 Hello, Longmont. I'm Macy May with the Longmont Leader. I'm here today partnering with the Longmont Public Media and the invitation of Public Safety Chief Mike Butler. We are here today to talk with Chief Butler about the situation around protesting demonstrations in reaction to the death of George Floyd in the Minneapolis incident, along with how that has spread nationally and even hit home here in Longmont. We've had some protesting going on through the first weekend of June here. And Mike has agreed to sit down with us and answer a few questions. So hello, Mike. How are you today? I'm doing great, Macy. How are you? Doing well. Doing well. Let's just start with your thoughts on what happened with Minneapolis. How does that affect you here, or affect us here in Longmont? Well, I think we can all see that the nexus is obvious and clear. There was a police officer who egregiously abused his power. And as a result, the death of George Floyd occurred. And there were other police officers engaged and involved as well. They have since been charged criminally, and all of them have been fired. And that rippling effect has had significant residuals all over our country, in fact, all over our world, but certainly here in Longmont. We have since in the last two weeks have heard the voices of many people wanting to know. How's our Longmont Police Department doing? Could that happen here in Longmont? And what can we do to prevent that? And so there has been, in my opinion, a very responsible focus in terms of people having their voices heard. And we have had a couple of larger gatherings, one at Third and Main, that went up to Roosevelt Park. And on Saturday, there was a large gathering at Roosevelt Park. And so I've fielded a number of questions. Our council has fielded a number of questions. Our city manager has fielded a number of questions. Our police officers in our community have been very engaged with people in our community as well, not surprising. But so we're getting a lot of questions. We're questions around how we do business, questions about our policies, specifically our use of force policy, and lots of other questions. And as I've said to others, Longmont Public Safety has always encouraged the voice of people in this community. And we've encouraged not just their voice, but we encourage them to go beyond just asking questions and talking about it. We want people in our community to be active, to take action. And at some level, be accountable for the rest of our community, including our police department as well. So the nexus is clear. It's obvious. And it probably will sustain that. We'll probably sustain that over the next months or years. So you talked about civic involvement. What can people do to find the answers that they're seeking to be involved in the processes? And what are those processes that they could get involved in? So let me just back up a little bit here, Basie. And one of the phrases that we're hearing a lot about is police reform. And I will talk about, I want to definitely talk about what residents and citizens in our community can do at a lot of levels. But I also want to talk about police reform. For years, I've been saying, my mantra has been that the police profession needs to kind of reset, recalibrate, rethink what we do and how we do it. We've been saying that, and I personally have been saying that for probably a couple of decades, but more vociferously in the last five to seven years. Because I saw our police profession as somewhat stagnant. And in light of or in spite of what happened in Ferguson in July of 2014 and other cities about that time, Baltimore, Cleveland, New York, Charleston, I don't know if our police profession really got the message that our communities in this country wanted and needed something different out of their police departments. And so for years, basically our police departments across the country have been more or less formed, designed, and structured around enforcing laws. And so that's something we have to do. But the vast majority of police departments typically only focus on enforcement. And so a lot of what they do in terms of how they recruit, who they hire, how they train, the cultures of those organizations, how they're led, how they're supervised, even the architecture of those organizations are kind of geared largely towards enforcement. We're called law enforcement, a phrase that I have not been particularly fond of for almost 30 years because our role is greater than enforcing the law. Our role is very much about partnering with our community at some level helping to build and create a stronger social fabric in our community. And something that Longmont is doing, trying to surface and activate the social capital. The social capital of our community is the gifts, the talents, the skills, the resources, the expertise that people have in our community. Well, police in our country have this incredible platform to kind of surface and activate people, our gifts, our talents. And I could talk a little bit about what we've done in Longmont in terms of our belonging revolution. I know that you've been on one of our walks with Dan Benavides and myself. And so a role that we can play. And so what we've been doing in Longmont is I will say we've been expanding our role. We've been changing our role. We've been resetting, recalibrating, rethinking what we do and how we do it over the last many, many years. And a lot of people are aware of that in our community, but a lot of people aren't. And so and along with that, we have stayed up to date with a lot of our policy and procedure