How To Create a Culture of Accountability In Police Departments and Communities

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

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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 Engel Enright and Chief Mike Butler have conversations with experts and visionaries who are transforming public service. Discover how innovative leadership, compassion, and restorative practices can bridge gaps and build stronger connections between community stakeholders and police officials.

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

[Carol Engel-Enright] (1:02 – 2:14)
Welcome to Beyond the Band-Aids. This is a podcast from Project PACT. Project PACT is a collaborative between three nonprofit organizations that are working to create a new vision for community and police.

PACT itself means police and community together, holding each responsible for creating a better, healthier community that enhances well-being and public safety for all. So we’re here having discussions about current topics on policing. I’m Dr. Carol Engel Enright. I come from an academic background, mainly around researching leadership and emotional, social, and communication skills. And I represent SOSES, the School of Statesmanship, Stewardship, and Service. We’re going to go around the table and reintroduce ourselves.

If you’re listening for the first time, we’re happy to have you as we head into this journey of conversation.

[Kristin Daley] (2:15 – 2:42)
Kristen, you want to introduce yourself? Sure. Thank you, Carol.

I’m Kristen Daly. I’m the Executive Director of New Blue, which is a national incubator for police and community to collaborate on solutions that change agency policy and practice and build trust. I’ve spent 17 years in police policy and training, and I serve on the board of the Law Enforcement Action Partnership as well.

Okay, and Mike?

[Mike Butler] (2:42 – 3:04)
Yes, I’m also a co-founder of SOSES, the School of Statesmanship, Stewardship, and Service. I was the Public Safety Chief in the community of Longmont, Colorado, a town of a little over 100,000 people, where I oversaw police, fire, emergency management services, and a few other social services. And so happy to be here today.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (3:05 – 5:09)
And Mike also is on the Law Enforcement Action Partnership Board. We call it LEAP, and our funding, our possibilities of making this whole project happen comes from a LEAP. So we’re very thankful for that as we get this conversation started.

Today’s conversation, today’s topic is accountability and creating a culture of accountability. Now, this is not just accountable, accountability to the police. This is accountability of the community as they work with police to create more public safety, to create and enhance well-being in their communities.

So I just want to start out. The definition of accountability means a responsibility. A lot of people talk about rights.

We are in a society that is heavily inundated with the rights of individuals. And yet, you know, sometimes when it comes up around a situation with a police officer, those rights supersede the responsibility of a person. So we’re going to talk about the personal and the collective responsibility and as accountability for both a police department, the individual police, and the community, and the individual citizen.

We’re going to take off and just talk about, and Mike, I want you to start out because you, this is something you worked on your entire career in bringing joint accountability, bringing real transparency to police departments, as you led the police and fire and public safety department. So why don’t you talk about your philosophy of accountability?

[Mike Butler] (5:10 – 10:47)
Sure. And thanks. So part of what I want to talk about is some historical context in terms of how we try to bring about accountability.

And when you look at the nature of accountability in terms of what’s happened, whether it’s internal to an organization like a police or sheriff department, or within a community, much of what leaders try to do is to work on the how can we hold people accountable? Or how can we get to ask questions? How can we hold people accountable?

Or how can we get people to choose accountability? Or how can we get people just to be more accountable? How can we get people to be more committed?

How can we get people to show up? And so those have been age long questions within the police department. I also think they’ve been age long questions within our community.

Because our communities have often said, well, the only people responsible for safety in our community are the police. And when something doesn’t go well, they blame the police, or we’re currently going through a lot of things right now in our country around who’s responsible for what’s not safe. And oftentimes, the institutions get blamed, the leaders get blamed, the organizations get blamed.

And people in their in that same breath, sit back and kind of declare their own innocence, in terms of I’m not accountable, I don’t have to be part of creating a sense of safety in our community or in my neighborhood. And so we’re that’s part of where we’ve been, in terms of people saying someone else is accountable for this. And so we point fingers a lot, instead of being as Gandhi once said, being the change that we want to see.

And how can we be accountable? For me, that’s been a big issue, in terms of creating any kind of partnership between the police and the community is that there’s one side of the partnership that believes that others that that that the entity of police should be more accountable. And so, in my mind, accountability has three dimensions.

