this is going to be something impactful and something that amplifies the good in the community and what’s working well and addresses the things that aren’t working and fixes them.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (21:15 – 22:26)
Yeah, Mike, I’d love for you to give an example of when you worked alongside community, how, I know you opened up your meetings, you invited the community, you allowed their voices to be heard, but you also, I think Kristen, you brought up the idea of the shared model of public safety and the responsibility. So you know what, when you’re a citizen, if you really want to engage and make changes in your community, you have to walk in with an open mind and you have to be willing to listen as well. The communication that happens between, you also talked about the power dynamics.

It’s not, I’m not going to speak just to you. I’m going to be with you. We’re going to connect.

We’re going to see what is shared. I love the shared model of public safety. So Mike, I know you opened up your meetings, you allowed the community to come in, you set up a strategic plan with the community.

Talk a little bit about how that changed the power dynamics within your department.

[Mike Butler] (22:27 – 32:01)
Yeah, sure. Well, that was, it was evolutionary for sure because that patriarchal relationship existed and the community didn’t know whether or not their voice was really going to count when we initially made an invitation for them to become engaged and become part of developing our police department in many ways, whether it was the policies and procedures of our police department, whether it was who we recruited as police officers.

You mentioned the strategic plan. Our first strategic plan process included a thousand people, 800 people from the community and 200 plus people from our police department at that point in terms of the development of that plan. That plan took 18 months to develop because the necessary conversations needed to happen.

Conversations that never happened before between police officers and people of our community occurred during that 18-month process. We had to be patient with that time frame in terms of making sure that people felt more comfortable. They did feel invited.

They did feel and believe that their voice counted, their thoughts mattered, that their humanness was valued. That became critically important for us that they felt like they belonged and so we developed in that strategic plan a three to five year plan that we basically created a future. We created a different future than the one that we created.

We created something different from the present. We created something that was different from the past. Once we had that document and once those conversations all occurred, the people in the community were much more engaged, much more willing to be part of the development of all of the strategies, hundreds of them, that we actually put in place during that strategic planning process.

A thousand people, 18 months. I would encourage any police department in America to go through a process like that to really begin creating that equilibrium, creating that level playing field between the police department that they’re in and the community. You got to create a place for conversations to occur.

The room won’t change. The essence of a community won’t change. A police department won’t change.

The relationships won’t change until those conversations are encouraged and until they happen. That was in essence where we went initially in terms of moving forward to create that partnership. Our motto was policing in partnership with the people.

Partnership has certain attributes associated with it. One is joint accountability. What happens between who’s accountable for how we move forward, who’s accountable in terms of the safety, who’s accountable for how we create a new future?

And so our community became more engaged during that process because they began to trust that their voice counted, their thoughts mattered, and they began to see and realize that there was this opportunity to say, hey, here’s how we can create a different police department. And so you’re right. We invited our community into our facility and into our meetings and their voice was very much a part of what we did and how we did it and how we moved forward with policies and procedures in a way that they believed that they were very much a part of the creation of what was going to happen in their community and in our police department.

And so there’s much more to go with that, Carol, but that was in essence what we ended up doing with everything. At least the community was involved in who we hired, who we promoted. They were involved in how we investigated crimes.

They were involved with everything that we did. And I know most police departments are concerned about the agendas that people might have when they get involved in their police departments. Do they have axes to grind?

Do they have agendas that maybe serve an interest, self-interest versus serving the interest of the whole, the good of the whole? And what we found almost exclusively was that once you invited people in and once they were part of these conversations, that they were very much seeing beyond their own interest and the interest of the good of the whole. Part of what we did was we shifted the nature in the police department of the kind of conversations that we had.

The invitation conversation is a very powerful conversation. It does level the playing field because you’re not mandating, you’re not forcing, you’re asking someone to consider another option, to be involved, to be engaged. People can say no to that invitation.

And basically that was a form of our leadership philosophy internally. We didn’t want to operate from the mandate perspective or that the brawn of rank was going to rule the day, so to speak. That’s very patriarchal.

We wanted to operate from a very partnership-oriented perspective within our police department, which by the way, for people listening to this, when our coursework, the things that we offer in terms of our curriculum is very much, we can teach police departments and leaders how to do this. We can give you examples, we can give you academic, practical, and experiential ways of figuring out how to have the kind of conversations that can be transforming. So invitation is one form of conversation.

Dissent is another form of conversation, allowing people to say no. If you can’t say no, your yes really doesn’t mean a lot. And dissent is how diversity gets manifested in terms of the nature of the conversation.