development to ensure that those policies and procedures were in alignment with our motto. And our motto, our Longmont Police Services motto, is policing in partnership with the people. And so the vast majority of our policies and procedures are kind of, have been kind of designed and created to support that motto. And I also want to say that over the years that many people in our community, many of our residents, have been specifically, intimately involved in the development of who we are as a police department. A number of years ago, we actually conducted a long range strategic planning process. And we invited the community to become involved with that. That process included close to 1,000 people from our community. And it took 18 months to develop because we meant what we said when we developed. In fact, our community helped us develop that motto, policing in partnership with the people. And that word partnership is critical to how we operate. We want to operate with absolute as much honesty as we can in terms of working as partners. We want to be as honest and as transparent as we can, as we practically can be. There are certain things we can't talk about because of the nature of ongoing investigations or because of officer safety issues. But our transparency, I would say a second to none in terms of what we're doing. And so community members have been highly engaged with us. And so they were involved in developing who we are. They've been involved in developing our policies and our procedures over the years. And so who we are today is as much a function of our community as much as it is anybody in our staff, including me. And so we have not programs, but we have systems and structures like the Citizens Review Panel where we have five people from our community who review every single internal affairs investigation. They review it for completeness, for honesty, for transparency, for thoroughness, for fairness. And then they make recommendations as to whether or not the actual facts in the investigation support the allegation of misconduct. We've been doing, we've had a Citizen Review Panel in this community for almost a quarter of a century. And many, many people from our community have been involved and engaged with that. We have a lot of people involved with the development of lots of programs within our community, in our police department. We have people from our community who are involved in lots of different aspects of our police department right now. They're walking our hallways. They come in and visit me on a regular basis. We're wide open for questions. And I would invite anybody in our community that if you wanna become involved in our police department, give us a call. You can go on our website. There's lots of contact information around lots of opportunities. But the point with all of this is that our community is engaged. And again, there we are in our essence in police, our function of who they are. So that's more or less what we've done a lot with that in terms of our community engagement, certainly our staff involvement with a lot of the development of our structures, our mechanisms, our processes, our systems within our police department to kind of change over time who we are and always staying in alignment and congruent with our motto, policing and partnership with the people. And so the voices, we want the voices of our community to be active. We want them to be, we welcome that. And sometimes we're a little discouraged when we don't see that. And so right now, people seem to be active. And frankly, and they want their voices to be heard. And that's something I have to just say, we enjoy it. We appreciate it. And we welcome those kinds of voices. We may not agree with everything. I don't want to sound like this is always, there's great conversations that happen. There's great debates that happen. And there's always perspectives that are, but what we promise people is that we will make a place safe for people in this community to have their voice heard about what we do and how we do it. So last week at council, you talked about many of these things, the programs that you have in place, how the police department builds relationships, how you look for personality types and do extensive backgrounds on police officers. But during this weekend's protest, I met with several people and many of them even said, one, they don't know what you're doing, but then two, they still don't feel safe in the community. So what, as this conversation grows, what is the police department doing to extend that communication to make it more known what you are doing and then how are you changing some of the ways you go about it so that more people feel safer in this community? You know, and I really appreciate that perspective. You know, let me just tell you what we've been doing over the years. Number one, the invitation to become involved and engaged, I just talked about. Number two, this video is an opportunity for people to learn a little bit and I don't know how much more clear I can be about inviting people in our community to become involved and become engaged. They can see, I won't go number three, number four, but I will say number three, anyone can participate in a ride along if they wanna participate with a police officer. Now that we're more near the tail end of COVID-19, we're gonna be opening up that ride along program again in the not too distant future. We've had hundreds if not thousands of people ride along with us. Our police officers are constantly walking neighborhoods, constantly interacting and engaging with people right where they live. As