Building Stronger Communities: From Dependence to Interdependence

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 – 2:52)
Hello, we are Project PACT. Today we’re going to talk about community. And the first thing I want to say is this is what distinguishes our difference as a group working on this, I’m not going to call it an issue, this future of the vision that we have for community and policing together.

That that we open up some doors, and we open up dialogue, and we open up conversation, and we open up trust. We’re going to be talking through some trust today and where we are at at present with the current state of police and community in America. But specifically today, we’re going to talk through community.

I’m Carol Ingle Enright. I’m the founder of SOSES, School of Statesmanship, Stewardship and Service. We came together as a group of citizens in our community to think about how to create a more engaged citizenship, how to have people, we could we could train them, teach them, we work on effective communication, we work on social emotional learning and social emotional skills.

And most of all, we learn on connecting people with other people. To put the power back into people. I think so often, people go, well, that’s, that’s a problem in our community, but that’s their problem.

And government needs to fix that. Or I’m a citizen, I’m interested, but I don’t know how to fix it. And so together, I always say we can do anything if we do it together.

I want to pass it to Mike Butler. And Mike, tell us a little bit about you and where you come from and how you think about just community in terms of, especially in terms of Project PACT.

[Mike Butler] (2:53 – 5:08)
Oh, thanks, Carol. I appreciate. It’s good to be here.

Mike Butler. In my former life, I was the public safety director for the city of Longmont, where I oversaw police, fire, emergency management services, a few other services. And, and so, and I’m also a co founder of the School of Statesmanship, Stewardship and Service along with Carol, and whose curriculum and courses and classes we’re using to help teach in Project PACT.

But the subject of community, I think, is maybe the most important subject we’re talking about in this whole arena of policing community together. Oftentimes, when you see how do we increase the relation, how do we enhance the relationship between police and community? How do we create a community that’s healthier?

How do we create a community that can enhance its own wellness? We often talk about services from a government perspective, or in this case, from a police perspective. But I think what gets left out often is the the essence of community and why that’s important.

And Project PACT will be focused very much on helping a community figure out how it can be part of creating safety, how it can be part of creating its own wellness, how it can help heal its woundedness, how it can help fix the social health issues. A lot of communities, as Carol said, kind of defer and delegate. And there’s reasons for that, that role to the experts, to people who, who have said that we know how to solve these problems.

And so we’re excited about being able to make a case and present in a way that says community has as big a role, if not bigger role in enhancing its own wellness and healing its own woundedness in creating safety in their community. And so I’m excited about that. And I’m looking forward to this podcast for that very reason.

So I’m going to pass it over to Kristen Daly. And take it away, Kristen.

[Kristin Daley] (5:08 – 6:38)
Thank you, Mike. I am the executive director of New Blue, which is a national justice reform incubator for collaborative action between police and the communities they serve. I’ve also had a 17 year career in police policy change, and am currently on the board of the Law Enforcement Action Partnership, who is a sponsor of Project PACT.

I think when we talk about community, we’re talking about a lot of different things. One thing that’s really important to acknowledge right off the bat is that police are not a separate entity from the communities they serve. They are a part of the community.

And we need all community stakeholders to be participating in public safety. So what our program does is actually pair police with community activists or organizations in their area, and work together to produce solutions to challenges within police departments within their policy and practices, and actually build this project that is sustainable, that is actionable, and that addresses a challenge in the justice system that brings police and community together in a shared model of public safety. And I think, you know, historically, communities have, you know, maybe the ones most in need of that interaction with police have been the ones most afraid of it or resistant to it.

And what New Blue does is really put them in a position where they share equal power, and create the solution that is based on community needs as defined by the communities.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (6:39 – 7:01)
Okay, so both of you talked about the current relationship. I’m going to kind of break this down. As I’m listening to you, I’m thinking, we use community as in terms of like its own beingness, right?

But community is made up of, I’m going to put whom. And Mike, I want you to go first. Who is community?

[Mike Butler] (7:02 – 9:22)
Well, community is all of us. And I like Kristen’s perspective around police is not a separate and apart from community, nor is government, nor is a municipal government. Oftentimes, it can feel that way.

Oftentimes, it can feel like, well, here’s the here’s the role of government. Here’s the role of citizens. But we don’t necessarily talk about, here’s the role of government citizens together.

