SHUTESBURY — Police Chief Kristin Burgess gets excited about the community policing model of law enforcement. She’s taken some flack for gushing about it, but trains her officers to focus on protection, not conflict.

“The overall goal is to be a guardian,” Burgess said. “The warrior mentality is that…there’s always a war…[But] my job is to watch over and protect…to be a guardian of the community.”

Burgess’ framing of the role of a police officer as a guardian suggests the better policing goal is to build relationships with residents. Building individual relationships in the community helps minimize the confrontational enforcement model of policing that characterizes so many departments in the commonwealth.

Residents often find the uniform, badge and gun intimidating, and may have trauma associated with previous interactions with law enforcement. Those traumas, Burgess hopes, will be neutralized by the more personal service her department offers.
Enforcement doesn’t bring elders in contact with the police very often. That prompted Burgess to ask, how does the department serve them too? How does the department keep the elderly safe?
Burgess’ answer? The Monday club.

“My Monday club is high risk,” Burgess said. “They’re an older elder or they have some health concerns [and] potentially they live alone and don’t have people checking on them.” With permission, she drops in for a visit. “I make my way around, sit and chat with them a bit, see how things are going, make sure their medication list is updated on the refrigerator for EMS. We talk about different provisional things they might need.”

The extra duty takes more hours and can be exhausting. Such community policing efforts may not be possible for many departments. Officers are in short supply in the Bay State and across the nation. Part of the effort doesn’t take more cruiser time, Burgess said it just means being observant of people in the community, their normal patterns of activity.

“We have a resident in town who walks many miles in a day,” Burgess said. “I went to my town administrator and said, ‘You know, I haven’t seen so-and-so in a little bit and her route for today should be coming by [here]…Could you check on her?”
She wants to know the bicyclist who rides by Town Hall every day at 4:30 p.m. The chief also wants to know kids at the elementary school, who also rarely interact with the Police Department. How does she serve them? One way is to visit the classroom and explain all the equipment she carries around.

Even preschoolers comprehend the importance of the firearm Burgess carries. For her, the school visit isn’t a time to emphasize equipment used for enforcement. Rather, it’s a chance to start building relationships and to change the image of the public safety department.

“I talk about my really important tool, my radio,” Burgess said. “I often show them my baton…I get frisbees off of roofs and balls out from under cars. That’s all I’ve ever done with this tool on my uniform.”

Recently, the Shutesbury Police Department hosted a graffiti arts class for teens, a way to bridge the social gap. The spray art is often used to cause property damage. The class gave teens an expressive skill, a possible first exposure to those wearing uniforms, and worked to evolve the image of the department from a punitive to a cultural presence.

Kids do get in trouble. For Burgess, it’s a chance to create a different relationship. She recalled when a young man got in trouble and failed to show up in court. She drove to his house, took him to see the judge, and on the way told him what to expect, what to say and how to comport himself.

“He did exactly what I told him to do,” Burgess said. “He found himself getting an extension and was thrilled, and that lifted him up.”

The extension to pay off his fines was a small win, a first positive step toward turning his life around.

“It is a huge success story,” Burgess said. “But if you think back, if I would’ve just kept in the same process as I could do,” the traditional model of policing, “he might not have ended up coming out of that and going into recovery and realizing there’s another route.”

Another route for the department is the co-response model of policing where an officer and an unarmed responder go out together on service calls. Amherst currently fields a co-response team while Northampton is in the process of setting up its own. Burgess said police departments in other towns are looking to form a regional co-response organization.

“Every opportunity to bring in some different way to approach people, that could lower someone’s defenses…yes, I believe they would be very helpful,” Burgess said.

Shutesbury was too small to participate in the regional co-response initiative, funded by a grant, and Burgess was very disappointed. She assigned an officer to research other grant opportunities to fund a similar initiative in Shutesbury. She’s also working with Democratic state Sen. Jo Comerford on police matters related to the negative effects on smaller towns of the police reform bill of 2020.

Burgess hears the reactions of residents to the community policing model in Shutesbury. Some people stopped seeing her uniform. The reminders of enforcement, the gun, badge and uniform, stopped making people nervous.

“I had the biggest compliment the other day,” Burgess recalled. “Someone said, ‘I honestly don’t even notice the uniform anymore.’ That’s a huge compliment because that means they’re seeing past all the intimidation and they’re seeing that there’s a person here.”

It’s difficult to have a relationship with a uniform, a function. Burgess — now playing both functional and personal roles in the community — appreciates the one on one nature of community policing and anticipates having more relationships with the people of Shutesbury.