Strengthening Police Legitimacy and Public Safety

Professors Russell Hassan, the Ambassador Milton A. and Roslyn Z. Wolf Chair in Public and International Affairs, and Clifford Stott, a visiting faculty member and crowd behavior expert from the Keele Policing Academic Collaboration at Keele University in England, are providing their community policing expertise to shape the processes and policies to build trust and legitimacy between the police and the community. 

Following police response to the civil unrest after the murder of George Floyd, and a subsequent federal court injunction against the department’s use of nonlethal force, the Glenn College helped Columbus police develop its Public Order and Public Safety model, a science- and evidence-based approach toward crowd management practices and policies.  

“All of our work is focused on understanding and managing the public perceptions of police legitimacy. Community policing is designed as a vehicle to try to generate good relationships of trust and confidence between the community and the police,” Stott said. “But community policing is impossible in environments where people don’t have trust and confidence in the police.” 

Key to the effort is a staged response to public demonstrations that starts not with a display of a potential use of force but instead with a newly formed police unit called the Columbus Dialogue Team that facilitates a conversation among the police and participants to set expectations even before events begin. 

“What really stands out for me with their work is the idea of the shifting paradigm: We’re here to encourage your First Amendment activity. We’re not here to stop you from doing something,” said Rev. Dr. F. Willis Johnson, pastor of Christ United Methodist Church in Columbus, who is providing input for the police and the Glenn College researchers. 

The result: Peaceful protests in the city that have not escalated or developed into disruption or confrontation because the new policing model has been applied appropriately. 

Columbus police Commander Duane M. Mabry said that since the start of the effort, the Dialogue Team has deployed more than 130 times, with only two minor uses of force. 

“Rather than a police leader yelling into a megaphone, ‘I order you to do this,’ now we have two-way communication sharing,” Mabry said. “We can have the law followed, and we can keep people safe, and we can have a compromise when we negotiate outcomes that are beneficial to everybody.” 

Mabry said that as he traveled around the country and around the world with Stott to discover successful ways police handle crowd management, he witnessed other departments relying on research to make officers better at their jobs.  

“We need a relationship with academia,” he said. “Why can’t Columbus be a living lab to Ohio State? We have almost a million people. We’re the 14th largest city. Surely a symbiotic relationship can be created here.” 

The effort began when Columbus city leaders commissioned from the Glenn College an independent, outside after-action review of the city’s response to demonstrations that took place in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd, a Black man, by Derek Chauvin, a white Minneapolis, Minnesota, police officer. Former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Ohio Carter Stewart and the Glenn College led an investigative team, which included Hassan as an advisor, and made recommendations on preparing for and responding to future demonstrations. Then, in 2021 a federal judge ordered the division to stop using non-lethal force, including tear gas, rubber bullets and batons, against nonviolent protestors, requiring Columbus police to further adapt their crowd management response. 

“Any interactions police have with community members get tense where they have mistrust from both sides, so you are hypervigilant,” Hassan said. “Even with work we’re doing when observing how police manage these large crowd events, we see this playing out all the time.” 

Hassan and Stott’s research involves evidence-based policing: the integration of scientific theory and research methodology into the evaluation of how and why policing works. The evaluation then informs the strategic and tactical direction of policing based upon scientific principles. 

They work with Ohio State units including the Department of Sociology and the Criminal Justice Research Center in the College of Arts and Sciences and the Drug Enforcement Policy Center and Divided Community Project in Moritz College of Law.  

Stott’s internationally recognized research in crowd psychology has disproven historical, common thought that when people get into crowds, they become anonymous and lose self-control. Instead, his science shows that people refocus themselves on the level of group identities. So, a cycle might start: If crowds see action by police as illegitimate, they confront police with violence to defend their right to protest. Police see the collective violence as validating their expectation that any crowd will become violent, and they react with use of force, which results in a confrontation and sometimes, injuries and property damage. 

“The police end up restoring order, but they didn’t stop public disorder from occurring,” Stott said.  

“Reforming police toward a human rights-based, science-informed policing model has taken us down the road of recognizing that dialogue and de-escalation is an important feature of what policing needs to do but singularly often fails to do,” Stott said. 