Here’s the role of citizens and community and police together, what that looks like. We don’t necessarily have those conversations to the level that we do. But, you know, in any one community, everybody that resides there, everybody that lives there, everybody that kind of works in that community, even sometimes people who visit those communities are all part of that community, and need to take a role of ownership and responsibility for, you know, the wellness of that community.

And so that’s going to be a big part of what we talk about today. But in my mind, no one’s left out. Everybody is part of what’s happening, and needs to take ownership for the current realities and for what we want to be able to create in the future.

And so that’s going to be the nature of our discussions as we move forward with Project PACT. And so for us, everybody has a voice. Their voice matters.

Their thoughts count. Their humanness is valued. And not just part of the community, but the other essence of this is the belonging aspect of, you know, it’s one thing to say, I live in the community.

It’s another thing to say, I belong in this community. And that’s a big part of it, too. If people don’t feel like they belong, they may not want to make an investment.

They may not want to be a co-creator. They may not want to try to take care of the community. I think you’ve heard me say that, you know, there’s a couple of dimensions to belonging.

One is, you know, one is relational. I belong to this community. And the other is one of ownership.

This community belongs to me. If those dynamics of belonging are alive and well in people, they are community. They are part of our community.

And in my mind, responsible for taking care of our community.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (9:25 – 9:53)
So… I always get to this question, because we’ve got individuals out on a podcast, they’re listening, they might be in police, they might be in, they might be a resident of a community, they might have just moved to a new community. What do you think it takes for an individual to be responsible, to take responsibility and to take ownership for the safety and well-being of right where they are?

[Kristin Daley] (9:53 – 11:31)
Sure. So I think, particularly with communities that have been disproportionately impacted by the system, that process really needs to start with breaking down the perception that police hold all the power within, you know, the structure of public safety and the structure within the community. And a lot of that comes from the police culture that we’ve had for, you know, generations.

So under this shared model of public safety, those power dynamics will look very different. And that begins with us leveling the playing field and emphasizing this shared responsibility and collaboration. And, you know, given that history, it does take police beginning, police kind of taking the first step by listening to community needs, and having a conversation, and treating the community as peers, rather than, you know, this perspective of, well, we’re law enforcement.

And that’s a conversation that Mike and I have had a lot using the phrase law enforcement versus police versus public servant. I think the real first step in getting a community to actively participate in public safety is the police empowering them to do so. But I also think communities need to come to the table ready to have that conversation.

And for the average person that probably starts with getting involved, getting engaged in the things that are happening in your community, you know, taking that step to put yourself out there and become part of the solutions, and part of doing what’s good and amplifying the good.

[Mike Butler] (11:32 – 16:59)
That was so well said, Kristen. I hope people listened to what you just what you articulated there. It was beautiful.

And I want to build a little bit on that. Because I think historically in this country, police have kind of been the folks when it comes to safety and social health issues in terms of who’s in charge, it’s been the police. They’ve been the ones who are in charge.

And so as a result of that kind of we’re in charge mindset, there’s been somewhat of what we’ll refer to as a paternalistic or patriarchal relationship in terms of, since I’m in charge, I’m the one that identifies the problem, I’m the one that comes up with a solution. And oh, by the way, I’ll be the one that kind of puts the solution in action. And so that kind of unlevel playing field that has existed in our country, in almost every community, it exists still to today.

There is not there’s not a lot of room and space for someone to say, I want to participate, I want to be involved. And so because of that, I’m going to kind of double down on what Kristen said, it will be the role of whether it’s a government entity or the police, to be the first ones to step up and say, we invite you to be part of what we’re what we’re working on here, we invite you to be part of healing our community, enhancing its wellness, fostering the safety. And so police have to get good and government officials and leaders especially.

Because I can I can see individuals that I remember when I was working, who believed they were powerless, who believed they had, they didn’t have permission to they didn’t even know they had gifts. They didn’t know they had the wherewithal. And so they thought they were powerless.

They thought that well, this is why we call 911. This is why we call the cops. This is what we’ve been told in the past is that you’re kind of in charge.

And we’re the ones who and you’ve always told us if you need us, call us for anything. And so those kinds of conversations and that kind of mantra is kind of set up the community to kind of take a backseat. And to kind of kind of hear this phrase of, well, we’re here, we can fix it.

