Local Leaders

Officer Jim Engmark never planned on doing mental health work. After years in law enforcement, SWAT, and the fire service, he came back to the Johnson County Sheriff's Office as a training officer and ended up helping build a Crisis Intervention Team that other Indiana counties now come to learn from.

In this Local Leaders conversation, Engmark talks about what mental health calls looked like before CIT: take someone to the hospital on an emergency detention, drop them off, and hope for the best, only to get called back to the same address again and again. He walks through how Sheriff Duane Burgess, court services, and a small group of deputies decided the system needed a real shift, how ARPA funding got the team full-time in 2022, and why follow-up months later matters as much as the first response.

We also get into the practical side of the work: de-escalation ("if they're at 150, bring them down to 50"), riding with a therapist on scene, peer support after critical incidents, and the day-to-day reality of trying to get people help instead of cycling them through jail or the ER.

Topics we cover:
• What mental health calls looked like before Johnson County's CIT team
• Building a program from the ground up (SIM mapping, buy-in, ARPA funding to county budget)
• The team today: three deputies, a therapist, and follow-ups at 30/60 days and 3/6 months
• De-escalation in practice, meeting people where they are
• Helping other counties start their own CIT training
• Why "drop them at the hospital and move on" was never enough

Guest: Officer Jim Engmark, Crisis Intervention Deputy, Johnson County Sheriff's Office (Indiana)
Host: Adam Lara — Local Leaders podcast (Indianapolis)

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He took out a $33,000 loan as a broke grad student to buy 15 cows — and 30 years later he's still running that herd. Keegan Poe owns Poe's Quality Meats in Indiana and served as president of the Indiana Beef Cattle Association. In this conversation we get into how a herd he bought while at Purdue turned into a real business, why he thinks "grass-fed" marketing is mostly misinformation, and what actually goes into running a cattle operation day to day.

What we get into:

How buying 15 cows on a loan while still in grad school turned into a 30-year business
Why he weans his calves based on the phase of the moon — and the 48-hour difference it makes
The actual difference between grass-fed and grain-fed beef (and why "healthier" isn't one of them)
Why grocery store ground beef can come from 50 different animals in one pound
What dry-aging actually does, and why local processors do it differently than the big plants
The real economics behind record-high cattle prices right now
Why the average U.S. rancher is 58 years old and what that means for the industry
How he prices beef by hanging carcass weight instead of live weight, and why
The hardest parts of the job: a uterine prolapse, an unexplained overnight loss, and other stories from 30 years of calving season
What it would actually take for someone to start a cattle operation from scratch today

Guest: Keegan Poe, owner of Poe's Quality Meats and past president of the Indiana Beef Cattle Association.

Local Leaders is a podcast of conversations with leaders across business, sports, faith, and politics about how their organizations actually operate, how they make decisions, and how they got into leadership.

Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
1:05 Growing up farming & how he got into cattle
7:10 The $33K loan: buying his first herd at Purdue
21:12 Turning a herd into a freezer beef business
29:43 Grass-fed vs. grain-fed: debunking the myths
48:02 Why grocery store beef looks and tastes different
1:04:04 Life of a calf: birth to the locker
1:15:38 The real economics, pricing, and risk
1:22:28 Why beef prices are at record highs (and could you start a farm today?)
1:33:51 When it goes wrong: calving disasters & final thoughts

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