TCD Podcast: Dr. Kathleen O'Toole, Ep 74, Part 1, former Boston Police Commissioner and former Chief of Seattle Police

Kathy O'Toole is an international police leader.  Starting as a patrol officer with the Boston Police Department, she rose through the ranks.     Kathy left the Boston Police for the now-defucnt Metroplitann Police.  When the Mets were subsumed by the Massachuestts State Police, she became a Lietenant Colonel. Kate she was tapped by Governor WIlliam Weld as the Secretary of Public Safety  She served as the Commissioner of the Boston Police from 19xx to 19xx.  She later served on the Patten Commission in Northern Ireland, which worked to reform the Royal Ulster Constabulary, creating PSNI, Police Service of Norhtern Ireland.  
Later, she was appointed the first Chief Inspector for the Garda Inspectorate in the Republic of Ireland.  

Kathy has retired and continues to provide consulting services to public and private organizations, including serving as a principal for CP 21. 

A graduate of Boston College, she earned her J.D. from the New England School of Law. More recently she competed her Ph.D. from Trinity University of Dublin.  She resides on Cape Cod with her husband, a retired Boston Police Detective.   

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Transcript

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 Dr. Kathleen O’Toole — Part 1 

[00:00:25.110] - Intro

Welcome to The CopDoc Podcast. This podcast explores police leadership issues and innovative ideas. The CopDoc shares thoughts and ideas as he talks with leaders in policing communities, academia, and other government agencies. And now please join Dr. Steve Morreale and industry thought leaders as they share their insights and experience on The CopDoc Podcast.

[00:00:58.870] - Steve Morreale

Well, hello everybody. This is Steve Morreale coming to you from Boston. And I have the distinct pleasure to chat with an old friend who is down on Cape Cod today. Kathleen O'Toole, Kathy O'Toole. Now Dr. Kathy O'Toole, who has a storied and history background in policing, starting in Boston and moving to the opposite coast, going to Ireland, Northern Ireland. So good morning, Kathy.

[00:01:21.790] - Kathy O'Toole

Good morning, Steve. Great to be with you today.

[00:01:24.290] - Steve Morreale

So happy to finally get you. I know how busy we both are, and so we were able to connect.

[00:01:28.520] - Kathy O'Toole

I was trying to think of how many years we've known each other. It's in terms of decades. Let's put it down.

[00:01:33.220] - Steve Morreale

It definitely is. I think I first met you when I was an MP and I was putting people in jail who I had arrested for desertion, believe it or not. And so it  goes, that was back in the 70s, so it has been a long time and certainly we fell apart. We pulled back together again. And so there's so much about your trajectory you're still actively involved in trying to get policing to get to a better place. So would you tell the audience about your background? Where did you start? I know it was in Boston. What did you do and where do you go from there?

[00:01:59.930] - Kathy O'Toole

Well, first of all, I should say, Steve, that I never imagined that I'd pursue a career in policing. In fact, it wasn't an opportunity that was available to young women. When I was growing up, I was at Boston College. I'll never forget, I was a sophomore junior in college when I saw the story on television that the first woman had been hired to be patrol officers in the Boston Police Department. And I thought, why would any woman in her right mind do that job? It just wasn't something that we were accustomed to. So a few years later, I had a friend that desperately wanted to be a police officer. I went along just to show some moral support, took the exam a few years later, it was offered the job and then thought it was pretty comical because it still wasn't something I expected to do. And I was in law school at the time. I was going to law school at night. My law school friends dared me to do it. They thought it would be a really unique opportunity to see the law from a different perspective. So I thought, sure, I'm a dare devil, I'll do it for a year or two.

[00:02:50.790] - Kathy O'Toole

And here I am, decades later. And when I found my true vocation, I've loved every day of it. So for those out there who never thought about policing as a career, maybe we could attract some of them to the business, because I never imagined it would be my life career either.