You don’t need to do anything. We’ll let you know. And so that’s been the nature of the conversations.

And it’s still very much the nature of a lot of conversations around the country between police and the communities they serve. And so Project PAC will will help people see that they’re not powerless. Will help communities see that they have the wherewithal.

And by the way, they have permission. And you don’t have to ask for permission to take what matters into your own hands. Please, we want people in the community to take what matters into their own hands.

And so, so that’s going to be a big part of how we move forward. And oh, by the way, you have gifts to offer. You have things that we, this community, could use if we could figure out how to integrate those gifts with the rest of the community or your neighborhood or sometimes just a few households in your neighbor, in your neighborhood.

And so there’s ways of, I can remember so many incidents and where when we would talk to people as if they were like a deer in a headlight. They had no idea what to do. They had no sense.

Because that’s kind of how we, that was the nature of the relationship. So for us, Carol, I think it’s a great question you ask is, how does, how do we take people, how do we work with people who have for so long been treated as powerless, who have been treated in a way that says, we’re in charge and you’re not. We have the answers and you don’t.

In a way that says, no, the opposite is now true. And so we need your voice. We need your thoughts.

We need your humanness. We need your gifts. And so it starts with how you have conversations, which Kristen mentioned, how you have conversations with people.

And the first big conversation that we need to have with people is one of invitation. Because invitation levels the playing field. It doesn’t say I’m in charge.

It doesn’t say you don’t have, you don’t have, you’re powerless. It says we need you. We want you.

We’re inviting you to the table. We want your voice. We want your thoughts.

People can say no if they want, but that’s what, that’s what gives them, that’s what levels the playing field. They have a choice at this point to say no or yes. The other big conversation we have to have with people is one of gifts.

Here are the gifts you offer. Here are the things that you have that no one else has. And we want to be able to leverage those for the good of the whole, for the good of our community, for the good of this neighborhood.

So it starts with changing our mindsets around who’s in charge, who has the power, and as Kristen so eloquently said, the shared power model. That becomes critically important. And so we will help communities through Project PACT, and we will help police departments change the nature of their rhetoric, change the nature of their language, change the nature of their narrative and conversations.

In terms of how do you create a space and a place where people feel safe to say, my voice counts and my thoughts matter, becomes critical.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (16:59 – 18:56)
Okay, so I want to get to that, that place where you feel safe. I’m reminded of, Mike and I were teaching a class on rights with responsibilities, kind of, you know, how you stand up for your human rights, your, your, your citizenship rights, and then how you take responsibility for the places that are around you. And we had a student that came up afterwards, and she had, she had been involved with a situation with a neighbor.

And so I kind of want to head into neighboring. And the, it didn’t go well. And so the police got called, which I think probably everybody listening to this podcast might have been in a situation like that.

Or certainly if you’re a police officer, you might have been called into service on, on a situation like that. And she’s, she said, she looked at me and she said, what do you do? What do I do?

What do I do now? I said, well, have you had a conversation with your neighbor? And so the concept of neighbor or have you had a conversation with your neighborhood?

Can you go around and, and, and sit down? Does it have to be the police? Does it have to be the government that we so often say, I’ve got to call them in?

Or have we gotten into this place where we just so mistrust everyone? How do we start to rebuild that concept of, of safety within us, among us, between us? And I, Kristen, I’m going to have you go first.

I know you, you’ve worked with, you’re working with active organizations, nonprofits, other areas that you can get to, to kind of resume this, this, this understanding that I am in a safe place. I do have my gifts to share with others. And we can be community together.

[Kristin Daley] (18:58 – 21:09)
Yeah, I think you’re exactly right. It does start with having a conversation. It starts with being open to hearing the other person’s perspective.

And that’s true in one on one interaction with with your neighbors. And it’s true with when, you know, you have a town hall forum, or you go and talk with your police department, or some other, you know, government entity, it starts with being open to hearing someone else’s perspective, and being open to kind of meeting in the middle and finding a solution that does work for everyone. And often, I think, you know, community members might come into this with a perspective of, I have different goals from my average police officer.

And I don’t think that’s necessarily true. I think police and the communities that they are a part of, do all have this goal of living in a community that is safe, that is well, where, you know, it’s peaceful, and there’s not, you know, chaos or tension. So I think everyone within the community can agree that those are probably the ultimate shared goals.

