 and welcome. My name is Summer Maxwell and I'm a public affairs intern here at ACMI. Today I'm joined by Arlington Police Chief Julianne Flaherty to discuss community policing in Arlington. Chief Flaherty truly thank you so much for taking the time to join us. Thank you very much Summer for inviting me on I appreciate it. So just before we get into the meat of this interview I think to get our audience who may not know and all of us on the same page would you be able to just define community policing in your own words? Sure so community policing is really about the community it's about building partnerships with between police officers and community members working with residents to solve problems working with residents business owners and just coming together to make the community safer and to make the community a better place to live, work and visit. It's really more than just a meet and greet it's about building these long-term relationships. A lot of some of the more serious crimes that we've solved in the past had involved people who we built these relationships with prior to. So it's really important it's something that the Arlington Police Department has been involved in in a long time and we're really proud of our community policing efforts. So speaking more to talking about those relationships could you explain the goal specifically of implementing community policing in Arlington is it building those or even more than that? Yeah so the goals are really just building trust and legitimacy right we want our residents and our business owners to know that members of the police department are caring compassionate very well-trained professional police officers who want to work with people in the community to to solve these problems and and to solve crimes and just to make the community stronger. Just to give us an idea would you be able to spotlight one maybe your favorite if you had to pick one community policing based program that you run out of Arlington PD? Yeah picking one is difficult but we've developed many programs over the years and I really like to think of it as policing has really changed and evolved over the years and Arlington Police Department has really changed the way we police our community as well. We have many programs we have Arlington Opiate Outreach Program, we have a homeless outreach program, we were one of the first departments in the Commonwealth to bring in a jail diversion clinician which means that we have a clinician embedded within our police department who corresponds to people that are in behavioral health crisis. I think that's one of our most important community policing programs. We have a recovery coach that works within the police department who helps people on their recovery journey and assist people with resources. I think we I'll talk about each program a little more in depth but we have our canine team with Officer Hogan and ICO. I think you would be very hard pressed to find anybody in the community in the school department who hasn't met Officer Hogan and canine ICO. He's one of our offices who goes to the schools. He gives demonstrations with his canine partner and just about I would say in the summer every day I have a group of either scouts or brownies camps coming up to my office because he's doing a tour and a demonstration. So he's really one of our offices who connects with the kids in the community along with our school resource officer. And then we also have our Citizens Police Academy that we run every year. We haven't been able to do it the past couple of years because of COVID but we bring people in the community in and we give them a mini police academy where they can learn everything that is happening in the police department. All of our different departments learn about our policies and our procedures and that's been a great program. I have people calling you all the time asking me when the next program will be running because that's really important for people to know what we do here and to learn about the police department, learn about our programs and build those relationships. So I see people past graduates all the time at a coffee shop or in the center walking by who will recognize me and have a comment about something that they did or learned in the police academy. So again, all of these programs are about building relationships and partnering with the community. It seems like you guys have a lot going on there and it's exciting to hear about them coming back after COVID in their full strength. A lot of these programs are also clearly very tailored to Arlington, which to me begs the question, especially because your police department has been nationally recognized for its success in community policing and being a semi-unique model. But that also begs the question, do you think that community policing has the potential to succeed everywhere or is part of its success that it's in a community like Arlington suburban rather affluent or do you think that it can succeed anywhere? Yeah, so I think it can. I don't think there's a one size fits all model for community policing. I think you need to tailor your programs based on the needs of the community. So we don't have the same needs as like Boston or Cambridge. So we looked at what our community asked for, what kind of calls we respond to and really the makeup of our community and we provide services based on the needs of our community. And it really, you know, it's not Boston has different programs. Some of all has different programs. But really here in Arlington, it's more of a philosophy. It's what all of our police officers think about and keep in mind when they're working with community members. Speaking of, you know, it around different communities in Arlington, are there in Arlington or at a bigger level? Is there any data to support, you know, the use of community policing or implementing its success that you guys have? Yeah, as far as gearing success, we look at crime rates. We look, you know, how many house breaks we have compared to last year or how many, you know, to struck property disruptions or things of that nature. But when I think about successes of the program, I looked at the relationships that we've been able to build. I walked through our front lobby every day and often there'll be somebody, an uncheltered person sitting in our front lobby waiting for an officer to come and pick them up and take them to court to clear up a warrant. Because our officers have built these relationships with people in the community. I stop in Dunkin Donuts across the street from the police station just about every day to pick up my tea in the morning and I often will see one of our offices having breakfast with somebody and that person, people