[00:03:06.090] - Steve Morreale

So you started in Boston and you rose to the ranks, and you did all kinds of different work. And a little while later, you went to another agency. I know that talk about that and sort of the roadmap to history, to where you are now working as a consultant. You just wrote a book. What led you to all of those things? How did you become the Boston Police Commissioner? How did you become the Secretary of Public Safety? I mean, it's crazy stuff that you've been through.

[00:03:29.720] - Kathy O'Toole

Well, I have to say, Steve, I wish I could say there was something strategic about it. There was absolutely nothing strategic about it. I just worked really hard, and I was very fortunate to have great family support. My husband's, a retired Boston police detective and behind me every step of the way, and also great mentors. I point to Bill Bratton, for example. I was only 32 years old when he tapped me on the shoulder and said, look, I'd like you to join my command staff. And it was just an extraordinary experience working for somebody like Bill. So there's no substitute for hard work and great mentors. I would definitely attribute any success I've had to those factors. But also, I think it's really important to say that policing wasn't what I expected. I went to the academy. I was taught to go out and fight the war on crime, police versus the community. This is back in 79 - 80. And then when I arrived out in the field working as a frontline patrol officer, I realized that, yes, it was exciting to make arrests and arrest dangerous people, take them off the streets and get involved in an occasional car chase or whatever.

[00:04:31.200] - Kathy O'Toole

But it was exhilarating. But there was nothing more satisfying than some of the service we provided. I had the opportunity to deliver babies and save a few lives, and it's really humbling to be there to help vulnerable people. And so I think that we see these cop shows on TV, and I think it's all about the car chases and the gunfights and law enforcement, when law enforcement is just a fraction of what police actually do out there, most of it's just providing service to people on a day to day basis, sometimes when they're facing the greatest challenges.

[00:05:04.060] - Steve Morreale

Well, you know, Kathy, I spend a lot of time in the classroom still, both at the university and at leadership training. I was just talking to a group of new England sergeants. And one of the questions I ask is, are you a customer service organization? And there was a little hesitation in raising hands, and I asked him, does it come off your lips to your troops, to your crew? Are you setting expectations that we are customer centric? We should be customer centric. And I know that you've led a number of agencies, and I wonder, how do you drive that home?

[00:05:35.000] - Kathy O'Toole

I think it's really important not only to drive that home internally, but externally with our community as well. So, yeah, you're right. I started my career in Boston as a patrol officer. And by the way, it was my favorite job ever. Yeah, it was great to achieve the positions of commissioner, and chief and all of that, but my favorite job ever was working as a front line patrol officer down in District One. And if I could go back to roll call today and do it again, I'd do it in a heartbeat. That's where my heart has always been. Those people out on the front lines in whatever position I've served and I've tried to get out there and spend as much time with people in the field. Never been one to sit behind the desk and push paper, because I really feel that the people out there on the frontlines, whether the people living in our communities, working in our communities, or the cops who are working on the front lines, they know best the challenges we face, and they also usually have the best suggestions as to how to address those challenges. So in any case, I rose through the ranks, had the opportunity to work in local landscape policing in Massachusetts.

[00:06:33.160] - Kathy O'Toole

And while each police agency I've worked in, it has its unique characteristics, certainly local policing and state policing have different priorities, but there are certainly principles across the board that apply. And when you talk about customer service, you're absolutely right. We're there to serve the people. Those days where it was the police versus the community, and we went out there and we were taught to make as many arrests as possible, write as many tickets as possible, stop as many people, and do threshold inquiries as possible, we actually get days off for producing good numbers 2030 years ago. Those days are gone. What we should do is go out there, find the problems, identify the problems, work with the community to prioritize those issues, and then figure out solutions to address them. So it's changed dramatically, and people are calling for huge reform in policing today. But guess what? Policing now is so different than the policing we knew even ten years ago. Things have changed dramatically and should change dramatically and will continue to change. I've worked on a lot of reform projects, on consent decree projects with the federal government. And there's a plan.

[00:07:33.940] - Kathy O'Toole

There's always a plan. We need to tick the boxes. We need to get all that work done. But I've said that it shouldn't be about a box ticking exercise. We should embrace this culture of continuous improvement, innovation. We always should be looking to see how we can do it better. And that makes it more exciting from a management perspective. But I think it also makes it more exciting for the cops on the front line.