One is personal accountability, one is the joint accountability, and one is collective accountability. And we’ll talk about those. But up until now, what we’ve been trying to do is either legislate accountability, by within the organization trying to pass policy, you know, reconstructing new policies all the time.

I got stories about the pounds of policies that were passed out in our organization prior to my arrival, and didn’t see anybody overly thrilled in seeing pounds of policies being given to them over and over again. Or we try to sit back and say we’re going to demand accountability, as if a leader can go up hold somebody’s arm and say I’m going to hold you accountable. And that’s a phrase that we see in here a lot, and that is who’s holding who accountable.

And then the other aspect of how we’ve been trying to achieve accountability is by purchasing accountability. And so somehow putting up a carrot in front of somebody and saying we’re giving them more money or giving them some extras and saying if I give you these will you be more accountable. Some of that’s implied, but that’s often how a way that we try to bring about accountability.

So the historical context has a lot to do with we’re going to legislate accountability, and that happens in the community, thinking that we can fix our health and social issues and make our community safer if we pass more laws or if we stiffen more penalties. Those are things that just haven’t worked in terms of creating cultures of accountability within our community. Or somehow we’re going to demand people to be accountable in the community.

That doesn’t work either. Certainly purchasing accountability doesn’t work in the community in terms of those things being sustainable models, sustainable models for the long term. And so my take on accountability that I think we need to talk about is how can we create a culture or an environment in which people choose accountability, in which people willfully and wantly choose to be accountable, that when they get that first right of refusal to be accountable they actually choose that.

What has to happen from a cultural standpoint for that to occur within the organization, within a police department or sheriff’s department? Because every police person who’s watching this knows that the vast majority of work done by our police officers is done, they do it on their own. They don’t have a supervisor overseeing them or kind of watching them, because they just can’t.

And so there’s a lot of personal accountability going on in our organizations that if people chose accountability instead of it being legislated, demanded, or purchased of them, we would have a higher level of accountability. And the same thing in our communities. We live in a democracy in this country, and the democracy is an honor system.

And a lot of people don’t necessarily see the actions of others. So how can we encourage people and how can we get to that point where we can begin to expect people to choose accountability? And that can come in a lot of different forms.

So initially, those are my comments around accountability and the various dimensions of them.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (10:47 – 12:07)
Right. So, you know, in the news, in the headlines, and we talked over the last, I would say, well, I don’t know, you know, I don’t know when Ferguson, the year that Ferguson happened, It occurred August of 2014. 2014.

So we are 10 years and plus down this road of, of really a focus on police making mistakes, as if they are machines and perfect. I like to think about, you know, how people look at a police person, a police officer and, and forget that they’re a human being as well. They’re dealing with a lot of the same emotions, the same feelings they’re dealing with.

And now, you know, 10 years later, there, a lot of legislation has been passed that could affect a police officer, personally. So Kristen, you’ve been, you’ve been on the LEAP staff, you’ve worked with legislation and policy for 17 years, and now running New Blue. What do you see in training in police departments that is helping the police officers accept responsibility for, you know, making good decisions?

[Kristin Daley] (12:08 – 14:16)
Sure. I agree that you can’t demand or legislate or purchase accountability. But you can definitely hire with an eye toward accountability and you can train with an eye toward accountability.

And I think that really starts with leadership. And it starts with transparency. So getting people comfortable with the idea of transparency within the department internally and externally with the community goes a long way toward creating, creating a culture of accountability.

You know, we have to establish that we are going to be clear and transparent and work towards shared goals. And in any organization, when you don’t have leaders that hold themselves accountable, hold themselves accountable, you know, I don’t, as Mike said, I don’t believe you can really hold someone else accountable and force them into accountability. But we can certainly hold ourselves accountable.

And, you know, leaders who have a hard time admitting mistakes or a hard time asking for advice when they need it, create a team that can’t really be transparent themselves or trust in their leadership. So I think it starts with the boss, the leaders. And then when we extend that internally, it creates that environment for officers from patrol all the way up.

They’re not afraid to admit when they make a mistake. They’re not afraid to, you know, say, hey, I did something wrong. And, you know, they’re not afraid of immediately losing their job if they did something that they didn’t mean to do.