And if we’re not open to hearing what that means to someone else, we’re not going to get anywhere. So what we do at New Blue is start with having the officers who participate in our fellowship program, actually have that initial conversation with community members, whether that means gathering, you know, kind of a focus group, or putting out a community survey, or identifying an organization that they’ve worked with in the past and, you know, maybe not had the most productive relationship with. How do you go to that group or that person and say, what do you need?

I think we have to really stress that communities do know what they need. And sometimes they’re not always laser focused on it, but a conversation that initial, what are your needs here? What can I do to make your situation better?

That can bring out a lot of ideas, and it can bring out solutions to the challenges that we’re all facing. So I would really keep circling back to what you said, Carol, and just be open to having that initial conversation.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (21:10 – 21:36)
Okay, Kristen, thank you for bringing that up. I wrote down some of the shared collaborations, but that there might be some different goals between what the community is hoping for and what they perceive the police have for the community. And so, Mike, you were a chief of police for 26, 27 years in a community.

What were your goals for the community?

[Mike Butler] (21:37 – 26:33)
Yeah, I don’t know if I necessarily had goals as much as I invited people from the community to come in and share their goals, or to maybe help form their goals, because this was an initial kind of process for people, never having been invited into a meeting, never having been invited to be part of conversations, never having been invited into saying, hey, here’s what needs to happen. And so there was this kind of tiptoeing, if you will, by people in the community wondering whether or not it was safe, wondering or not whether what I was asking, I was really being sincere. And so there was a sense of, what is he really talking about?

What does he really mean? And so we had to work through that sense of trust, that sense of newness, if you will, that sense of novelty of my voice counts as much as someone else’s at the table, including yours, Mike. Because I would always tell people, I would say your voice counts as much as anybody’s, as long as your interest is bigger than your own self agenda.

If your interest is about your own personal agenda, your voice probably won’t count that much. But if your interest and agenda is about what’s best for the community, what’s best in terms of how this police department can deliver a service that’s valuable to the community, I can guarantee your voice will count as much as anybody’s. People didn’t believe that at first.

It didn’t take long for that to shift or change. But initially, it was all about opening up myself, being vulnerable, if you will, to what people had to say. Because we stepped into a set of circumstances here in Longmont, where there had been a double shooting and killing of two Latino young men by a police officer in our community not long before I became the chief.

And so there was a lot of mistrust. There was a lot of a sense of what’s going to happen here. And so we had to work through all of that.

But once people were at the table, and once we began having conversations, and once we began seeing—and part of the dynamic here was one of facilitating meetings in which there were community members and police officers and people who had rank within the organization at the meeting, those people who always thought that they were in charge, people who thought that their voice counted more than others, perhaps, that there had to be some facilitating of making sure that people realized there was a level playing field. And so that was a big part of that as well. But ultimately, the persistence of the continual invitation to people, the continual suggesting that your voice counts and your thoughts matter, the continual acknowledgment of their great ideas and their pearls of wisdom became critical to the process as well.

And sooner or later, we had a—we ended up with a long-range strategic planning process that took 18 months and included 1,000 people, which included 800 people from the community and 200 people from our police department staff. And the reason why it took 18 months was because it started off with this unlevel playing field. It started off with people not knowing that they had a voice, and it started off with people who believed their voice counted more than others.

And so we had to kind of slowly but surely, here’s where my arms are going. I can’t show you, but there’s the equilibrium, the sense of there was a level playing field. And so it took that long for us to realize that that level playing field was a reality, and that the conversations that eventually would take place took place amongst equals.

And so, but that was one process we went through. But the idea of inviting people to the meetings, the idea of meeting people where they were at, in their living rooms, on their streets, in front of their house, in their driveway, became another big part of leveling the playing field. Because it wasn’t just invite people to a government building to have a meeting.

We also had to go out and say, we have to be in your domain. We have to be where you feel safe, where you feel comfortable. And people did.

Once we were out there in that community, walking neighborhoods, we did this early on, all the way through, that people began to see that that was a part of how we did business. And that we created venues where people felt safe, and people felt like, you know, they’re in their home, they’re in their sphere. How do we work it from that point?