I talked before a little bit about our belonging revolution, Dan Benavides and I walked 200 plus neighborhoods in this community over the last five years, mostly on Sunday mornings. And our purpose in walking those neighborhoods was to encourage people to feel and believe they belong. If anyone, so let me just continue on with that. The other part of that that we did with that belonging revolution was that we invited people, again, we're about making invitations to people and what we want is we want people to take us up on those invitations and we'll talk about what people can do later in this conversation. But we would definitely want people to become involved and become engaged. In terms of safety, I'm not sure if they're talking about safe from police or safe in their neighborhoods or safe from what's that? They felt like they were still not safe from police prejudice. Did they give you exact examples? Did they give you circumstances or anything that I can respond to more specifically or they just kind of say generally they didn't feel safe? It was more of a general feeling of police officers identifying people of color, maybe not making them feel as welcome or feeling like some people mentioned in their high schools, if something went wrong, kids of color were targeted first or suspected first. So what I can't respond to, Macy, I can't respond to anything without exact circumstances. Sometimes people hear these things and it becomes kind of a general mantra. What I'm very open to is hearing specific complaints or concerns that people have. Let me just say that our school resource officer program is one that we have 12 police officers that are in our schools and two in each high school and one in each middle school. And those police officers, the basis of that school resource officer program is one of relationship. Their purpose is to develop relationships with people, the kids in those schools. And we are highly selective of who we put in those particular positions to the point where high school students, often high school students and school staff are involved in the selection of those police officers. In fact, we have high school students that are involved in the selection of our police officers on an ongoing basis anyway. And so when we do have hiring processes for our police officers, we invite the community, including high school students, to become involved in those. What's difficult for me to respond to is just the general feeling of things. I'm happy to hear that and I can pass that on to our entire staff. But what I want, what we need is very specific circumstances from people in terms of saying what happened, when it happened, where it happened. We're wide open to that. And by the way, we know that sometimes coming down to the police department and filing a complaint can be somewhat intimidating. And so we developed a program called SOMOS. It's a Spanish word that means we are versus me and you and me are separating us. It means we are. And so we developed that with key minority leaders, key people of color in this community several years ago. And what we designed was a place for people that if they wanna file a concern or a complaint with the police department, they don't have to come to the police department. They can go to our community relations department, Carmen Ramirez, they can go to El Comite and speak to Donna Lovato. They can go to the R Center. They can go to St. John's Church and file their concerns and complaints. And those folks will actually kind of serve as their advocates. And so we have designed a way of doing business so that people, if they wanna file a concern or a complaint, they don't have to come to me. They don't have to come to our police department. They can go to people that they trust in the community who can serve as their advocates and who can serve their best interests. And so we've worked through a number of concerns that have been filed with either Carmen or Donna or Marta or people from the R Center and have worked through those issues as well. So I just want people to know that that avenue is there for them. And so, but the other part of this is, we welcome again, I can't say enough how much we want to invite people to become part of who we are. So earlier you spoke about police reform, changing the way police departments across the nation think. Some people have called for, and especially this weekend, defunding police in general. So what are your thoughts on that and would that make a difference? Well, I'm 100% certain what people mean by defund. I mean, you can take it on its face value and say, we don't want any more police department in this community. But the language and the concept that I'm hearing emerge, more so than defund is to reimagine what police services, what public safety services can look like. And again, I go back to the words that I've used over the last several years, reset, recalibrate, rethink what we do and how we do it. I'm not sure there's a big difference between that phraseology and the idea of reimagining. And we are always open to thinking about how we can do things differently. And so I know that the big push for that has been in Minneapolis where the city council has said they're gonna defund the Minneapolis Police Department. And so I don't know exactly where that's all gonna go. I don't know exactly what people mean. When they say we just don't want police, I think it also means that we would rather see more, I think what I've also heard is they would rather see more social workers or more people from other professions responding to calls for service. And by