[00:07:54.040] - Steve Morreale

Well, it's much easier to do your job when you have some friends behind you. And you're not going to have friends if you don't extend your hand and get to know the people who are running the bodegas or who are running the businesses or who are running the parks and those kinds of things. And I think that's important. But one of the things you said a little bit ago about what we count, and I know that you are involved with 21 CP, among other things, looking at agencies and trying to figure out, okay, how can we do things better in a different way? How can we capture the work that we do? And it seems to me that sometimes we count the wrong things. We're bean counters. How do you capture community interactions? How do you capture community meetings, the things you talked about? How do you capture a group of officers going and dealing with the community to find out what their issues are and work on them together and try to find collaborative agencies to work on the problem? Am I wrong about counting the wrong things?

[00:08:44.570] - Kathy O'Toole

No, you're absolutely right. And I can cite a fairly recent experience. When I was police chief in Seattle from 2014 to 2018, I arrived out there and the department was distracted. They had been under investigation by the US Department of Justice. They just entered into a consent decree, and so the department was demoralized. Very difficult time for that organization. And when I arrived, I realized that they were capturing numbers, but just enough numbers to report their crime stats to the federal government. That was about it. As I said earlier, crime is only a fraction of what police do. We need to capture data to show what we're actually doing, what services we're actually providing to the community. So we established our version of comp stat out there. We called it Cstad, and we started by capturing much more reliable, accurate crime data so we could, of course, deal with crime. That's always going to be a priority for the police. But I said, we need to capture all the other stuff we're doing. In Seattle, one of the greatest challenges was at the intersection of public health and public safety. People who were unsheltered homeless, people who had addiction conditions, people who were in mental health crisis.

[00:09:49.820] - Kathy O'Toole

I said, Let's take some of those categories and determine my captured data, determine how we're doing. So after a year of capturing this new data, my analyst came to me and they said, wow, some of these results are like, startling. And I said, Really? Give me an example. And they said, well, for instance, Seattle police officers are responding to people in serious mental health crisis about 100 times a year. And I said, wow, that's amazing. I think first reaction would be, how do we get people who are more appropriately trained to deal with these cases? But they said, wait a minute, there's more to this story. What's that? And they said, well, 50% of these people are threatening either before or during the call with the police. That threatening themselves or that's threatening others, and eight to 10% of these people are armed. So I said, this data is really important. Not only do we need to share this with our community to show what we're doing, to show the services we're providing, but we also need to be really thoughtful about the way we develop approaches to these issues going forward. We've seen in the last year, all these last couple of years, all these calls for defund and reimagined and some of these knee jerk reactions to horrific scenarios out there.

[00:10:56.740] - Kathy O'Toole

I mean, certainly the police need to reform. The police need to innovate. But let's do it in a really thoughtful way and let's use data to inform our decisions, as we did in Seattle. And we constantly use data. I just wanted to emphasize the importance of collecting really accurate and timely information so that we can inform our operations, but also share that with our community so they know what we're doing. They know the services that we're providing.

[00:11:22.830] - Steve Morreale

So as an executive in a number of agencies, you know that we have gone through a transformation where we were and we're talking about now, we were measuring output, we were counting beans. And of course, now the federal government is looking for outcomes, and so agencies should be looking for outcomes. You as an executive should be looking for outcomes. How do you measure did that data that you were beginning to collect a little bit differently, did that help to measure outcomes?

[00:11:46.480] - Kathy O'Toole

Absolutely, because we were able to show, for instance, what we did, what the outcomes were for these people. We were able to show that police only used for in these cases in less than 2% of cases. And by the way, most of it was soft take down or minimal force, tight handcuffs or something of that nature. Most of it, I think, serious force, was used in a fraction of 1% of cases. And I think that's a remarkable statistic when we show that officers walked into these really complicated situations. And by the way, we're able to use this information to inform our training as well is really important because, as you know, as I rose through the ranks of policing, I got some good training, fairly decent training, when I was first in the academy. But my in service training amounted to maybe a visit to the range every year or two and CPR certification once in a while, that was it. So now we've recognized that we need to give police officers much better training in areas such as de escalation, dealing with people in mental health crisis, use of force, bias replacing. We've come to recognize that we need to do much better training for our in-service office.