It’s not rebellion. Dissent isn’t rebellion. Dissent isn’t withholding.

Dissent is just giving someone the opportunity to say, that doesn’t fit for me, and I’d like to be able to do something different. Someone saying no can be the first conversation to getting to a different form of partnership. And so if we were all on a board together, if all of us were on a board of an ABC corporation, we would all have the right to say no.

That’s part of a partnership, is being able to say no. Your voice counts as much with your no as it does with your yes. And so that kind of conversation becomes important.

The conversation of possibility, which this program’s about, becomes important. Possibility isn’t about prediction. It’s about creating something that doesn’t exist yet.

It’s a new form of conversation that says, here’s what I think can happen that’s different than today. And giving people that opportunity to be part of that possibility conversation. It’s about the conversation of commitment.

It’s getting to that point where you can say that I’m committed to this without condition. And so we’re not talking about tiptoeing into these conversations. We’re talking about commitment.

What do those commitment conversations look like? And so we can teach people how to have different conversations that are more partnership in the framework of partnership than in the framework of patriarchy. And what that looks like.

Because let’s face it, in any community, I don’t care how small or large it is, there’s all these great minds, there’s all this great creativity, there’s all this great resourcefulness, there’s all this incredible expertise, these gifts, these talents. And a police department’s role should be very much aligned with how can we surface and activate and eventually coordinate all of those talents and all that expertise and all the gifts that people have. Just think if we could do that.

Our social and health issues are going to be more resolved that way than through legislation, than through stiffening of penalties, than by putting a chokehold or a monopoly on who gets to make decisions. Like Kristen said later, who identifies the problem? Who’s part of solving the problem?

Who’s part of creating the solutions? And then ultimately, who’s part of executing these solutions? That’s where we need to go.

It’s not so much, you know, who’s going to be the right person in the right organization and having that kind of monopoly on it. It’s about how we create a whole that’s greater than the sum of all the parts. And all those parts need to include community.

And when you begin to look at the nature of your conversations, you have to consider that whole. And you have to consider all the parts and all the pieces that can be part of that arrangement. And so police departments and municipal governments have to be good at being able to do that versus saying, we’re going to pass a law, we’re going to stiffen the penalty, we’re going to add more legislation that somehow is going to have this kind of magic effect on resolving or curing or healing a community’s woundedness.

I’ve never seen that happen, by the way. Never seen that happen. And so that’s where we’re going to have to go.

And that’s what Project PACT is about. And that’s what Beyond the Band-Aids, this podcast is about. And so that’s where we’re headed.

[Kristin Daley] (32:02 – 32:40)
That point about dissent and being able to say no or even being able to ask questions is so important because it’s often met with defensiveness and, you know, a negative reaction. And how do we open police and their communities up to the possibility of having that conversation and not being afraid of a no and not being afraid of questions or pushback, but using that, like you said, Mike, as an invitation, a starting point to a deeper conversation? Or you mentioned connection, Carol.

How do we use that no or that dissent as a point of connection rather than a roadblock?

[Mike Butler] (32:40 – 34:00)
Yep. I just want to add one more thing, Carol. In our walks that our police officers did in our community and that I did as well, that was a big part of what we did when we showed up on people’s streets without an agenda and made it clear to people that we wanted to hear what their perspectives were and who they were and where they were coming from.

When we did these hundreds and thousands of walks in our community without a police agenda, so to speak, it was amazing how much people opened up and how safe people became and how open they were to an invitation to become more engaged in their community. You know, 80% of the people we talked to were enthusiastic about becoming more engaged in what was going on in our community. It didn’t make any difference what our invitation looked like, but the invitation was, the quality invitation led with we were there, we were there, we were there in their neighborhood, we were there in the street, their front yard, their driveway, sometimes their living rooms, and having these conversations that kind of set up, if you will, a sense of, hey, we can be part of this.

We can be part of moving forward as we create a new future.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (34:01 – 35:46)
I want to talk about, both of you have talked about gifts. Some of the words that have come through are around being a public servant, being involved with public service. I’m thinking about, you know, Mike and I were recently in Cambodia and a young man who was one of our guides talked about a point in his life where he felt useless.

And he figured out how to put together a school, an after school program for the children there to learn more English and to learn computer skills. And he said, all of a sudden, I felt useful. And I wonder how often our police officers, our community organizers want this, they have this idealism about making change and affecting change.