the way, we have made that shift in Longmont to do just that. And let me just talk about that for a minute. Number one, I'll talk about what we do with restorative justice. It's a program that Longmont is nationally well known for, statewide we're well known for. And restorative justice, when someone commits a crime and offends and there's an offender and someone's a victim of their harm and there's a victim, rather than arrest or summons somebody, we asked the offender and victim whether or not they would rather, would they like to engage in a reconciling conversation to figure out how they can repair the harm and how they can move forward in their relationship. We have referred literally thousands of people that we would have normally arrested for crimes to the restorative justice process. They don't end up with a rest record. They don't end up with a conviction. And interestingly enough, the recidivism rate from restorative justice is less than 5%. And the victim satisfaction rate is hovering somewhere between 95 and 100%. And so that's an example of a shift that we've made as a result of input from the community in terms of saying we want you to do something different. And so our officers all use restorative justice on a regular ongoing basis. That's one example of people who have committed from people who committed crimes. In terms of some of the social health issues that I think people say, hey, we don't need the police to respond to this. We'd rather have maybe a social worker. We're doing that. We have a new division called the Community Health and Resiliency where we actually have mental health and addiction treatment service providers. Professionals within the arena of mental health and addiction. Responding along with paramedics and police officers. And so they have actually, we've changed and shifted the roles that we play. So rather than arrest people because they've committed a crime and are struggling with an addiction, or rather arrest people because they're committed a crime and they are struggling with their mental health, we actually work through what we call harm reduction model and we work with people to try to divert them down another path so that they can find these services. And so, and let me just say that we run across a number of people who are struggling with addiction. We run across a number of people who are struggling with their mental health. Those are two major social health issues that any police department in this country are encountering. Another one is homelessness, by the way. And so what this country, and one of the things I wanna talk about in a minute here is what we have done to try to deal with those health and social issues. It's not so much just what the police do. This gets bigger than police reform. That is, that's part of it, but there's bigger pieces and parts here that we have to think about as a society and as a community. If we're gonna deal differently with these social and health issues. And so people are saying the fun part of the language I've heard about is that, well, we need different kinds of services to the things police are responding to. I couldn't agree more. But what we've done is we have created, we have legislators, elected officials at all levels, local, state and national have passed laws or stiffened penalties to try to address these social and health issues. And so what we have to do is back off that kind of legislation. And I wouldn't mind if we eliminated some laws that has something that that things to do with folks struggling with their mental health or folks struggling with addiction or even folks struggling with homelessness. But there's hardly a social issue that or it's residual that the police don't respond to. And so if we could get out of the business, a police could get out of the business of responding to a lot of these social and health issues. And we began and we've developed new mechanisms and structures to deal with those issues probably more effectively than invoking the criminal justice system. I think we would be much more effective in dealing with those issues. But at some level, when legislators at all levels are passing laws and saying we were mandating the police to respond, that put the police in the position of having to respond. And so we get people in the community, neighbors. We get family members. We get friends who call the police and say we want you to come and deal with this particular issue, whether it has something to do with an addiction or something to do with mental health or the fear that comes from people struggling with homelessness. Oftentimes those issues are square on the backs of public safety, specifically police. And so the conversations that we've been having that I've been having specifically over the last several years is that this shouldn't fall on the backs of police. If you ask any police chiefs throughout America about those particular social and health issues, they would tell you that in their minds that the community depends more on them to deal with those particular issues than anybody else. And in fact, many of those folks that we encounter have been abandoned. They've been abandoned by families. They've been abandoned by friends. They've been abandoned. They've lost their jobs. They've been abandoned by coworkers or other acquaintances. And in many cases, they've been abandoned by mental health treatment or addiction treatment service providers because those treatment providers call us and say, we don't know what to do. Can you go out and deal with that? And so we took it upon ourselves in Longmont to say, okay, but