And then when we extend that outward from the police agency into the community, how can we expect communities to trust their police department if the police department is not being transparent or accountable when things go wrong? So I think it’s kind of a two way street. And it starts with hiring the right people, training them well, and making sure that we’re promoting leadership that believes in being transparent and being accountable.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (14:17 – 14:46)
Okay, so so we’re gonna, this takes us to kind of a question of ethics, right? In terms of how one holds themselves accountable. Mike, I want you to talk about as you came in to your department, what you saw first, and then what you did to start opening this door of shared goals, shared transparency.

[Mike Butler] (14:47 – 24:17)
So the the tool that I use the most in working with people in, in creating the kind of culture we created in our organization, whether it’s a culture of accountability, a culture of service, a culture of stewardship, our culture of of, of teamwork, was the tool of utilizing conversations. And, and what I did and what I think police departments can do more of, this may be a word that it gets beyond transparency, it’s actually becoming vulnerable. And it’s actually people, you, allowing people to see you and your humanness and your sense that, that, you know, you’re going to do your best, but you’re human.

And, and, and there are things that you that you, you do that and, and want that you’re going to need others to help with. And so the big part of this in terms of, in my mind was creating a culture of partnership, creating a culture of openness, creating a culture of sense of everyone’s going to have to be responsible for the outcomes. And everyone’s going to have to be personally responsible for their work and responsible for the organization.

And so I kept on having those organ, those internal conversations with people, because for the most part, people were used to a very patriarchal model. And when you go into an organization, in light of or in spite of your background or your beliefs into an organization that’s highly patriarchal, highly hierarchical, and where decisions get made at the top and where you don’t know if your voice counts and your thoughts matter, you tend to kind of slip into that kind of way of thinking in terms of saying, well, someone else makes the decision. So we had conversations around who has, here’s your level of responsibility.

What authority do you need to make the decisions you need to make? We made architectural shifts as well. We flattened our organization.

We eliminated a few layers of kind of management, if you will, so that we actually broadened the bandwidth of people in their decision making process in terms of where they can make decisions. And so if a citizen was to ask a patrol officer or detective, well, what do I need to do at this point? Oftentimes when I got there, patrol officers or line level people would say, well, that’s up to somebody else.

I can’t tell you. And so they would get into this mode of, well, it wasn’t a resourceful answer. It was an answer that said someone else has the answer, not me.

And so how can we create a culture and an organization aligned with a supervisory leadership philosophy and an architectural design that encouraged people to be able to be more resourceful, if you will, to the people that we were serving in so many different ways. But by the way, there is a long-term process for all this to happen. And along with that, as Kristen kind of alluded to, one of the things I made clear was we’re going to make mistakes.

We’re in a very complex environment dealing with the humanness of a community, and we’re going to make mistakes. As long as your mistakes are not intentional or purposeful, I wasn’t going to do anything other than to allow people to learn from their mistakes, because I believe the vast majority of people want to self-correct and want to do the right job and want to do things for the right reasons the vast majority of the time. And so that was the attitude and kind of the nature of where I went with my conversations.

And by the way, I can’t begin to emphasize the importance of the communication link that occurs between the top of an organization and other levels of the organization in terms of bringing about long-term sustainable change. That was something that I focused on tremendously. The conversations were around inviting people to be more involved, not demanding or mandating, or having conversations in which people could disagree or express their doubts or their reservations or say no, even.

Because I realized that if they couldn’t say no, their yes didn’t mean a lot. Or having conversations about what does commitment really look like? What’s commitment without conditions really look like?

And who’s willing to have those conversations or having conversations about possibilities? What could we create that doesn’t exist yet, that could be of value to our organization, that could serve our organization? So there were tons of things that we had to go through.

The other part of this was around the kinds of questions I asked. I didn’t ask questions like, how can I get people to be more accountable? Or how could I get people to be more committed?

Or how could I get people to show up and take ownership for their work in the organization? We asked questions that got to the point of inviting others to examine their own little boxes that they were in. We asked questions that had some power attached to them in a way that said that they had to do some kind of work within themselves to answer the question.

And we asked questions where people in public, in front of others, where people got to say, I choose accountability or I don’t choose accountability. And part of this also got into, in terms of creating a culture of accountability, had less to do with the nature of the people who were there, and more to do with the idea of who’s responsible for the outcomes? And how do we have those conversations in which people can make a commitment, aren’t afraid to make mistakes, and are willing to hold other people at some level?

The four levels of accountability that we talked about was, and when I say hold other people accountable, what I really believed in strongly was the peer accountability piece. And so the most powerful force for accountability in an organization is the personal accountability. The second most powerful is the peers.

