Chief Michael Davis 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 Katherine McQuay of the COPS Office here with Chief Michael Davis of Brooklyn Park, Minnesota Police Department. Brooklyn Park is currently working on an initiative that undertakes community-wide strategic planning. Chief Davis, thank you so much for speaking with us today. Could you tell us a bit about your program and how it came about? Chief Michael Davis: Well, we’re a community that has been evolving to a process where we believe we need strategic planning over the course of the last four or five years. If you look at all the fundamentals of community policing, we developed a problem-solving strategy, we have various outreach initiatives that look to connect the police to people that we’re serving, but those things we felt fell short of dealing with what we consider to be the underpinnings of what’s hindering what I consider to be the possibility of our community. We’re a community that is 40 percent diverse with 20 percent of our population being foreign born, and we have an immense amount of talent of people that live and work in our community, and we weren’t leveraging that in our traditional models of engagement. And so we felt it necessary to engage in something that’s going to have a succinct effort that will have an ending that we can actually measure. We thought that was important. And we did it around the premise of defining livability. When you have a city that has divergent opinions, it’s important to, we believe, get one opinion on what livability is, so it’s crafting what the future state should be, so what’s the possibility of our community. So you’re shifting the conversation from what the problems are to what the possibility is. You’re defining what that is, and then you’re coming together and you’re creating a roadmap of how to get there. So everyone knows along the way that you’re achieving milestones towards the mission of what you want to accomplish. And we really set out to accomplish three things. One is to do what I just said, which is to define what it is we want to accomplish and set a roadmap to get there. The second is to leverage talent within our community, which we felt we weren’t doing. And the third was to craft a clear mission for our employees. Really what this is, you know, we’re about -- a city of about just under 80,000 people with 300 employees. But this undertaking really treats the entire community as our organization, so really it’s an organization of 80,000 with 300 on the payroll. And so what we want to do with that 300 is we wanted to have them understand what everyone’s roll is in enhancing livability with respect to the mission we’re trying to accomplish. So it’s a very ambitious undertaking, but we’re emphatically moving forward, and we’ve been very pleased with the results thus far. Katherine McQuay: What’s been the reaction of the community? Chief Michael Davis: It’s been great. This started out -- the strategic planning process is something that’s been used in a lot of different school districts across the country for many years, and we’ve adapted to this community setting. And the first thing we did -- we had is we called a Community Café, and the Community Café is something -- it’s not meant to be a forum for us to talk to the community; it’s a forum for the community to talk to each other. And we set out the information about this Community Café exercise, and more than 400 residents showed up and had conversations that they would not have but for having this forum and opportunity to do it. On the heels of that, we identified what we call our Core Planning Team, which is a group of people that represent the total diversity of our community, not just in demographic, but also divergent of opinion, which we thought was very important. And that’s 31 people. And we got that group together who crafted what is the initial framework, which is the Draft Strategic Plan. Katherine McQuay: And what about your officers? How have they felt about this initiative? Chief Michael Davis: The officers are hungry for it. We believe that this generation of officer -- and we have a very young department in Brooklyn Park -- this generation of officer is hungry for a mission-based sense of service. Going out and doing the perfunctory traffic stop and arrest, while those are parts of the jobs, they’re here to do more. They’re here to contribute to more. And what this is going to do and what this has done, by fully engaging the community in some, is it’s given them, right, a look at what we’re aiming to do. The mission is very succinct in what came out of this process is that Brooklyn Park is a thriving community inspiring pride where opportunity exists for all. And all of us within the community have a role within that. So this is not a conversation about the transaction of what can government do for you. This is not about building our capacity as a department. It’s about having the community be introspective, look at what the issues are honestly and openly and then not focus on the problems, but focus on the possibility and the talent of the community to get us to our mission. And we’re calling the question. Katherine McQuay: And how will you measure success? Chief Michael Davis: Success will be measured as part of the process. What comes out of the core planning team process is we have measurements teams, we have action teams, that are set up along each strategy that’s going to clearly landmark and create milestones of success as we go along the way. So it’s not enough to say, “Here’s the mission, and we’re hoping to move towards it.” Here’s the mission, here’s the strategic objectives, and here are the strategies that we’re measuring to get us to our objectives. And so as we go through this process, which will be completed here late this fall, we will have a full measurement strategy commensurate with the plan so we know that we’re on the right track. Katherine McQuay: Terrific. Well, congratulations on your program and thank you for sharing it with us today. Chief Michael Davis: Thank you. 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 Michael Davis 3 6/15/10