let's deal with it without having to arrest people. And so I can tell you as an example, from data perspective, for a number of years, the number of suicide, suicide attempts and suicide alleviation calls have been on an increase in Longmont. And so our core program, our co-responder where we have an actual mental health service provider and we actually have a paramedic and a police officer all teamed together now to go on as many of those calls as we could possibly go on. And what we hear often from those people that we're working with is that the only friend they have is a police officer or the only friend they have as a mental health is the clinician or case manager or the paramedic that everybody else in their lives have abandoned them. And so if this community or any community wants to develop mechanism structures to deal with those particular issues, in the moment, I'm talking about on a Saturday morning at 3 a.m. And they wanna go to the messes that we go to when we're called to these messes. We're happy to participate. We're happy to coordinate. We're happy to collaborate with anybody to try to make that happen. But in Longmont, that's what we're doing. We're doing that. And we have a lot of interest, interestingly enough, we have a lot of cooperation from people in our community. But they all wanna know whether or not a police officer is gonna go because they don't know if they're gonna be safe when they go to those instances. And so because we do encounter circumstances where someone might be struggling with a reaction to a drug or to a mental health crisis. And we are especially trained to be able to de-escalate those and to be able to calm those circumstances in a way where the person, the clinician, the case manager, the mental health or the addiction treatment service provider can actually begin to do their work. But I wanna make it very clear, we hear this all the time, that the only friend that some of these folks have are people that work, that are police officers or the people that work in the community health and resiliency division as a case manager, clinician or as a paramedic. And so that's part of the shift that I think we can make. And so when people talk about defunding or re-imagining, we're doing that re-imagining. We're doing something that we think is more effective and more viable for not only the person we're responding to but their families and ultimately the community. Because we know that when we arrest somebody and they're struggling with a mental health issue or they're struggling with an addiction, for them to go back into the system, they come right back out and nothing has been done about the root cause of what's going on. And so rather than arrest, we're working with those folks, we're helping them find services and this harm reduction model basically is a model where we meet people where they're at and we're not gonna make demands for them. The other thing that I don't think people know, a lot of people don't know about that we're doing is that almost three years ago we started what we called the angel initiative. And if you wanna point your camera to that up there, it's an angel with an inscribed angel initiative on top of it. But our angel initiative started a few years ago and what we've done is if we invite anybody who's struggling with an addiction, chemical substance addiction, that come to the police department, come to our doors, let us know that you're struggling with an addiction. If you have drugs, if you have paraphernalia, bring that along with you. We're not gonna arrest you. We're gonna deal, we'll take your drugs, we'll take your paraphernalia, we will destroy it. But then we will find you treatment. We have agreements with over 100 different addiction treatment service providers in the area. And they've agreed to provide free addiction, chemical substance addiction treatment to anybody that comes through our angel initiative. And so at the date, we have served probably 250 to 300 people who have walked through our doors, basically waved their white flag and said, I'm struggling and I don't know where else to go. And so Longmont now is a community in which the vast majority of communities struggle with how do you access addiction treatment? We're no longer a community in Longmont where you have to worry about that. You don't need insurance. You don't need the financial wherewithal. You come down to our police department and we will find you treatment. We have found people treatment. We're talking eight to 20 some months of residential free addiction treatment. And so for me, this is not necessarily an infomercial, but this is another way to say to the community, anybody watching this, that if you're struggling with a chemical substance addiction, or if you know somebody, you have a family member or a friend or you yourself are struggling. I understand that there's a little cognitive dissonance to kind of come down to the police department and deal with your addiction. But I can tell you, we have found every single person who walked through our doors addiction treatment. And so again, we have moved away from this whole idea of, we're just gonna deal with the war on drugs through dealing with supply. The Longmont police have frankly shifted a lot of how we do our philosophy, our policies and our practices to deal with the demand. In fact, I had the leader of a unit within, please come to me the other day and say, you know, we found somebody, and I probably shouldn't say too much, but there was a recent case where we found somebody who's actually had a meth lab in their house. We have very few