[00:12:50.920] - Steve Morreale

So you run around the country, you go from one coast to the other, you crazy fool! And you step aside from Seattle while they were under consent to Cree. And so you were operating and trying to guide them through the consent decree and at one point in time you ended up in Northern Ireland. I'd like to talk to you about that and obviously in Ireland for a couple of assignments. So how did that happen? And tell us what you did.

[00:13:14.000] - Kathy O'Toole

I wish I could say again that was strategic, but it wasn't. Well, my husband and I both have more family in Ireland than we do here, so there's a big Irish connection there and we started traveling there when my daughter was very young to go visit family. So we have a real love for the place, real fondness. But in the mid-1990s I was working in Governor Weld's cabinet as Secretary of Public Safety in Massachusetts and I was invited to a conference at Boston University. It was hosted by Liz Shannon. Liz Shannon was the wife of former Ambassador Charles Shannon, who was US Ambassador to Ireland at one point. So Liz hosted this conference and the theme was Reaching Common Ground and it was women from Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland and the United States. And we were invited to go and share our experiences and talk about some of our common challenges. And initially I thought, I don't know what we're going to have in common. There's a war in Northern Ireland that's been going on for nearly 30 years. The Republic of Ireland was fairly quiet and in Boston we were dealing with gang violence.

[00:14:13.350] - Kathy O'Toole

But the more we talked, the more I realized we did have in common. I was talking about the challenges of dealing with the young people, teenagers in our community who are taking each other's lives day in and day out and sense of gang violence. And the women in Northern Ireland were talking about losing their sons and their brothers and their fathers and their husbands to this horrific violence there and it was really powerful. And we came together and I talked about some of the initiatives we were undertaking in Boston and other communities in Massachusetts, how we're trying to break down barriers and work with other partners, including community partners like the clergy, and trying to prevent and intervene rather than just respond to the crisis after the fact. And they talked about how they'd loved to embrace a model of community policing similar to that in Northern Ireland. So that was the foundation. And then I was invited to Northern Ireland this was pre peace process. I was invited to Northern Ireland to do a series of lectures on community policing. That was an interesting experience when I arrived there. The RUC at the time, it's not the Police Service of Northern Ireland, but at the time it was the Royal Australian Constabulary.

[00:15:17.630] - Kathy O'Toole

They asked me if I wanted to go out on one of their community policing patrols. And I thought, Oh, yeah, that would be cool. I'd love to go out and talk to neighbors and shopkeepers and things like that and get a sense of the place. And next thing you know, I was in an armored Land Rover surrounded by people with long rifles and automatic weapons.

[00:15:34.460] - Steve Morreale

So they were literally policing the community, right?

[00:15:38.290] - Kathy O'Toole

And we had a military escort everywhere we went. So it was community policing in Northern Ireland in the mid 1990s was a far cry for community policing because we would know it here in the US. But certainly they've come a long way. So when the peace process emerged, as you know, senator George Mitchell went and represented our country and did a phenomenal job of negotiating the agreement, the Belfast Agreement, the Good Friday Agreement, and two issues were left one unresolved. One was the policing issue. And that's when Chris Patten, former governor of Hong Kong and well known British politician, was asked to chair the Commission to develop a new framework for policing. And I was one of eight members of that commission. I was asked to join the Commission because of the work I'd done over there, the familiarity I had with the place. But it was an incredible experience as well. I have said to you several times, I think I've learned my best lessons about policing on the opposite side of the Atlantic.

