Chief Jim Bueermann Interview


Bernard Melekian Intro:
This is “The Beat,” a podcast series that keeps you in the know about the latest 
community policing topics facing our nation.

Katherine McQuay:
I’m here today with Chief Jim Bueermann of the Redlands Police Department in 
California.  Chief, thank you for joining us, and can you talk to us about why you believe 
in the importance of community policing?

Chief Jim Bueermann:
Sure.  Community policing is important to this country, in my opinion, because it quite 
frankly is kind of the way Mother Nature intended policing to be.  It is a connection 
between the people that serve the community in the role of police officers and support 
civilian staff and volunteers and the members of the community that fund those police 
departments and more importantly have a real connection to the services that people 
provide.  And when we connect to the people we serve through this framework called 
community policing, then I think we are much more likely to co-produce public safety in a 
way that is comfortable for everybody and removes much of the stigma of either being a 
cop or being subject to police services.  It gets everybody on a level playing field and 
really brings us back to where policing was a hundred years ago in this country and 
perhaps we’re just reinventing the past.

Katherine McQuay:
You did a project with the COPS Office a while ago called the Value Based Initiative.  
Can you talk to us about that and the importance of that to your community?

Chief Jim Bueermann:
The Value Based Initiate was our attempt to formally connect with the faith community 
in ways that we intuitively knew were important, hadn’t really discovered a structure that 
facilitated that.  This was especially true with non-traditional congregations in our town 
that were very important with the populations that we were dealing with on a daily basis, 
whether those were people on parole or drug core clients or folks that found themselves 
homeless.

And so, the VBI gave us the ability to not only create a system by which we connected 
with the faith community, but also some technology.  We, for quite a bit of time, had 
two-way pagers -- today, we would be using smartphones if we were still at that point -- 
to connect up with a group of ministers so that we could directly provide them with 
information as it was unfolding on critical intent.  We felt that it was better for them to 
hear from us what had happened on a critical incident and to respond, if that was 
appropriate and they were able to so that when they received phone calls from members 
of their congregation, they had a better sense of what had actually happened and they 
had, in many cases, seen this for their own eyes.  

We tried to replicate some initiatives in Boston using the faith community.  We felt that 
worked really well.  We had problems in our downtown core area with young teens that 
we had conflict with.  When we paired ministers with our police officers and had 
interaction with those teenagers, the conflicts changed dramatically and the kids heard 
messages not just from the police, but from members of the community, and in many 
cases, from their own ministers, saying that things like, “We need you to stop this kind of 
behavior.  You are unruly and you’re causing problems, and if you don’t then I’m going 
to ask this officer here to write you a ticket or we’re going to take this a step further, and 
if this officer doesn’t treat you well then the officer’s going to hear from me and the chief 
is going to hear from me about that.”

So, I think partnering with the faith community keeps everybody focused on problem 
solving and what we need to do and it opens up vistas for police departments in terms of 
communication that we never thought about.

Katherine McQuay:
Great.  One last question: I know you’ve gotten some hiring grants, several grants over 
the years.  Can you talk about the importance of the COPS Office and their programs like 
that to your agency?

Chief Jim Bueermann:
Since the COPS Office was created, we’ve been very fortunate to be the recipient of 
several grants.  Some of those were hiring grants.  Certainly, with the economic 
downturns that we are experiencing today, we wouldn’t have hired anybody in the last 
couple of years had it not been for the hiring grant from the COPS Office.  At this point, 
we’ve seen a third of our department disappear through attrition or layoffs, and that has 
equated to 25 percent of the street cops are no longer with our department.  So, to keep 
our head -- literally keep our head above water, we used this COPS hiring grant.  If we 
didn’t have that, we would be even worse off than we are today.

So, as it relates to the recession, this is the thing probably that’s saving us right at this 
moment, but as it relates to a broader perspective of organizational development, we’ve 
used a COPS grant to literally change the organization from one that was traditionally 
structured to one that was really structured around the community needs relative to non-
traditional resources: housing, recreation, senior services, code enforcement, other kind of 
things.  We used COPS hiring money to help us create a structure that facilitated that.  If 
we hadn’t been able to do that, then I think that we’d still be struggling with the 
traditional model that really didn’t reflect the needs of our community, and so, forever 
we are going to be indebted to the COPS Office.

Bernard Melekian Exit:
“The Beat” was brought to you by the United States Department of Justice COPS Office.  
The COPS Office helps to keep our nation’s community safe by giving grants to law 
enforcement agencies, developing community policing publications, developing 
partnerships, and solving problems.

[end of transcript]

Adayana: Chief Jim Bueermann	1	9/1/10