meth labs. We've had very few meth, this is the first one we've had in years. And so we were surprised. But ultimately after talking to this person, we realized that this person was struggling with a meth addiction. We referred them to the Angel Initiative. And so here it is, meth lab, heavy duty crime comes with a heavy duty conviction, lots of years in prison. They're now in the Angel Initiative. That's an example of how we're doing business differently. That's an example of reimagining, resetting, rethinking, recalibrating what we do and how we do it. Because a lot of what we encounter with health and social issues are related to addiction, related to mental health, related to homelessness, a lot of the people that we deal with in these programs I just talked about, maybe 40 to 50% are folks who don't have homes, folks who are experiencing homelessness. I don't know if people know that, but we've been able to help a lot of people kind of come out on the other side, if you will, and be more productive, take another path without an arrest, dealing with their addiction. And frankly, I'm totally honest with this. I mean, the best friend they have is the police officer referred them to these programs because oftentimes these police officers will help them and guide them and support them through these programs. And by the way, back to that school resource officer program, that's exactly what we do with a lot of the kids. A lot of these kids, some of these kids are struggling with addiction. They're struggling with mental health issues. They're struggling with family issues. They're struggling with making friends. And so, and sometimes their best friend is the school resource officer. And so, I'm not gonna challenge anybody to kind of say that we're more or less focused on people of color, because I've not heard that. I've not heard that from Melcomatay, I've not heard that from Carmen, but I'm here to say that if you believe and think that that's happening, I wanna know about it. We wanna know about it. Because our role in the schools is to develop relationships, because we know that's a hard time for people in her lives, anywhere from middle school through high school and beyond. So, our SROs are kind of geared, trained, school taught to work with these students, to work with these young people in a way that can help them get them through those school years. We arrest very few people in the school resource officer program. And we have great relationship with parents, we have great relationship with the kids, great relationship with the staff and the teachers. And so, I invite anyone to let us know if they're seeing anything different, but I want them to come with specifics, not just a general statement. Yeah. So, could you, you've talked about how you help people with mental health issues, with addiction and things like that, but how, what do you do in this police department to rethink, to reimagine, using your words, diversity and being sensitive to diversity in our community? It's an important, important question, very important. And it's something we've worked very, very hard on. And so, and there's been a number of things that we've done over the years. Number one, we have done a lot of cultural diversity training. We have done implicit bias training. I want to tell you a story here about how I got to know Dan Benavides. I don't know how many of you know Dan Benavides, but Dan Benavides was, he became a loud and important voice back in 1980 when a very, very set of unfortunate circumstances occurred when one of our police officers was 40 years ago, when one of our former police officers, a white officer, killed two Hispanic boys. This community, it was not unlike a lot of other communities where this is happening today. Dan became a strong voice to the point where he actually became and a member of our city council, Mayor Pro Tem. And so, I don't want to say too much more about what happened in 18 years, it's more about Dan Benavides. Dan has been a powerful voice in this community for a lot of years. A person of color, very much an advocate for our Latino-Hispanic community, very much kind of has seen himself as someone who wanted to hold government's feet to the fire in terms of ensuring that there was a level playing field, that there was equal opportunity for everybody, that the police weren't racially profiling. And so, he's been very much an advocate for those throughout the years. A number of years ago, I'm gonna say, I don't know, it was at least eight, nine years ago, I attended a cultural diversity training taught by Dan Benavides. And what most culturally diverse trainings that I've been to kind of worked on the trainer seeing through the lens, seeing deficiencies through the lens, seeing deficiencies through that lens. And so, they would get up and say, here's what, more or less, here's what's wrong with you, here's what you're not doing right. And I understand that to some level, but Dan's approach was different. Dan looked through the lens of people's gifts. And so, I asked him if he would wanna be, do some cultural diversity within Longmont Public Safety, he said, of course. And so, it was quite an extraneous program because we would have had to work around the clock for a full week in order to hit all of our shifts. And what Dan did, though, more than anybody else with that cultural diversity training is, he had police officers listening to him. He had police officers and tears. He had police officers thinking, there is another way of seeing differently than what I've been seeing. Because Dan didn't come in to the department and