INDIAN ISLAND, Maine — As Penobscot Nation Police Chief Robert Bryant sees it, Maine is changing and law enforcement needs to change with it.
In February, Bryant was asked to testify before t he president’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing in Washington, D.C. He returned to the capitol in late July for a follow-up session.
President Barack Obama established the task force in light of the recent violent events in Ferguson, Staten Island, Cleveland and around the country as a way to strengthen the relationships between local police and the communities they are supposed to protect and serve.
“Trust between law enforcement agencies and the people they protect and serve is essential to the stability of our communities, the integrity of our criminal justice system, and the safe and effective delivery of policing services,” according to a post on the White House Blog.
That is a notion that Bryant embraces.
“This whole approach is to bring stakeholders in from the community rather than looking [at] it as us working in isolation when we deal with issues in our society, because we’ve found that’s not effective at all,” Bryant said last week in an interview at his office on Indian Island.
“It’s about having a voice. The public wants to have a voice. It’s about trust, and if you don’t have that trust, at the end of the day what do you have?” he said.
Bryant was invited to Washington to bring a tribal perspective to the task force’s discussion.
“I have to admit it was a great honor to be a part of that process, part of that change,” he said.
As the tribe’s police chief, Bryant oversees a department of four full-time and five part-time officers who serve a population of a little over 600. While he is not Native American, his wife, children and grandchildren are.
“I’m a part of the community,” he said. “On an everyday basis, it’s about us being interwoven with the community. I think it goes back to a slogan I heard years ago: ‘Don’t make any decisions about us without us.’ If folks would apply that and understand that, there’s true meaning behind that. It’s about being inclusive.”
One place to start, he said, is at the state’s criminal justice academy. Bryant pointed out that attempts to get a tribal representative on the Maine Criminal Justice Academy’s board of directors have failed twice in the Maine Legislature.
“Maine has changed demographically in the past 15 to 20 years. … I think it’s important that not only do we look at this and say we need that representation there, but we need other races to have that seat at the table because we are changing, the state is changing,” he said.
Maine should be working at “getting that buy-in not only from those who live here but from those who are moving in because they are part of the state now, and to deny that, I think, is wrong,” Bryant said.
“We all travel. We go to different parts of this country, and the hope is that if we are somebody of a different race, different religion, the officers that we come into contact with are well-rounded, well-educated, well-trained and come from a diverse mindset, and that we don’t have some type of implicit bias that may come into play,” he said, “Because it’s about officers having that knowledge, that awareness of the different cultures that make up this vast country.”
Bryant said he hopes to bring that perspective to his department and beyond.
“I want to be a leader in taking Maine in that direction and saying we need to lead by example. Maine is changing and it has to be an inclusive state. I think it’s an exciting time for us,” he said.
Bryant hopes the task force’s final report will spread widely in law enforcement circles, particularly at the academy “because that’s where our young officers are being formed. It’s my hope that I am able to work with the academy in bringing a diverse approach to not only the academy itself but to the training that’s going on there.”
Bryant noted that he has changed since he graduated from the Maine Criminal Justice Academy in the mid 1980s.
“When I first got out of the academy, it was all about you give a ticket, you make an arrest. You’re enforcing the law. Now, it’s about how do we work together and provide the safest and best place to live?” he said.
“The word ‘enforcement’ is such a small piece of what we do. Service is the largest component of what we do,” he said.