And when peers see other people doing things, and by the way, your supervisor may not be there, but the chances of someone being there that you work with, in terms of the work you’re doing, is pretty powerful. So how do we create a culture in which peers can civilly and respectfully say, hey, here’s what I saw you do, and this is something that I have, I wish we could have done differently. Can we have a conversation about that?

The third level of accountability was attached to supervisors. I always said to our staff, you are the first right of refusal when it comes to accountability, but I just need you to know that if you choose not to choose accountability, that we do have supervisors here who will do that. And so and so then the fourth level of accountability was the distant internal affairs apparatus.

Before I got there, we had the year before I got there, we had like 150 to 200 internal affairs cases, because the organization that I inherited was very top down in terms of trying to hold accountability, demand accountability, legislate accountability. And so that was where that was at. And the more internal affairs cases we had, the more people would be accountable.

Well, that didn’t work. And by the way, the laws don’t necessarily, aren’t necessarily all that help people choose accountability to do the right thing because they’re because of their own morals, their own ethics, their own values, etc. So but I just want you to know in terms of finishing this piece, that we averaged after that point, maybe somewhere between five and ten formal investigations from that year forward.

And I would say maybe a third to half of those were fender bender car accidents, because we were we were at some level forced to because the city policy said whenever you have a car accident that someone else, it’s the city employees fault, you have to open up a formal investigation. So we went from very top-heavy in terms of pushing accountability into the organization, demanding and legislating it to an organization in which people began to choose it. But there’s a lot more that goes into that, that the courses that we teach through the Police and Community Together PACT system will help police leaders, city managers, and mayors understand that building a culture of accountability is going to be much more valuable.

And by the way, the only way you sustain accountability is by people choosing it, not by being forced, not by being demanded or legislated or purchased. The only way that it really gets sustained is by when people choose it. And there’s a lot of other aspects to this that go into it that we’ll talk about in our instruction models for police departments, city managers, and mayors across the country.

[Kristin Daley] (24:18 – 24:35)
And I do want to really amplify the point that by empowering people to become decision makers and taking away kind of that extreme fear of making any mistake, we are teaching them to become problem solvers internally and in their communities.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (24:36 – 25:45)
I, Micah, as you were talking, the first thing I want to say that I think is important is you opened up to listening. I think so often the top of any, I can say from an institutional point of view, not much different in a university, right? You know, like do you have the, can you be responsible for making decisions or do you always have to go to the top to say, here’s my idea.

Now you decide. This flattening of organizations really lends itself to creating more accountability as long as everyone’s on the same page of shared vision. So Kristen, you know, how have you experienced, especially around community policing, community-based policing, and some of the work you’re doing in New Blue, how you create a shared vision that people can be accountable to or, you know, idealism, you know, what are we hoping to reach, achieve, and how that affects accountability?

[Kristin Daley] (25:46 – 27:43)
Well, I think once again, it all comes back to listening. So the start of that process means both sides, police agencies, and community leaders, community members, listening to each other, investing time into learning what the community needs and wants from the police agency, learning what the police need to collaborate with community members, and then engaging on a deeper level to develop an understanding of what problems in their community most need to be addressed, and what things are working well and what they can amplify, and what people in neighborhoods are facing that they’re, you know, that they want to work together to remedy or to build on. I think it really all comes down to starting with being open and ready to listen, and as Mike said, vulnerable. And being vulnerable is not always easy.

It’s particularly difficult in environments where there has been that sort of tension that there has been with a lot of communities and their police departments. But being vulnerable, and being open and being ready to listen is really the key. And within New Blue, officers come in with, you know, a forward thinking mindset from the start, obviously, that’s what we’re looking for.

But there are varying levels of comfort about working directly with the community and collaborating on a solution at first. And I think ultimately, the people who come into our program learn that that’s really like learning to collaborate with your community and be on the same side is one of the most essential skills that you will develop as a police officer. So without that kind of trust and that willingness to listen, you’re not going to be as effective as you could be at your job, not even close.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (27:44 – 27:56)
Yeah, and I just want to reiterate, you said be on the same side. Why wouldn’t a community and their police department want the same thing for public safety?

[Kristin Daley] (27:56 – 28:03)
And they just don’t realize. Yeah, exactly. I think that’s where the conversation starts.

