‘Humanize our coppers’: Police officers hold community conversation in the SUB

If you see a group of cops standing at a table in the Strand Union Building (SUB) drinking their morning coffee, don’t worry — no one is in trouble. They’re gathered to engage with the community and answer any questions people might have about law enforcement and things going on around town.

On April 9, two officers from the Bozeman Police Department (BPD) and one officer from the University Police Department (UPD) made themselves available in the SUB for the Coffee with a Cop event.

“[That] is why we are out here today,” said Captain Benjamin King, who serves as the division commander of BPD’s Support Services Division. “We’re just trying to — one — humanize our coppers and the nice badge a little bit, and [also] let the community know that we are people and we have a job, so we put the uniform on.”

According to King, Support Services handles everything within the department that is not enforcement. King oversees everything from hiring and recruitment to community engagement

King emphasized that while most people only interact with police in negative contexts, their work extends far beyond such encounters.

“It’s not always positive interactions,” he said. “Until you interact with a real cop in a non-enforcement activity and you get to see that we’re just real people, really here, driven with the mission to help.” 

Officer Bre Sanders has a similar role at BPD. As a community resource officer, her day-to-day includes attending educational events such as this one.

Sanders said she enjoys attending these events and seeing members of the public and police officers shift their perspectives on each other after interacting.

“I’m probably humanizing law enforcement to everybody, but then I also get the opportunity to bring cops that are on night shift or long-term patrol officers to these events and to different community functions,” Sanders said. “So I really get to humanize people to cops too — so it really goes both ways.”

According to Sanders, community engagement is important because it makes the police available to the public for questions. She specifically cited questions people may be embarrassed to ask others, or controversial topics they may want clarification on from a police officer. 

“We give them an opportunity to come in and actually have that talk and have that conversation. We can’t give away stuff that is going on with active cases, but we are very transparent,” she said.

Sanders highlighted the importance of transparency for maintaining public trust. 

“We don’t want to be hiding things from the public, and I think that sometimes it can be a misconception,” she said. “And maybe that is in other agencies, but it’s definitely not with MSU, with BPD and with Gallatin County — we are all about transparency.”

Lieutenant Dana McNeil has been a police officer for 21 years and recently moved from the BPD to the UPD. He previously worked for BPD’s in the special victims unit, which it shared with the UPD, and eventually decided to make the switch.

He said he believes that community engagement is important because the police and the public are not as divided as people may think.

“There is this principle called the Pelium Principle for Policing, and that is that the people are the police and the police are the people,” he said. “So we should be representative of what the interests of the public are, and we should not be separate.”

According to McNeil, community engagement is especially important with college-aged people because this stage in life is critical for building trust in the police.

“I worked sex crimes for many years and a lot of times people who are very vulnerable — or in the most vulnerable populations — have a misguided view of what the police are and what they do, and so they are very reluctant to come forward because they don’t know what to expect,” McNeil said. “So maybe getting a chat with somebody in this type of setting first will help them later in life when they really need help.”

McNeil said that he really admires his coworkers and believes that they are all genuinely good people.

“I work with a group of people [at BPD] and here at MSU that will just give you the shirt off of their back, and it’s not anybody that can say that, so I just feel really lucky,” he said.

For more information, visit the UPD website at www.montana.edu/police.