[Carol Engel-Enright] (26:34 – 26:46)
Beautiful. I know we’ve had the discussion around how the patrol car became a dividing, you know- It became an obstacle. It became an obstacle to people.

[Mike Butler] (26:46 – 26:55)
It served a purpose, but it also became, well, this is my office, and I don’t get out of my office, so to speak. Yeah.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (26:55 – 28:24)
And if I do, you might be in trouble, right? There might be a reason for that. There might be a reason.

I love that you were talking about self-interest. And, you know, I think when people think about showing up at a government meeting or a government agency, or they’re coming in with, oftentimes they’re coming in with discord, maybe, and they’re certainly coming in from self-interest. Shifting the culture of both, you know, we talk so much about shifting the culture of police, but shifting the culture of community, what can we, how can we be proactive with shifting the culture?

I know, you know, SOSUS School of Statesmanship is working with in-person classes and growing the numbers of the classes. So people kind of have the concept of this. Kristen’s working with it with community projects.

But how do we move from a media state that says we’re very divided, we’re very polarized, to we can be in unity with each other in this concept of, and I kind of want to get back to this goal. What is our common goal for community in terms of safety? Kristen, I’m going to let you kind of take that on.

That was a lot.

[Kristin Daley] (28:25 – 29:54)
Yeah, I think our common goal is for everyone to feel safe and know that they’re safe, and for there to be, you know, kind of generally a feeling of peacefulness in the community and not have this tension or this angst. I really love what Mike said about people need, people do need to know that they are safe to come to the table and have that conversation. And once you have people feeling safe and feeling like they can use their voice, that’s when they start to feel like they’re equal participants in the process.

And I love the example of the patrol car. It makes me think of, so when we’re talking about crime survivors, during the interview process or, you know, taking the initial report, I always tell officers to, you know, put yourself on equal footing with the person that you’re speaking with, because you’re going to have a very different interaction with that person if you’re coming in wearing your badge and your gun and introducing yourself as officer so-and-so versus sitting down with them, being on eye level, introducing yourself by your first name. That’s a very different dynamic.

And I think it’s exactly what Mike is talking about with the example of the patrol cars and meeting people in a place where they feel safe. And then, yeah, I think the ultimate goal is for everyone to feel safe.

[Mike Butler] (29:55 – 35:29)
So let me add to that a little bit too, Carol, because I may not have answered that question originally as you as you asked it, but in my mind, the whole idea was that we have a community of 100,000 here in Longmont, and how can we create a whole that’s greater than the sum of each of every one of the people in their parts, so to speak, it wasn’t just about individuals. It was a collective mindset around community as well, because strength is a number, strength is found in the collective, safety is found in the collective, safety is found in social interaction, safety is found in connection, partnerships, and a sense that I’m not alone and that I belong, and that I belong to this community and that this community belongs to me was always a big goal. And so it was never just occasionally you’d have to work with one person and that, you know, by the way, the continuum of people we worked with was people who were ready to jump into the deep end with both feet, didn’t need any encouragement whatsoever, and then people who were kind of very tentative, very shy, very maybe not confident in their own sense of what their voice was or what they believed or thought because of maybe their own history, maybe history with police, maybe history with family, whatever that might look like in terms of what was going on for them. So part of the role of, of a leader, in my opinion, is to understand that that continuum existed and that people continue exist up and down that continuum. And sometimes it’s situational.

Sometimes it can always be, it can always be a situation that brings about some sense of, I don’t feel safe, or I feel fearful, or I’m intimidated. A leader needs to figure out in the way they communicate, in the way they talk and how they have conversations, is to understand through that emotional intelligence that that’s there, that’s alive and well, and how you can help people kind of feel better about themselves and better about their voice and how you can help them kind of tiptoe towards that aspect of who they are. And they can begin to see, because another part that I, you heard me talk about before is, it’s how we see people.

If we see people as air prone or limited or weak or barely useful, the conversation is going to be different. And our actions are going to be different than if we see people having almost infinite or unlimited capacity. And that there, that within that person are all these possibilities.

If we see that as leaders, then we end up talking to folks differently. We end up talking differently about who they are, what they bring, what their gifts are, what their possibilities are. We don’t see that person as a problem to be solved or someone to be fixed or see them through the lens of their deficiencies.