And then they can’t quite get to, how do we do it? And I love this conversation that we’ve talked about in terms of sitting down, having the conversation. Kristen, you talked about the defensiveness that most people feel or the, you know, we’re in a, we’re in this kind of culture right now where people are afraid to say anything because they don’t know what the reaction is going to be.

They don’t know what’s going to happen. And, and, and so both of you, can you talk about the, the, the gift, the, the beauty of the spirit of working with the public to affect change? Because I know you both have been there.

[Kristin Daley] (35:47 – 36:58)
Yeah. I mean, I, I think it starts with giving people, you know, making them feel like they have the opportunity to be heard. I think if you give people the opportunity to be useful, a lot of times, most of the time they will rise to the occasion and be useful.

People want to feel like they can contribute. And if we put them in the position of kind of feeling like they’re just supposed to go along and not be a part of the solution, they feel less invested. If you give people the opportunity to express what they need and how that fits into the greater good, they’re going to want to help you work toward that solution.

And I think that’s what we’re seeing now when police and community have these conversations around, what are the things that we want to see change? What are the things that are working well? When you give people the opportunity to be directly involved, they’re more likely to be directly involved and work with you.

There’s going to be less defensiveness and less resistance because they’re going to be a part of it rather than just kind of an inactive participant.

[Mike Butler] (36:59 – 42:28)
That was so well said, Christine. I want to go back to the title of this particular podcast. And if people in a police department, public servants, and by the way, Carol, I want to just back up and talk about the sense of police idealism.

When people get into policing, 99 times out of 100, if not 100 times out of 100, police officers get into this work because they want to make a difference, because they want to help people. They really mean that. They don’t necessarily know what it looks like yet, or how it’s going to feel, how it’s going to play out, but there’s this urge going on inside of them.

There’s this feeling and sense of, I can make a difference. I can be useful. And part of what we want to be able to do with Project PACT and talk about on this podcast, Beyond the Band-Aids, is what police departments can do to not only leverage that idealism, but expand it and protect it in a way that police officers sustain that idealism throughout their career.

Oftentimes, you hear the stories or you hear the theories that, well, once a police officer becomes a police officer, they go through these stages where they end up in this deep cynical mode of being a police officer over a period of years, three to five years. And what we want to be able to do is to help police departments create a culture in which that sense of idealism stays alive, stays well, stays healthy, and is at the surface of what people are trying to do within their police departments so that they can begin to see that police idealism is a form of social capital, and that police departments begin to realize that they have to leverage it, they have to protect it, and they have to do whatever they can to sustain it and expand it. So I just wanted to comment on that. But this program is about seeing police and communities as problems to be solved or seeing them as possibilities.

And we can do that in our relationships. If you look, it all depends on how you see people. In my mind, that’s what it comes down to.

If you see people as problems to be solved, if you see people as ear-prone, or as limited, or as weak, or as likely to make mistakes, your conversations are different, your approach is different, your sense of who they are is different. But if you begin to see people as possibilities, you open up something, and people begin to see and feel that you see them differently. There’s a certain level of presence that people begin to feel that when people see them as a possibility and as having something to offer, and begin to see that their gifts, they begin to see that you see that they have these gifts to offer.

Sometimes they may not even know they have these gifts, and that’s one of the roles of a leader, is to acknowledge that people do have gifts, and people begin to see that they have those gifts. They can become more useful. The other thing I want to talk about is this dynamic of belonging, what that means and looks like.

Peter Block wrote a beautiful book called Community, The Structure of Belonging, and I encourage people to read that book. And in that book, he talks about two dimensions of belonging. One is relational.

I belong to something. I belong to something, which is very important. The one is ownership.

Something belongs to me. And when someone believes that something belongs to them, they’re more likely to make an investment in that what belongs to them. If they don’t believe it belongs to them, if they believe it belongs to the police department, or the community belongs to something else, and they don’t feel like they’re part of the community, or they don’t believe the community is theirs, they’re less likely to make an investment.

So a big role that a police department can play in a community is creating that sense for the community and citizens in their community that they do belong. And that’s a role that they can play. And that’s a big role that we believe police departments can play in the future, as we create futures, is a sense that citizens do belong.

They have something that is theirs, and they have something that they’re a part of. And when people feel like they’re a part of something, and something is theirs, that they own, there’s a sense of ownership, that they’re more likely to be a co-creator of something new in the community, and they’re more likely to take care of it. If you rent a house, you’re not likely to take care of it and paint it.