[Mike Butler] (28:03 – 34:51)
Yeah, you know, and it’s, we’re going to have those, we’re going to have differences. People in relationships have differences. Families have differences.

Others have differences. There’s going to be differences. The question is, is how do you approach those differences?

And to what level? What are the ground rules for having conversations to find common ground? And so those become important.

But I wanted to expand on that whole vulnerability piece in terms of what has to happen, what goes on. And by the way, we had to do the work internally before we could actually go out into the community, because we couldn’t sit there with a patriarchal mindset and culture within our own organization, and then tell our staff to go work in partnership with the community, when those two things were kind of offsetting with each other. And so we had to work on the whole arrangement of partnership within the organization in order for us to say we could work in partnership with the community.

But we actually did that simultaneously with our community by inviting our community in hundreds and hundreds of citizens. In fact, the first process that we that we did that was large was invite, there were 800 citizens involved in the development of the future of public safety in our community. And, and those conversations that took place, took place between people who never had talked to each other before.

And so there was a lot of, there were a lot of roadblocks, there were a lot of, of inertia that worked against having common ground conversations. And we had to be patient with that. And we had to provide people the skill sets and, and the training to suggest and to give, give them the sense that we could get there.

And so it was a process that took 18 months. But it was it include 800 people from the community and, and a few hundred people from the police department. And over a period of 18 months, we had the editor and publisher of a newspaper in the same room with officers who worked graveyards.

And, and so, and worked during the night. And those conversations started off real rough, but we had to be patient in terms of letting them see how they could find common ground. And so that was part of our vulnerability in terms of bringing in citizens.

Now, that wasn’t a well accepted way of doing business, because initially, this police department that and most police departments are kind of like this fortress like kind of apparatus. They’re semi faceless in the community, or if not totally faceless. And the personalization of who people are, can be difficult for police officers.

There’s a lot of police officers that don’t want their pictures taken or don’t want to be kind of seen in the community as being, you know, and who people people for them, the community to know that they are a police officer. And so there were a lot of those, a lot of those forces at play that we had to work through. And so, and so this is something that takes time.

But we’re talking about another aspect. These are this is the stage prior to a community choosing to be accountable. You almost have to go through this phase of a community seeing all the pimples, the weaknesses, the capacity that we don’t have, because up until now, police departments were saying, if you need us, call us or anything.

And they were they were not vulnerable. They were kind of kind of like said these fortresses and we’re going to we want you to be dependent on us. We want to be the patriarchs, we want to be the decision makers, the action takers, whatever that might look like.

And so when we start sharing this role and this responsibility, it requires an entirely different perspective. It requires someone to be confident with it with themselves so that others can see their weaknesses, their vulnerabilities, their pimples, their sense that, you know, they don’t know everything. I’ve said before, here’s my vision.

What I wanted to do was surround myself with anybody who was wanting to tell me what I couldn’t see. That’s how we have to go into these conversations, because few people see it all. In fact, no one sees it all.

Few people see a small, most people just see a small percentage of what’s really there. And so allowing people to kind of gift you with what they know what you can’t see is an act of vulnerability. But during that act of vulnerability, people also saw the commitment, the compassion, the dedication, the skills, and the desire to be able to serve this community.

And so they saw all of our humanness. And once that got once they got to the point that they became comfortable with what we what we could and couldn’t do. And by the way, one of the things that we had to be work with in terms of creating a cultural accountability was our honesty and saying, here’s what we’re capable of doing.

Here’s what we can do. Here’s what we need you to help with. Whether that was me talking to a staff or our staff talking to a neighborhood, police officers talking to a neighborhood.

Because up until then, well, it’s the number of armed guards that are going to make your neighborhood safe. No, it was the coalescing and socialization of your neighborhood that was going to make you safe. And so but up until then, it was, well, we just got to keep on responding to calls for service and keep on giving this place more police officers until they until they believe that we can make them safe.

That’s kind of creating unhealthy dependency. So all of this is precursor to this people choosing accountability. But when they see that they’re invited in this conversation of invitation, that they can also express their dissent or reservations or doubt that they know that they can be part of creating a new future for their their neighborhood and their community.

It’s amazing then when those invitations begin to happen, how many people are willing to say yes, how many people are willing to make a commitment without a condition. And that’s where we wanted to get to. And that’s when people began to choose accountability.