We’re seeing them as somebody who has something to offer, have gifts and something to, so there’s that whole nature of how we have conversations with people. And that’s situational as well. But my goal was always to say, I didn’t want any neighborhood to feel or believe it was unsafe.

And I also knew that that neighborhood, the more coalesced, the more socialized, the more got to know each other, the more got to understand and connect that would create a safety. It wouldn’t be the number of armed guards in that neighborhood or else otherwise police that we’re going to make that neighborhood safe. It was going to be to what level of social capital, to what level they were willing to coalesce and knew each other, to what level they felt comfortable with each other were working and, and, and doing things for each other, knew each other’s schedules, knew each other’s families, all those, all those things in terms of the more they knew that the safer that community became, and I can’t think of a single neighborhood that when it got to that point was, was full of crime and disorder, in fact, the opposite was true and I would challenge anybody across this country or anybody listening to this to say, when a neighborhood gets to that point that they are in essence, they are, they have created their sense of safety, they have self created that trust, that sense of I belong and this neighborhood belongs to me and I, and I belong to this neighborhood. Once those dimensions and realities are in existence for people in the neighborhood, the police don’t have to be there. In fact, our motto, our, our, our, our metric for effectiveness in, in our police department was we’re no longer needed, people don’t call us anymore.

That was our metric for effectiveness. And that needs to be all of our metric that needs to be everybody in government’s role for effectiveness is that we’re doing so well in terms of building self-reliance instead of reliance on us, we’re doing so well in terms of building self-sufficiency that they don’t have to be, they don’t have to be dependent on us that we’re no longer needed and so I would invite every police department, every police official to reconsider what their metrics are when it comes to your role in your community and so if they constantly need you, you’re constantly getting calls for service and you’re, well, that may sound good and feel good initially, but ultimately it’s, the, the mantra shouldn’t be, if you need us, call us for anything. The mantra needs to be, we want you to become self-sufficient, self-reliant so you don’t need us anymore.

[Kristin Daley] (35:29 – 35:52)
That’s just a perfect way to put it, that safety is about connectivity and a sense of support. And I just, I just love the idea of, I feel like I belong to my community, my community belongs to me. That’s, that’s exactly what we want to instill in people and empower them and make them a true part of their communities.

That was perfect.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (35:53 – 37:03)
Yeah, I’m excited for episodes down the line where we get more into the, how do you bring a neighborhood along? How do you, how do you work with that? I want to get back to social interaction.

Mike mentioned it, Kristen talked about stakeholders and, and Mike and I were in high schools, a high school last week, talking with senior students and one of the things that came up in terms of conversation was the fear, the uneasiness, the distrust of adults and people in authority. And you know, I know within communities, a lot happens with youth who have maybe not risen to or developed into higher levels of maturity, so I want to kind of go to each of you, Kristen, I’m going to start with you, working in, in places that are dealing with a little more uneasiness and, and angst around working with youth and, and connecting youth and police from the community.

[Kristin Daley] (37:04 – 39:23)
We’ve had a lot of fellows come through our program that want to specifically create programs or solutions that work with youth. It’s, I think, top of mind for a lot of police officers. We have one specific, wonderful example.

We had a fellow at Boston Police Department who created a program based on a nonprofit she had already started called Grow, which was girls reflecting our world. And this program was for girls, roughly mid-teens to early twenties, who were potentially, you know, struggling within their communities, struggling to feel that sense of connection, struggling to find their place and get involved. And her project with New Blue actually addressed the issue of police recruitment and how youth don’t feel that policing is necessarily a viable career option for them.

And, you know, the problem of women not being really involved in policing in leadership roles or, you know, in, in volume was another issue that she thought about and wanted to address. So she created this track of her program to have these girls and young women talk to active police officers and other women in the policing realm, forensics experts and others, and essentially create a branch of recruitment. And it served two purposes.

One, it made the girls feel really engaged and involved in their communities and like there were positive steps and actions that they could take. And then it also addressed the problem of, you know, police departments being more reflective or representative of their communities. We’ve also had police officers form programs around, you know, using body-worn camera to develop positive interactions with their communities.

Or I would say it’s so important for youth to be involved early and to feel like they have a voice and have an opportunity to participate in their communities. And a big part of that is finding those positive relationships with their police department and with their community leadership and government entities. And I think that that’s something our fellows have really excelled at.

