August 5, 2020 4:00 am Published by

Episode 67:

Chief Janeé Harteau (retired) was Minneapolis’ 52nd Police Chief and the first female chief in the city’s history and in April, 2017, Fortune Magazine named her one of the world’s top 50 leaders. She initiated MPD 2.0 immediately after she became chief, systematically changing accountability and transparency within the Department while maximizing officer performance and opportunities for advancement within the organization.

Chief Harteau is currently the CEO and President of Vitals Aware Services. The Vitals™ App enables safer community interactions by allowing individuals with visible and invisible conditions and disabilities to create and share a personalized digital profile with authorized first responders, health care professionals, and educators via a secure, mobile app – improving real-time communication, reducing the risk of misunderstandings, and promoting greater independence.

What you’ll learn about in this episode:

  • How Janeé rose to the top of the ranks in a male-dominated field that is not very receptive to female police officers.
  • How technology has inherently changed policing for the better
  • Why women struggle to thrive in policing
  • How police reform has improved the work environment for women and minorities
  • Janeé’s opinion on police brutality and society’s perception of the police
  • Janeé’s theory on “the one bad apple” when it comes to police brutality
  • What businesses can do to set up an intervention system to deal with the ongoing chaos and civil unrest
  • Defunding our police departments vs. reforming our police departments
  • What the average person can do to be an agent of change with these issues
  • The biggest challenges Janeé has faced in launching her company

Resources:

The Realities of Policing

Chief Janeé Harteau is no stranger to controversy or crisis. Now retired, she was Minneapolis’ 52nd Police Chief and the first female chief in the city’s history. Janeé led her department through transformational change during politically charged and turbulent times. She continues to be an agent of change in her new role as CEO of Vitals Aware Services. The Vitals™ App enables safer community interactions by allowing individuals with visible and invisible conditions and disabilities to create and share a personalized digital profile with authorized first responders, health care professionals, and educators via a secure mobile app. In this episode of Intentional Greatness, Janeé shares her story and her perspective on what is happening in Minneapolis and communities around the country.

Heroes and Villains

Janeé says that what makes policing tough is because people question your role. In modern society, everyone has access to a camera at all times. We are starting to see multiple sides to policing, with more context and more backstory. It keeps cops honest and it provides so much information/evidence that used to be inaccessible. But with everything being recorded, we see the bad side as well. Life and death situations bring out either the best or the worst in people. And with that tension ever-present in Janeé’s work environment, it was a difficult task to rise to the top of the ranks in a male-dominated field.

A Different Dynamic to Policing

Janeé always thought that if she was really good at her job, she would be accepted. That was not the case as she struggled with male colleagues who were dismissive, slow to respond to calls for back up, and even flat-out prevented her from doing the job in high stakes situations. Janeé rose to the top because she refused to walk away. She was fighting bad guys in the streets and bad guys in her precinct, yet she refused to fold no matter how bad things got. When she got to a position of power, she did everything possible to make a change. Janeé always pushed for diversity in the department, not just in ethnicity and gender, but in life experiences as well. Women bring an entirely new dynamic to policing, and everyone in uniform is better off because of it.

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