will come to the police station because they're hungry, right? And it's really a good feeling for me to know that when somebody needs services or if they need something or if they're in crisis that the first person they think that can help them is one of our Arlington police officers. So really, that's that's how I get the success of our community policing. Yeah, it appears that you are building a lot of relationships there and you've had that success. But at the same time, I imagine that there are challenges to running community policing programs maybe outside of the typical challenges of just running a police department. Are there any challenges in community policing specifically that you'd like to speak to? Yeah, I guess. So getting mentioning COVID again, that was a challenging time for community policing. We weren't able to be out in the community. We weren't able to do our parking walks and go into businesses and engage with people the way we usually like to engage with people. So we did a lot of social media, right? So we pushed a lot of information out about our services and how we were still here during COVID. We wanted people to know that, but we were doing a lot of things virtually. So we used our Twitter, our Facebook and our website to really get information out there. And I think another challenge is not everybody feels comfortable with the police, right? So we have to keep that in mind. We may want to engage and partner, but there are some people who still have issues of trust and we take that into consideration. So that's really, you know, an important aspect too of successful programs. Well, hopefully with the COVID challenge especially, we're now able to be finally starting to move past that or have adapted appropriately so that these programs can now continue in 2022 and beyond. Something that I think about a lot as a young person and a university student is how my personal relationship with police as a university student is different from many communities. My university and many in the Boston area and nationally have their own private police force opposed to interacting with those as much from the towns or communities that host the university. Do you think that community policing can come to play a role on universities or campuses? Because I know campus police relations are not always the most positive for many students. Right, yeah. So I think so. I think, you know, a campus is like a community, right? Especially a lot of the bigger campuses. They do have their own police forces and I am familiar with many, especially in the Boston area, that have programs like I mentioned. They have rad programs for rape aggression training for students. They have Citizens Police Academies. They have programs in which students can call on the police for safety walks home and they'll have just meetings. I see a lot on social media where they'll have ice cream socials and that's all about coming together, getting to know your local police department or your campus police department, building those relationships so when students need help, if they, you know, are afraid or if they need something from the police department, they can call and, you know, hopefully they'll be on a first name basis with some of the offices. That's what I always hope for here in Allington. Another bigger question that I have is in the past two years, especially, I've seen a lot more calls to defund or disarm or even in some cases abolish police departments. Do you think that community policing can serve in any way to satisfy or meet compromises or at least bring more discussion to the table with groups that are calling for this? Yeah, sure. So when people talk about defunding the police departments, they're talking about taking funds or money away from police budgets and investing them in other social services or behavioral health services and just as we spoke about earlier, the Allington Police Department already has a lot of these behavioral health programs set up for community members. I talked about our jail diversion program where we have a clinician embedded within the police department. We have a recovery coach. We have, we partner often with health and human services to work with people in the community who are in need of services, right? We partner with the Summable Homeless Coalition to identify people in the community who are unsheltered and to get them permanent housing or the services they need to eventually end up in permanent housing. So we do a lot of work with those programs as is, but yes, there's always, you know, I'm always open to having more conversations with people in the community about different programs that we can offer or what the town offers. Just before we wrap out, is there anything else that you'd like to add to our audience about community policing or just updates to look out for with the APD in general? So I, I thought about it and just over this past week and I've been thinking a lot that I had the great experience of attending academy graduation. We just had six new police offices graduate from the Cambridge North Eastern Police Academy. It was a graduation ceremony and one of the officers that came with us to attend was officer Kelly who's been with the Allington Police Department for several years and he had, he works in patrol and during the course of his shifts he would often stop into a lot of the businesses in his sector. We have Allington has broken up into six different sectors. That's where we do our community policing and he became friends with one of the clerks that looked that worked in one of the stores and the clerk was very interested in being an Allington police officer and they talked a lot and officer Kelly had guided him through the process of taking the civil service test, of signing up for it, taking the test through the interview process. In this particular person ended up going to the academy. He's from Nepal so he didn't have a lot of family here and at the graduation officer Kelly was asked by the officer to pin his badge on him. So if I, you know, that is the best example of community policing that I could give and I was so proud to be part of that moment where you know one of our officers just patrolling his sector was able to make this relationship and partnership with somebody in the community and assist him through his journey of being an Allington police officer. So that's the best example that I can give. Well Chief, as always your time is so greatly appreciated. Thank you so much for joining us here today and we look forward to talking with you in the near future. And from ACMI, I'm Summer Maxwell. This has been a conversation with Chief of Arlington Police, Julianne Flaherty. We appreciate you for being here.