Or if you rent a car, you’re not likely to even wash it. But if you own that house, and if you own that car, you’re more likely to take care of those things. So there’s a big deal here.

And a patriarchal relationship has more of this renter-like mindset. A partnership relationship has more of this ownership-like dynamic attached to it. And it’s more than subtle.

It’s very distinct. And so police departments can play these roles, and they have these legitimate platforms that they can utilize to help bring about that sense of belonging by the citizens in their communities.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (42:28 – 44:08)
Yeah, I love all that. Boy, the entire community perspective, working side by side, this idea of partnership. The public perspective, how do we shift it?

I’m going to ask each of you kind of as we close up. How do we shift this public perspective? We’re given one narrative by the media.

Every time a policeman, a police officer, makes a mistake, it makes the news. Not every time a police officer saves a life or helps someone does that make the news. We have to start putting a focus on the goodness and this perspective.

All of us come with our individual perspectives, our individual beliefs, knowledge, training, experience. Whatever relationship we’ve had with a police person in the past may affect the filter that we see policing and community safety in. How can we work to create this concept of service through the possibilities of partnership with policing?

Think about and talk to what can each of us do to become more engaged, become a little more interactive with our own police departments as policemen and as citizens?

[Kristin Daley] (44:09 – 45:33)
I think we need to start with empowering both police and communities to take accountability, take responsibility. We need to start looking at culture change from the top down and the bottom up. We really need police chiefs and leaders who advocate for their teams and include the entire department in decision-making processes the way Mike did in Longmont.

We need officers who are willing to choose alternatives to the way it’s always been done. We need city leaders and officials who really prioritize innovative approaches. And then we need community members who are willing to step forward and express their needs and make them known and be willing to engage in that dialogue with their police department and with their city officials.

And then we also really need to avoid kind of a checkbox approach. We really need to think deeply about the current culture and what we want it to look like moving forward. And we want to place the emphasis on overall community well-being and how we get there and make that our continuing and long-term goal.

And we really need to avoid that us-versus-them mentality. We need to make sure that everyone feels collaborative, everyone feels accountable, and everyone feels connected and a part of this.

[Mike Butler] (45:34 – 48:03)
Kristen covered a lot of bases there in terms of what these things are going to look like. I just want to go back to what Project PACT offers, a police department and a community. And we do have instructive curriculum and coursework that gets down into the details of what Kristen just talked about in terms of what that looks like, how you can shift and transcend a culture within police department.

From one of patriarchy kinds of ways of operating to want a partnership, to ones where a few voices count, to one where everybody’s voices count, to one where people are willing to take commitment and own the organization and own the culture and own their actions, to those kinds of ways of being within an organization. And once that happens, how that transfers into the community in terms of what a police department does in the community. Because if police officers are saying that they’re being led by leaders, stewards that are very much oriented towards believing that their voice counts and their thoughts matter, they’re much more likely to transfer that into the community than if they’re being treated in a way that, you know, when we want your opinion, we’ll give it to you, so to speak.

And their voice doesn’t count that much. It’s hard for police officers to transfer that into the community where they’re working in this partnership arrangement with the community. And so Project PACT offers the coursework to help police departments, to help leaders figure that out in terms of what that looks like for their police department, and then how their police department can be working in partnership with the community in ways where the whole does become greater than the sum of the parts, where they’re seeing the community not as a threatening kind of, they don’t feel threatened by the community’s responses as much as they feel invigorated by the responses that the communities have around how policing can work and how the communities can become safe.

So Kristen covered a lot of bases with her response and I liked what she said.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (48:04 – 49:31)
Okay, we’re going to wrap it up. We encourage all of you to go to our website projectpact.org. Please sign up for our newsletter.

We’ll have our first edition of the newsletter out in the first of the new year. And we will be, you can request information on collaborative advising where either Mike or Kristen come into the community and work. We have in-person classes with Carol and Mike that can come into your community and take you through some training and work with you on schedules like that.

If you are a citizen, I’m going to say, you know, say hello to your neighbor today. Make your own neighborhood a little safer place to live. Think about what you can do to connect to others and just stay involved.

Please listen. This is going to get more exciting every week as we start to expand and bring on some of our guests to talk about where this is working in the United States as communities open up to more well-beingness, healthy community trust, public safety, a shared model of public safety. It’s not just all on the police department.

It’s on all of us that we can we can be better, live better, and create a future that we all want to live into. Thanks for listening.

[narrator] (49:32 – 50:24)
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.