[00:16:33.040] - Steve Morreale

Yeah, I understand that that was quite an honor to serve. And obviously some of the work that you've done, and I just had the opportunity in April to work with PSNI Police Service of Northern Ireland, of which Patent Commission, which you were a member, was the initiator of that, changing uniforms and changing the approach. And obviously you still have the Catholic - Protestant issues that are there. They're trying to add more Catholics to it. But as you look back, are you proud, are you happy with at least the momentum that you started in Northern Ireland?

[00:17:01.590] - Steve Morreale

Well, it was certainly a humbling experience, and I would say that the lesson I learned most is that the people need to buy in, the people need to contribute to the dialogue. We had a very robust public consultation process. I was the one who recommended at one point that we do public meetings. And some people looked at me like, oh, this naive American thinks we can go out in public and talk about policing here in Northern Ireland.

[00:17:24.170] - Steve Morreale

We'll be stoned.

[00:17:26.530] - Kathy O'Toole

But Chris Patten was just phenomenal. He was absolutely committed to public dialogue. So we went out and we held dozens of public meetings. And I have to tell you, there were times when I looked for the closest door window in case they had to make a run for it. But that was just such a powerful experience because, of course, we listened respectfully to the politicians and we listened respectfully to the people who ran different organizations. But we needed to hear from the ordinary people in Northern Ireland. And I think when they got into town halls and these other venues and they listened to each other talk, they realized they had more in common than they imagined. They wanted safe schools and neighborhoods for their children. They wanted all the things that we want for our families and for our communities. So it was great to hear their perspectives. Not only did we do the public meetings, but we had countless private meetings with people, a lot of victims on both sides of the troubles there. We met with a lot of police families who lost their loved ones, who had been murdered or assassinated during the troubles.

[00:18:23.870] - Kathy O'Toole

We met with people who the police had murdered or had been victims of violence in the community. So there was a lot of grief there. I heard many people use that phrase. Nobody had the monopoly on grief there. But I really appreciated that people came forward in such a constructive way and contributed to our work. We also took written submissions, and we received thousands of them. So anybody who wanted a voice in the process had a voice in the process. And in every process I've worked in and every police department I've worked in, subsequently, I've applied that same philosophy. Anybody who wants a voice wants to contribute to the dialogue on policing. What kind of policing they want in their community should have that opportunity.

[00:19:04.700] - Steve Morreale

What's both mystifying and daunting, when you do something like that, is capturing all of that and synthesizing that into your report and pulling some of those ideas and ideals that come from that conversation. Because I know that you then went to Ireland later on, and you became the first, as I understand it, inspectorate for the Garda. And when you went there tell me about that, because you replicated that same process when you came there's so many things to talk about. And by the way, we're talking to Kathy O'Toole, former commissioner in Boston, former Chief of Police in Seattle, Washington, a member of the Garda Inspectorate, and also the chair of a commission to look at the future of policing in Ireland. So when you went to the Garda, what was your approach to that? Who's this American coming into the Garda? I don't care if she's an O'Toole or Horton, what the hell are you doing here? No, it doesn't. It never does.

[00:20:01.290] - Kathy O'Toole

But I have to say that it was an incredible experience, and again, I learned a lot from it. So I was asked to serve as the Chief Inspector of the garden inspectorate. The Irish government decided in 2000, I believe it was 2005, it was the Garda Chicago Act of 2005. They decided to create new structures around policing there in the aftermath of some tribunals and some investigations. I have to say this, that the Irish police, they've had their challenges from time to time, but they still enjoy incredible support from the community and independent studies that consistently their favorability rating is in the 80s, which is just mind boggling compared to most organizations. I'm sure most politicians would kill to have those ratings, right? But they recognize the need to modernize. So they created new structures around policing. And I was appointed the first Chief Inspector of the Garda inspector. And on day one I arrived. And you're right, the media response at the press conference was, you woman from America, you're probably going to make a recommendation that we arm all of our police because they've been routinely unarmed police service. And I said, no, on the contrary.