Great. Mike, I know you’re on this.

[Mike Butler] (39:24 – 44:19)
Well, no, no. I just want to go back to the opportunity we had to work with about 50 seniors at a local high school here. And in one of the sessions, one of our school resource officers was in the room and each table was reporting out one of their things that they were doing.

And one of the tables, one of the people, one of the young men mentioned how the school resource officer convinced him that he had gifts that he didn’t know about. And it was very moving and inspiring to hear that young person say that. And in terms of what that school resource officer was saying to them.

So the other part of this for us is I totally agree with Kristen in terms of engaging citizens at a younger age. And that was one of the things we do with our middle school school resource officers and certainly with our high school school resource officers is that we’re teaching them what it means to be a citizen. What it means to take civil and civic responsibility, what their role can be in a community that it’s not just, it’s not just, I’m just going to grow up in this community and leave, but I have, I have a role, I have a responsibility.

And so we, we actually taught classes and I was part of teaching those classes in which we helped students see that they could be citizens in this community. They could, they could take their gifts. They could take their, what they had, their offerings and, and make those work for other people.

And, and so, and so, by the way, I would say this to every buddy in America that’s listening to this, that if you want to minimize, if you truly want to minimize the violence in our schools is that we have to figure out how to help those, like one of the things I talked about was, you know, I asked the students in the room, I said, we all know people and you all know people in your, in your school student that may be friendless, that may eat lunch by themselves.

It may seem a little bit odd, that may be alone in their life. And it comes to school and goes to school and no one knows anything about their lives. We just kind of sit back and kind of join her on little clicks.

And so, and so what if three or four of you surrounded those, one of those people and a group of you surrounded another person in a group of you surround, and you said, we want to help you in so many words, feel like you belong, feel like this school’s yours and feel like you belong to this school and this school belongs to you. And by the way, we want to be part of your friends. We want to, we want to eat lunch with you.

We want to do things out of, out of the, when we’re not in school with you. What if we all did that? You can expand that to the community, by the way, because there’s a lot of folks, we have an epidemic of loneliness in this country, but what we, what we can do in our community is there are a lot of people who have those gifts of saying, Hey, I want to help those people who feel disconnected, become more connected.

And so that’s what we could do in our schools. And so if we want to enhance safety in our schools and we can expand that to the community, that is a great first step towards doing that. Oftentimes we get hung up on, well, we need more school resource officers, or we need to arm our teachers with guns, or we need a metal detectors.

We say the same things in our communities. We tend to address the symptoms, the downstream issues of, well, we need more police. We need to make more arrests.

We need to invoke the criminal justice system, or we need to be more aggressive with people who are, who are doing things that we don’t want them to do. Well, there’s an underlying upstream issue that we can address as well. And that has everything to do with what Project PACT is going to be supporting.

And that is helping people feel like they belong, helping people feel like they connect. We’re going to, we can help communities get to that point. We can help neighborhoods get to that point.

Anybody listening to this who’s in a neighborhood, which we all are, you know neighbors that are kind of alone, isolated by themselves. What do we do with that? What’s different?

What can we do differently than just acknowledge that that’s happening? And so anyway, that’s what being a citizen is. That’s, that’s what, it’s helping those who are marginalized.

It’s helping those who feel giftless. It’s helping those who feel like they don’t belong to help them feel like they’re part of the community or part of the neighborhood or part of the school. So I just wanted to bring up that one example where that SRO said to that young man, you have all these beautiful gifts, use them for the good of others.

And it was a power, so powerful for that young man that he brought it up almost emotionally, somewhat emotionally with, with the rest of the students in the room.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (44:19 – 46:14)
Yeah. I think I was there and I think it’ll guide his direction as he moves on into the rest of his life. Possibly, you know, talk about recruitment.

If people could see police as true public servants that connect and provide hope and help and safety in those situations where it’s needed. I just want to get to kind of a wrap up of thinking about how Project PACT is going to bring this forward. And just the training that’s going to be available for community and for police departments and how we’re working on it, how we’re strategically thinking about it.

Mike, while you were talking, I thought about your strategic planning process and how that resulted in a citizen review board that your internal affairs was all within the community. And you did that early. I know we hear about it so often now that, that police are so contained within themselves, but you were, you were doing this 20, 25 years ago, bringing the community together and talking about accountability.