say, here's what's wrong with you and here's your deficiency and you're a problem to be fixed. He didn't do it that way. He came in and said, basically, you have lots of gifts. You have lots of talents, you have lots of skills. And my Latino community in this, in Longmont, could really benefit from who you are as a person. That shifted who we are, who we were. That training shifted who we were. And a lot of our relationship in terms of how our officers were acting and interacting with our Latino and Hispanic community. And I wanna say that during our belonging and revolutionary walks, Dan Benavidez was my partner during those walks. We walked over 200 neighborhoods. The vast majority of those neighborhoods we walked in had lots of Latino population community engaged. Because we walked mostly, well, we walked mostly on the east side of the community, but we walked some on the west side. We walked mostly apartment complexes. We walked mostly mobile home parks. And we encountered a lot of people, but the major part of the population we were working with was our Latino community. We wanted our Latino community. I don't know what else to say. I don't want this to be political, but we had some issues that came up when this current president was elected. And basically it was a lot of fear from the undocumented population around what might happen. And so we spent a lot of time with our undocumented folks, letting them know that it was safe for them to access Longmont police. We wanted them to be able to access the police. We wanted them to feel safe. So we spent a lot of time in those neighborhoods talking about that with people. We weren't 100% uncertain whether people were undocumented or not. But we know that through our thousands of people that we encountered that we ran across a lot of, mostly we probably ran across people who were undocumented. So we've done a lot of implicit bias training. We've done a lot of cultural diversity training. We've done a tremendous amount of work ensuring that our staff can speak and write and understand Spanish. We have done a lot of work with immersion training with our police officers. At one point, police officers were standing in line to go to immersion training, which by the way is not cheap. But we carved out a significant chunk of our training budget just for to teach our officers Spanish. And that ebbs and flows in terms of the amount and number of people that we have that speak Spanish. But we focus a lot on that because we know we have a number of monolingual people in our community. And we don't want them to feel and believe that because they don't speak English at that point in time that they have an incident that they can't call the police because they don't speak English. And so we have taught a lot of our officers over the years how to speak Spanish. And so we've done a lot of work with our Latino community. We have, with every advocacy group, like whether it's El Comité or any other group, we have a liaison with them. We have someone who serves on the board. We have a police officer that actually serves on the board of El Comité right now. And so, and we've invited them in to our midst as well. And so, and then what Dan taught me though was that you know what, Mike? You just can't invite them into the government buildings and to meetings. You gotta go out into the trenches. You gotta go out into their neighborhoods and meet with them. And so that's what we're doing a lot of right now. So you spoke briefly about the, I mean, we're hitting the anniversary of that 40 year shooting, but this weekend, some folks talked about that as well. And the way they framed it, it was someone from El Comité who said, this happened and this is what we did. We reached out to our police department. We built a community with them. So will you talk about some of how that shooting prompted more change? Well, there's no doubt that that was a incredibly unfortunate tragedy. But sometimes strong communities and far seeing visionary people can see the potential opportunities and possibilities that come out of those tragedies. And people like Martin Marino and Dan Benavides and others did just that. And some of that occurred before I got here. And so there was an outreach by police and it was an outreach by the Latino community to come together and to partner and to figure out how our Latino community and our police department could work more closely together to try to resolve issues and to be more preventative and more proactive to prevent things from happening as well. And so there's been, and what I just talked about prior to that Macy included a lot of what, that's the larger answer to your question. So I just gonna have to call this out. You are retiring at the end of this month. And so a new person's stepping in, there's a lot of change and a lot of change is uncertainty. So what is the plan moving forward with City of Lamont, with the police department? You've held these ideals for many years in your tenure. Are they gonna continue on? I'm not gonna be here, you're right. My last day is July 3rd, but I've had several ongoing conversations with our city manager. But I also wanna say that the culture of this department, the systems, the mechanisms, the processes, how we do business, what we do and how we do it is pretty much institutionalized. And so in my mind, the leader, one of their main roles is to ensure that after they leave that whatever they did, if it's good, sustains itself. Like I have a plaque on the back of my wall that's behind me that I won't turn around and read. But in essence, it says that good leadership, the