New shelter update: Bozeman police get acquainted with new shelter site

While one Bozeman Police Department officer had a question about pets being welcome at our new shelter (spoiler: they will be!), the tenor was mostly quiet on a recent Monday morning tour of Haven’s future new shelter, with the group of longtime police officers doing a lot of listening and nodding. 

“This will be really good for some of the newer guys,” one of them said during the tour. 

Monday’s tour for longtime BPD officers – the shortest time served was 12 years – was the first of six tours Haven is doing for local law enforcement as we prepare to open our first-ever public-facing location in Haven’s 40+ year history. 

Haven staff took the small group through The Barnard Center, showing them the BPD substation on site, talking about our security protocols, and offering a refresher on our confidentiality policies, which can affect police work like warrants and welfare checks. 

The tours this winter are part of Haven continuing to strengthen our partnership with law enforcement – while at the same time understanding that many of the survivors we support may not want to interact with police. So while, for example, BPD will have a substation on site as part of our security protocols, the shelter site is designed so that residents won’t have to interact with police officers our staff may be interacting with.