And so maybe let’s address just to wrap it up, the joint accountability, the chosen accountability, and how those can raise the level of interactions, thinking, planning, and being proactive versus so much of what we hear in the news is reactive. But being proactive to combining everyone, letting everyone have a seat at the table.

[Mike Butler] (46:15 – 48:56)
You know, and let me just real quickly talk a little bit about our motto was policing and partnership with the people. That was our motto. But no one really understood what those words meant for a while.

But the attributes of partnership are in my mind, pretty clear. And one is absolute honesty. One is the right to say no.

One is everyone being engaged in exchanging, ensuring that they’re defining purpose for this partnership. And the last one I’ll talk about is joint accountability and what that meant. And a lot of people said, well, that sounds great.

When you said it fast, policing and partnership with the people, the community didn’t necessarily know exactly what that meant. But what it meant was they’re as accountable for their safety as we are. Up until then, it was only the police.

But it took a while for people to realize that they were responsible for their safety, too. But I just wanted to mention that that took a while to create a culture of accountability within the community. But that culture came with the kinds of conversations we were having.

It was the conversation of invitation, the conversation of commitment, the conversation of possibility, the conversation of dissent, the conversation of gifts, the conversation of action. All those conversations had to constantly occur in our community so that people became more and more willing to become accountable, to become committed, and to actually take action. It’s one thing to say, I’m accountable and I can be committed.

It’s another thing to take action. Being accountable and being committed may make the room gentler, if you will, but it’s when we take action. And so it took a while for us to get to that point.

I’m just going to leave it at that. But creating cultures of accountability are different than demanding accountability, than purchasing accountability, or maybe what we do more than anything right now, and that is legislate accountability. Thinking that if we pass laws and stiffen penalties, that will create an insurance policy that will protect us from the human condition.

Those are the ways that we have, those are the old, old, worn out, tired, diminishing point of return models. We need to figure out how to create cultures of accountability where people choose accountability. That’s the only way accountability is sustained, is when people choose it.

And so it takes a while for us to get to that point.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (48:56 – 49:15)
Okay. So, Kristen, let’s hear what you think about joint accountability from both community, citizens, individuals, stakeholders, and police at all levels in their ranks, and how that relates to community.

[Kristin Daley] (49:15 – 50:24)
Yeah, I think, well, thinking about it within the context of Project PACT, I think what we want to do is to amplify and expand the best that policing has to offer. We want to empower communities to value everyone’s perspective and to embrace this shared model of accountability. And then I think we also want to deeply engage in the narrative around police culture and community trust and explore what the history of policing has led us to at this point in time.

We want to look at the current dependence on policing. And I know Mike has talked a lot about that and really beautifully and articulately. And we want to look at viable alternatives to the justice system and think about what that could mean for moving communities more into that mode of shared accountability.

I think we also really want to focus on building networks between experienced police leadership, officers just embarking on their careers, municipal leaders, and the broader community. I think those all play pieces in this shared model of accountability. I love it.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (50:24 – 52:08)
Building networks. I love it. OK, so I’m just going to say to our listeners and our viewers, if you’re online, you got to stay tuned.

Some good stuff is going to be coming your direction. I also want to say call to action. You know, be a better neighbor this week.

Walk your neighborhood, maybe. Walk some public areas. Say hi.

I was looking through some of the things on civility. And being polite and saying please and thank you are just a reminder of the simple things, the one step you can take this week. Or just saying hi, being friendly, or maybe calling on that neighbor you haven’t seen for a while.

Just checking in. Also, please go on our projectpack.org website. Subscribe to our newsletter.

If you’d like to have a download of Mike’s Safety in Our Hands, written with Peter Block, who teaches a lot on partnership and stewardship, please sign up for that. It will be delivered to your inbox. And just tell your friends.

Tell people. It’s a topic that is current. We’re going to stay with what’s current.

We’re not going to talk about the problems. We’re going to talk into the future. We’re going to talk about how to build something that’s greater than what we know today.

So thank you for listening. Thank you for being here. And we look forward to our next episode where we will be speaking about the police.

We will talk about that relationship and what’s happened a little bit and how we can go forward to something better. So thanks for tuning in.

[narrator] (52:09 – 53:00)
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.