And they didn’t go to saying, well, we need more cops or we need some more people arrested. They actually began to take on some of the responsibilities about how to make their neighborhoods and their communities safer in so many different ways. So anyway, that’s just that’s this is the 30,000 foot conversation.

Most of the details are found in our instruction.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (34:51 – 36:55)
Yeah. So and that’s for another episode of safe neighborhoods and really enacting and creating that. I just I love this concept of of internal and external internal first the culture of the internal department.

And certainly everything we’re doing with Project PACT is around walking into a police department and advising saying, you know, what’s happening for you sitting down, going through that listening. By the way, one of the first trainings that we go through is active listening, reflective listening, learning how to really hear what people are saying. I’m laughing.

I was on the Peloton today and the instructor was like, no one in this world listens anymore. Everybody has an opinion. Everybody has a viewpoint.

Everybody thinks they’re right. And I’m not you know, I’m not generalizing, but that’s how we’ve gotten to this kind of place of of a conflict that we’re seeing. I just want to talk through the accountability around metrics.

And Kristen, I’ll take you first. You know, at LEAP, I you know, I’m sure there’s there’s so much measuring going on around crime, how people are moving forward. You might have worked with police departments.

The ultimate accountability of a police department is if they get sideways with a community, they have they might be given a consent decree by the federal government. Like, what have you seen in your history, working with different police departments and people in New Blue of how how they’re incorporating technology, but also this the social side, the social interaction side of building relationship with community?

[Kristin Daley] (36:56 – 39:11)
So I actually have a perfect example in one of our fellows from 2023 Solutions, which really merges technology and community policing and building trust. So he is an officer at LAPD, which is a huge department, and they do a lot with body worn cameras as a tool for community engagement is the way that he’s framing his project. So essentially, he wants to focus on the issue of trust and the perception and recruiting into our most resource deprived communities.

And his project focuses on developing relationships, particularly in the black community with youth and really taking that body worn camera footage, which historically has been used in a fairly negative way. Right. It’s to prove an officer did something wrong.

And he wants to take it and build sort of a repository of this body worn camera footage and use it to show positive community interactions. So there’s a lot of the problem of, you know, having bad apple policing in the community. And he from his standpoint, and he’s out there every day, he’s a motorcycle officer.

So he’s doing a lot of interacting with community engaging with youth. He wants to show those positive interactions. So it’s built around the idea that interactions between officers and their communities can be this really positive thing.

And a tool, a technology like body worn cameras can be used to show what’s going right. And that can also potentially be implemented within the department in, you know, reviews, performance reviews. An officer could potentially have all of this great footage in the repository that could be taken into account when their supervisor is giving them their performance evaluation.

So this is, we feel a really great use of taking technology, taking community policing, and taking the issue of trust and building it into a project that does something really positive and meaningful for the community and for the officer.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (39:11 – 39:19)
Yeah, creating a new vision, creating something new, creating what’s right and good. And Mike is all about that. So I know he wants to talk.

[Mike Butler] (39:19 – 43:19)
Absolutely. Project PACT is going to come from the perspective of building on what we want to see more of and working with organizations. It’s not going to be looking at here’s what needs to be fixed.

Here’s the deficiencies. Here’s what’s wrong. Here’s what we need to be afraid of.

But here’s what’s working well. Here’s what we want to see expanded. Here’s the goodness that’s happening, not just within the organization itself as a police department, but also in the community.

That’s the change model we’re going to leverage. We’re not going to come in and say, here’s what’s wrong. So anyway, that gets off into another topic.

But to answer your metric question, Carol, it’s hard to measure. Oftentimes, what police have gotten themselves caught up in and what the nation has gotten themselves caught up in is measuring the sense of safety by what goes wrong, what’s happening that’s not going well. Like, here’s the amount of crime.

Here’s the amount of traffic accidents. Here’s the amount of disorder. And so we’re looking at the community through their deficiencies.

We’re not seeing that, well, here’s what went well. And so we look at what’s happening from the cup is half empty perspective. But to give you an idea about what can happen with metrics in terms of effectiveness, something that we had to deal with was our department really focused on engaging the community around the health and social issue of domestic violence.

And what we know is that less than 20% of these cases are reported initially. And it’s a very underreported crime as are sex assaults and some other kinds of personal violent kinds of crimes. But what we wanted to do was to get more people to report.