[00:21:08.070] - Kathy O'Toole

I said, I have huge respect for the fact this organization has been routinely unarmed since its inception in the early 1920s. And the Garda Commissioner at the time one of the organization was first established said that they would serve with moral authority, not with force of arms, so they remained routinely unarmed. I said, that's such a wonderful tradition. And I said, if we can work hard to preserve that, sure. I was concerned about police officer safety in an environment where guns were becoming more prevalent, but I thought that there were ways that we could mitigate some of that. We got them all stabbed vests or bulletproof vests very early on, and we created armed response units to show up strategically at situations where guns have been reported or guns were anticipated. So we tried to make recommendations that were sensible, that it addressed the public safety and officer safety issues, but didn't resort to arming the entire organization. So I think the point I'm making here is that each organization is unique and we need to consult with people in those organizations, the officers working, particularly those on the front lines, but we need to consult with the community as well.

[00:22:16.600] - Kathy O'Toole

And that's what we did during that process too. Every time I did an inspection and we did an inspection on a wide variety of different issues, policing in general. But then we took on controversial issues like dealing with victims of child sexual abuse. We were assigned to that matter as well. So we took on some really sensitive, controversial issues. But in every instance we spent time out there in Garda stations across the country and in community meetings and private meetings, listening carefully. I felt like we were facilitators. We weren't dictating the agenda. I didn't go to Ireland and say, oh yeah, well, I've been in policing for decades and I'm going to impose my ideas here. No, I said, I'm going to listen carefully. We're going to crisscross the country. We're going to engage in public consultation, and then we're going to distill, as you said, that information and attempt to come up with sensible recommendations. So that's what it was all about. And later, when I worked on the Commission, the Commission did the same thing. We held public meetings throughout the country, and we listened carefully. It was an authentic process.

[00:23:17.850] - Steve Morreale

And I watched it, and I watched it, and I saw it. And I had been over there just shortly after when the report came out. And thanks to talking to Kathy O'Toole, thanks to her connections, I ended up in my Fulbright at the University of Limerick, the Law School, with a vouch from Madame Kathleen O'Toole and ended up in the Garda, the Garda College, which is amazing. So I have a special place in my heart for the Garda. And what I'm curious to know is this thing that you seem to believe is so important, that listening skill, deep listening, where does that come from?

[00:23:51.400] - Kathy O'Toole

I really think that we need to set the tone at the top of our organization. Organizational culture is driven by leadership. I mean, occupational culture, when we think about our beliefs and there's some great aspects to it, running into 911, running into buildings when other people were running out, the bravery, the courage, the commitment to service. I mean, that's all part of the occupational culture of policing. Some would say the US versus them mentality. And some of the cynicism that develops over years and people are working in difficult circumstances like that would also be part of the occupational culture. But organizational culture, the organization culture, is driven by leadership. And that's why it's so important for leadership to set the tone and to set the example. And by nature, I was always one that really wanted to get out and engage with people and listen to people. I didn't make unilateral decisions. Occasionally in places, you have to make a split second decision, right? If it's a life or death situation or if you're in an operational situation where a decision is required, yeah, you have to be decisive. But even if I had five minutes to make an important decision, I would consult my team or best case, I would consult my community.

[00:25:01.730] - Kathy O'Toole

I've had members of the clergy on speed dial when I've had to make some of my toughest decisions in Boston and Seattle and even in Ireland. It's just you have to get out and listen carefully and develop trust with people. So I can't emphasize that enough, that authentic engagement is so important. And I think if you model that in training and educating your officers, if you do a lot of scenario training, for instance, and put them into situations or difficult situations where they have to engage with people so they can test out some of it, I think to some people it comes naturally. This human engagement comes naturally. Others actually have to work at it. And they need a model. They need to see how this works. And I think it's so rewarding. I'll just say this, Steve, as I alluded to this before, but the Irish police never lost their connection with the community. When we think about the roots of modern policing and the Pale and principles and all of that, police or the community, the community or the police, that relationship with the community is absolutely essential in order to have effective policing.

[00:26:01.820] - Kathy O'Toole

If the police don't trust the community, do not trust the police, then the police won't have legitimacy and they'll fail. So there's nothing more important than this relationship with the community. And the Irish police never lost that. We veered off course here in the US. We started to fight the war on crime and the war on drugs and the war on our communities, and it was a police versus community. And now we've been scrambling over the past couple of decades to re establish those essential relationships.