The Columbus Police Public Order and Public Safety graded tactical model involves distinct phases: The specialized Dialogue Team officers establish positive rapport with protesters and proactively defuse tensions while monitoring the crowd to get a realistic and real-time look at any challenges. If more serious tensions develop, the dialogue officers relay those to police commanders who can then escalate response using bike squads to create more of a physical barrier between conflicting groups. If conflicts increase and safety is threatened, then the police initiate arrest and control teams and mobile field forces. 

In what he refers to as “action research,” Stott said he and Hassan work alongside police officers and leaders to observe the policing of crowd events and provide consulting about changes to evaluate and ensure the success of the new crowd management approach. Police make changes, and the observation phase begins again.

Columbus police Sgt. Steve Dyer, who leads and plans the Columbus Public Order and Public Safety events, said the division has implemented suggestions from Stott such as using officers on bikes for traffic control instead of cars; having a mobile command, so a decision-maker is on the ground to see what’s going on; and holding briefings before events to tell the Dialogue Team what they expect might happen and what’s expected from the officers. 

Of 52 pro-Palestinian protests in Columbus where the dialogue policing method has been implemented since 2023, police have had to initiate just two minor uses of force and three arrests among more than 13,000 participants.

At this summer’s downtown Columbus Pride March, which drew crowds in excess of 700,000 people, Hassan and Stott attended roll call before the event to understand how the police explained the process to participating officers. They then stayed close to the Dialogue Team to observe them in action, such as how they talked to preachers who were protesting and parade participants to explain the officers’ intent to protect the 1st Amendment rights of all parties. Hassan and Stott walked the parade route to observe the actions of the officers and the Dialogue Team. 

At one point, Pride leadership, caught unaware by a Queers for Palestine protest that blocked the parade route, requested help from the Columbus Dialogue Team, which then helped resolve the miscommunication, Dyer said. 

“Really it came down to the analysis done by the Glenn College on our response to the 2020 protest. We fill this criminal justice umbrella, but in police work we have lot of hats we wear. The John Glenn College of Public Affairs also does this,” Mabry said. “What we’re talking about is a public policy change. It’s a culture change.” 

Stott says evidence-based policing is becoming a major movement, but the changes don’t come easily. 

“Trying to inject this science-based approach is for many police officers counterintuitive and countercultural and counternormative,” Stott said. “This is where evidence-based policing starts to help: It shifts the agenda. When leading academic experts put evidence on the table, police have to listen to this, because if they ignore it and things go wrong, they’re left being culpable.” 

Hassan said Columbus police have made significant progress in the effort. 

“As a matter of fact, it’s one of the most American things,” Johnson said. “It’s the most authentic thing to who we are and what we have become. So even those of us who engage in that are trying to figure out when things are not manageable or are challenging, how do we resource or manage that. To be able to have a partner or a viable resource, a respectful resource to engage with is useful. I’ve seen folks leading actions and movements who have gone to the dialogue police and said, ‘I need your help with this one,’ or ‘These people aren’t our group, they’re not with us.’” 

Hassan said one of the challenges is finding the right officers for the Dialogue Team.

“In the Columbus Division of Police, they have some officers who are very good at that now,” Hassan said. 

Mabry said the police division also learned to reach out to the protest community to get their perspective and to bring them in on officer training on dialogue policing. 

“It gives them empathy to look at it from the police perspective,” Mabry said. “Our officers are humans and have their own opinions. Cops have diverse political beliefs. Our Dialogue Team is unintentionally the most diverse team in the history of the division.” 

Johnson hopes Columbus police make the Dialogue Team the equivalent of any other tactical unit on the force, with officers who have the desire and skills for this particular policing. 

He calls the Columbus reformed community policing effort “forward thinking.” 

“I think more importantly, it’s the kind of exercise of intellectual thought and curiosity and practice that needs to be modeled,” Johnson said, “because if you can take it out of a textbook and take it to the tactical unit and they actually apply it, that’s what’s very impressive to me.” 

Read the latest edition of Public Address, the Glenn College magazine.