And so we were successful. But the way the media presented it was that that Longmont’s domestic violence rate was four or five times higher than other communities because what we were looking at it from an effectiveness, well, we have more people reporting. We have more people coming out and saying, here’s what’s going on.

And we could begin to help those circumstances at a much earlier stage before domestic violence ratcheted up and it became a more serious issue with potential lethality involved. And so the metrics themselves, we had to work with the media and we had to work with the elected officials to let them know that because Longmont’s cases were three to four times higher than other surrounding communities of similar size, didn’t mean we were a less safe city. It meant that more people were reporting because if you go back to metrics in policing, I’d say 30 to 40 percent of most crimes, even the property crimes, go reported.

The rest go unreported. Now, when you get up to cases like homicide and very serious injury kinds of incidents that involve violations of laws, most of those do, if not all of them, get reported. But there’s a lot of crime that goes unreported.

And so saying your community is safe or unsafe from community to community is a real misnomer in terms of looking at the amount of crime that’s being reported. And police departments, by the way, if they choose to focus on one event, let’s say they choose to focus on car break-ins, and they make a big marketing process about that and they let the community know, we want to know where anybody is. The number of car break-ins from one year to another will double or triple, not because there were more two or three times as many, it’s because there were two or three times as many reports.

And so there is this metric, the whole metric thing is something that has a, it’s a little bit loose when it comes to, is it really a great measuring tool for the effectiveness of police department or how safe or unsafe the community is.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (43:20 – 43:40)
So interesting to think about social benefits are very, very hard to measure. Very, very hard. As you’re working within community and you’re helping people and you’re assisting them with your mental health and social and addiction and all of those things, very hard to measure.

Yeah, Kristen.

[Kristin Daley] (43:40 – 44:17)
Yeah. And just to be really clear, when it comes to crimes related to sexual violence, domestic violence, there are a lot of reasons why survivors may not report. But one of them is widely acknowledged to be a lack of trust in being treated fairly by the system.

So if you’re seeing an increase in reporting, that means you’re doing something right. You know, if people are willing to come forward and report, it means that they are trusting in your agency to handle it the right way, which is a really powerful thing. And, you know, just want to acknowledge that and that, Mike, you were really doing something well there.

[Mike Butler] (44:17 – 45:03)
Well, we it’s it. Thank you for that. I appreciate that.

And you’re exactly right. One of the big reasons when we did our research and did our surveys is the reason why people didn’t report crimes. For the most part, the number one reason was because they didn’t think the police could or would do anything about it.

That was early on. And when we started saying, why aren’t you reporting? Well, when we began to reshuffle the deck in terms of who we were and how we were and enhanced our vulnerability and got more community engagement, you know, unfortunately, you know, some of these things went up, but in terms of numbers.

But then we were able to do something else to kind of once we knew more information, we were able to deal with these issues with a more informed way.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (45:03 – 45:14)
Yeah. And your initiatives caught it early and did a lot more training. And in the long run, you had your metrics went down in terms of fatalities way, way down.

[Mike Butler] (45:14 – 45:47)
But we had but we had to get that trust to the community. We had to get and we had to get the accountability of the community. We did, you know, for instance, we talk about domestic violence, which, by the way, exist in every community.

And if police departments were kind of being forthright about it, they would say it’s probably near their number one public safety issue in their community, that we weren’t going to treat it just as a criminal justice system issue. We began treating it as a health issue in which everybody had to take responsibility.

[Kristin Daley] (45:47 – 46:04)
Right. And it’s something it’s something that has holds a cultural stigma. So it’s not necessarily easy for people to talk about.

But if police and community leadership make it easier, then it’s easier for people to come out and talk about it, work together. Yeah.

[Mike Butler] (46:04 – 46:32)
And that’s that lends itself to our conversation about accountability at a deeper level as we drill down through the various dimensions of what goes on between a police department and the community. And there’s there’s an infinite number of those that we haven’t even begun to talk about that. That’s where that becomes we can have more conversations around how chosen accountability and can can really help make a community much safer.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (46:33 – 47:09)
Yeah. And I know, Mike, that you you did a lot of outreach to community groups. You spoke in churches as you took on new initiatives.

You went to schools, talked to the students. You regularly had breakfast and planning just conversations with city officials, especially elected officials. And so you didn’t stay behind that fortress.

