COLUMBUS, Ohio — Law enforcement agencies from across the state took part in a crowd management policing seminar at the Columbus Police Training Academy. Clifford Stott, professor of social psychology in the U.K.’s Keele University, led the seminar. Stott has been working closely with Columbus police over the past year to put this new practice into action.
Columbus police’s dialogue team first launched at the Columbus Pride Festival in June of 2022. Its designed to help in de-escalating crowds, protests, and riots.
"Really the work we're doing here is pioneering in the United States,” Columbus Division of Police Commander Duane Mabry said.
"Its not so much that I'm teaching them things that they don't know so much as I'm helping them to understand what they already do,” Stott said.
Mabry said the police department realized it was time to start doing things differently after the protests in 2020. Mabry said they brought Stott in to start working with officers to develop the dialogue team.
"Previously in crowd management what we would do is we would observe a crowd and respond to what we saw,” Mabry said.
This new approach gets officers engaged with the crowd from the start, keeping an open line of communication and understanding with protest or crowd organizers to get ahead of any potential mishaps. Stott said he’s typically met with hesitation from officers on this new practice, until he walks them through how it works.
"What we find at the end of that day, and its precisely what we did today, is that you get a level of buy in, you get rid of the skepticism, they get an understanding of the utility of this knowledge… We can create an environment where different groups can come together to express themselves and to express their political views without those situations escalating up into the kinds of confrontations that we've seen in the past,” Stott said.
"We want our community to know that we've heard them and that we've changed, and we're trying to adapt and do new things and we're trying to be the best police department we can for our community,” Mabry said.
Stott said there are plans already in the works to continue expanding this new concept to other departments across the state.