[00:26:28.870] - Steve Morreale

You know what troubles me? You're right. It troubles me. My history. And when you Secretary of Public Safety and the work that I did with New England Community Police Partnership, we were trying to push community policing, and that was going down a tremendous road, and so much good was happening. And then 911 happened, and then we began to focus on terror and terror prevention and terror identification, and we took our eyes off the ball, in my estimation, because now, for some reason, I remember seeing so many people. What do you got today? I got a detail. What are you doing? I'm out at the club and I'm watching the waterway. What are you watching for? I don't know. It's overtime. It was that thing like, what are we looking for? Instead of ramping up community policing. And the community would know if there was something amiss, if something was changing. We lost our way for a little while. Gratefully we're coming back. But I see your head shaking. What are you thinking?

[00:27:18.690] - Kathy O'Toole

No, I absolutely agree. Yeah. Community policing is a term that's used so liberally, but very seldom defined, and I think it's really important to define it. Community policing shouldn't be a unit or an assignment. When I first heard the words back in the 1980s, we were young Boston cops downtown. It was like, Oh, yeah, they're going to assign somebody from headquarters to community policing. And we were all like, Oh, we want to be crime fighters, we don't want to be social workers. But unfortunately, it wasn't appropriately defined or organized back then. Community policing should be the ethos, the foundation on which everything is built, right? That's what we're there for, to keep our community safe. So it needs to be the foundation on which everything is built. And everything should revolve around that commitment to the community and that engagement with the community. So I think for organizations that are trying to do better at community policing, the first thing they need to do is define it. And define it in that context, that it's not just an assignment or a unit to go off and do things separately apart from the rest of the police service.

[00:28:20.700] - Speaker 3

It's actually the foundation on which everything's.

[00:28:22.890] - Speaker 2

Built and that everybody plays a role, not just five or seven or ten people in each sector.

[00:28:27.920] - Kathy O'Toole

Some of this sounds maybe philosophical, but let me give you a practical example. So when I arrived in Seattle, people said, hey, so what's your philosophy on community policing? And I said, well, I said, I'm not going to dictate that here in this community. I said, I'm just getting to know the city. It strikes me that it's similar to Boston in that it's a city of proud neighborhoods. So I said I want to get out to those neighborhoods, talk to people and see what they want. And we actually established a great partnership with Seattle University. I can't overstate the importance of relationships with academic partners in Boston. They were invaluable, in Ireland and Seattle. I mean, your own work at University of Limerick, so you get a test to this as well as anyone. So we really worked hard in these different places to establish great lines of communication with the community. But in Seattle we formalized this. We decided to develop a new strategy. We called them our community policing micro plans. And we went out and defined these different neighborhoods in the city, these proud neighborhoods that for many years, over the years had been established.

[00:29:31.700] - Kathy O'Toole

And in each neighborhood, we had cops on the beach. And people living and working in those neighborhoods develop the top three to five priorities that they wanted to see the police focus on. The police are always going to respond to 911 calls and always going to focus on part one, crime. But they're all those other quality of life issues, 85% of the time people call the police. It's not for crime, it's not for law enforcement. It's because of quality of life issue or because there's someone vulnerable in the neighborhood. So we went out and said to the people living and working in these neighborhoods, what do you want us to focus on? And we developed plans and working with Seattle University, they helped us facilitate this process. And then they independently did surveys with both qualitative and quantitative data to show how we were doing, to demonstrate that we were addressing the issues that people asked us to address. And during that period of time that I was there and that we launched these, the favorability of the police department skyrocketed. I mean, we got up into the mid seventy s, I believe we're 74%.

[00:30:31.840] - Kathy O'Toole

And we went up very significantly in communities of color as well, and crime dropped. So I really think that that commitment to community engagement and then more specifically those community policing micro plans where we really focused our officers work on the things that were of importance to the community made a difference.

[00:30:49.480]