And I suppose we need a whole nother episode. Oh, we’ll have to maybe talk about the vulnerability.

[Mike Butler] (47:10 – 47:35)
We’ll have a because it’s like, by the way, for for those listening, whether you’re a citizen or a police officer, just know that Project PAC can offer you a lot more precise information, step by step information and instruction in terms of how you can move from where you’re at to where you want to be in these arenas and what that looks like. And so just know that that’s available to you.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (47:36 – 48:47)
Yeah. And that gets us back to the beauty. I just want to kind of wrap this up with the beauty of the motivation of most people who enter the field of policing, enter into public servant positions, that they do want to make a difference.

They do want to help people. They want to create something that is better than what exists today. And that’s our whole mission, our whole vision of of how we’re coming together and bringing different groups and more training and not just the the personal development training is is as important as the professional development training.

A lot of, you know, like how you handle your emotional and social intelligence, how you go at, you know, imagine that policeman in L.A. how he goes out and can connect with the youth and in the community and what he’s looking. He’s looking for what’s what that does for a whole neighborhood when that happens. So anyway, any last words you want to talk about?

[Mike Butler] (48:49 – 50:34)
No, I I just want maybe to say that we have to come from this perspective that there’s these new possibilities out there and that whether you’re in an organization as a police officer, you’re in a community as a citizen, we have to come from the perspective that each and every person has gifts, talents, skills, expertise, resources to offer. One of those one of those is the idealism, as you talked about, Carol, of people and and people in the organization. And one of the things, in my opinion, this is something I’m going to stand.

I got I got a hard perspective on this, and that is I think leaders of police departments are responsible and accountable to ensuring that the idealism of their police officers is alive and well. And and that’s a that’s a role that police chiefs have to take, because it’s easy when you get involved in man’s inhumanity to man for people to kind of drift towards becoming cynical or skeptical or less hopeful. And we want our police officers to feel and believe as this person that Kristen talked about in Los Angeles, that there are a lot of great things going on in our community and that for every bad thing that’s happening that a police officer sees, there’s hundreds, if not thousands of good things that are happening.

And so and so one of the things I believe police leadership needs to really focus on is the is the is the preserving first identifying, preserving, sustaining and enhancing that social capital of idealism and their staff of police officers.

[Kristin Daley] (50:36 – 51:07)
And I think the last thing I would want to say on all of this is that we need to create a culture where everyone feels like they can be a leader, that it’s not so much determined by ring rank or your status in the community, but everyone can take accountability and take that leadership opportunity and be a part of creating public safety that works for everyone. And the first step in becoming a good leader is becoming a good listener. Great.

Awesome.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (51:08 – 51:34)
So I just encourage you to go to the projectpact.org website and sign up, give us your email so we can stay in touch with you. We’ll be starting our newsletters coming out. Mike has a booklet on there written with Peter Block, a consulting business executive leadership author of several books.

[Mike Butler] (51:34 – 51:37)
And a definite thought leader, my opinion.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (51:37 – 52:21)
Called Safety in Our Hands. It’ll be delivered to your inbox. And we want to form this community.

If you are in a police department or you know somebody in a police department that you feel could benefit from just a one hour advice session, that listening session. What are your needs? Where are you going?

What are your hopes? What are your dreams? How are you handling things right now?

What could you use? And then into the digital training system that we’re putting together. And we’ve got so many good things we can do in person.

Kristen and Mike can come straight to you. And I’m around as an educator as well.

[Mike Butler] (52:22 – 53:16)
I think what we need to start doing on these podcasts is inviting people to become part of Project PACT and to let them know that they can be part of our Project PACT policing community together. Just give us a call or email us or text us, however that might look. And we will find a place for you in terms of what that might look like in terms of your own engagement.

Because I know that we’re talking to 800,000 to a million police officers that want something. Many people want something different than what’s happening right now and want to be part of something where they know that they can create a future that have those qualities of aliveness and being that people we all want to live into. I know there’s a lot of police officers and other people within police departments that want that.

And so we welcome your involvement.

[Carol Engel-Enright] (53:17 – 53:25)
Yep. And thank you for listening. We look forward to further conversations.

We have a lot to talk about. And it’s not all talk. We’re taking action.

[narrator] (53:27 – 54:18)
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.