best kind of leadership is when the people stand up, the best kind of leader will know when his or her job is done, that when the people stand up and say we ourselves have achieved it. And so that's what I hope is here. That's what I'm pretty confident is here, but our city manager, our city council is aware of all of this. Our staff has made it very clear that they wanna continue down this path and even grow more that reimagining, rethinking, recalibrating process. But I will also say that it's not just up to me or the next leader or the staff or the city manager or city council, it's gonna be up to this community. So this invitation stands right now for the next month and certainly for after that. And so if people wanna ensure that their police department is responding in the way they want it to respond, they need to get engaged. And I wanna talk a little bit more. We talked earlier in the conversation about what people can do in our community. So I mentioned social capital and I mentioned our belonging revolution. And when I was out at the, I attended the gathering protest that went between 300 block of main in Roosevelt Park last Friday, I believe it was. I mentioned to somebody that I love the fact that people's voices are loud and clear, but it needs to go beyond that. There needs to be action and there needs to be accountability on the part of the people in this, for other people in this community. Cause there are people who are marginalized. There are people who are socially disenfranchised. There are people are economically disadvantaged. This is my own kind of opinion here. This doesn't represent the opinion of the city of Longa. This is Mike Butler's opinion, but this is where I came from in terms of why we did the belonging revolution and why I believe I've lived in this community for 40 plus years of lots of friends, lots of acquaintances and this community is full of goodness. I can assure you that. And one of the things that we encountered on our walks is that when we talk to people and people tell us their story, their life story, how many gifts they had. And the other thing that we got to realize was that they really wanted a way to offer those gifts. They just didn't know how. And so one of the roles that public safety has been playing over the last few years is figuring out how people could line up the gifts they have to helping others in the community. Because when I was out there Friday with the gatherers and protesters and through our block of main, I said, great, your voice is powerful, it's strong, it's good, we need to hear it, thank you for it, but we also need more. We need you to be part of this. It just can't fall on the backs of police. Like I said, the issues with addiction, the issues with mental health, the issues with homelessness, oftentimes what I hear and see are, what's the police gonna do about it? What are the police gonna, what's government gonna do about it? And so the whole idea of the shift that needs to be made beyond just police reform is that there are a lot of people in this community, whether it's undocumented, whether it's folks who can't speak English, whether it's people who are economically disadvantaged, whether they're socially marginalized or disenfranchised, it's up to our brothers and sisters to help out with that. We can be our brothers and sisters keeper. I am a big believer that that's ultimately where it's gonna go. It's not just gonna fall on government's lap, but we have that capacity and that's what you saw what happened on your walk with and how many people said yes to our invitation. Yes, I'd love not only yes, but an enthusiastic yes to get more engaged and more involved. And so I would invite anybody that wants to have a voice is to go beyond their voice and say, I'm willing to step into the role of trying to help somebody. Because if you want to level the playing field for other people who are socially marginalized or economically disadvantaged, who don't believe they have opportunity, then the best way for that to happen is through other people in this community, through residents, through neighbors, through other citizens. And so when we would gather, oftentimes we would wanna develop what we would call a circle of accountability and support. And the idea is that five or six people from this community would help somebody figure out their life, whether it was find a job, find treatment, serve as a social network, help them with whatever they needed help with. That's ultimately I think the best way to do that. It doesn't mean that police and government won't be involved, we can be. We've actually helped train people to help to do that. But that's where I think this is gonna go. And that's what I think people should be thinking about in terms of how do we make it so that when people want peace and they want justice, a lot of that justice and a lot of that sense of leveling the playing field and a lot of that opportunity can come from our fellow citizens, can come from our fellow brothers and sisters. And so I strongly recommend, and I'm gonna leave with that thinking and I'm gonna stay here in Longmont once I'm done and I'm gonna be part of that once I am done because while I'm retiring officially for my officially sanctioned role as public safety chief, I also intend to be an active community member as well. Well, great. Well, thank you, Mike. I think unless you have anything else that you'd like to add, I think that was a pretty good spot to... Okay. We got the thumbs up. I think that's it for now. And thank you for the questions and thank you for the opportunity. Thank you.