Under a fading late-fall sun, protesters in support of the Palestinian cause are starting to gather in front of Ohio’s white-columned Statehouse.
They arrive alone, or in twos and threes, wearing kaffiyehs, sneakers, and puffer jackets. Most are carrying Palestinian flags and handmade signs protesting Israel’s aggression.
They’ve come to downtown Columbus on a Sunday afternoon, leaving the campus of Ohio State University to meet near the Statehouse’s frontispiece, a statue of President William McKinley, an Ohio son assassinated in 1901. The protest today follows a week of campus events on the conflict in Gaza, organized by the group Students for Justice in Palestine.
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American police often use force to manage unruly crowds. Reforms from Europe emphasize talking to protesters. Some U.S. police departments are giving it a try.
Around the corner, past the Holocaust Memorial monument, three police cruisers are waiting. From the McKinley statue, they remain out of sight.
But mingling among the demonstrators are four uniformed officers wearing powder-blue police vests emblazoned with “Columbus Police Dialogue.”
Jineen Musa, a student leader wearing round, tortoiseshell glasses and a black hoodie, is holding a bullhorn to her lips. “Don’t talk to any cops, even the dialogue cops!” she says, going on to announce the protest is about to start.
Some have already talked with officers who have radioed the information to Sgt. Steve Dyer, the dialogue unit’s team leader at the steps of the Statehouse.
He learns they plan to march north behind a black pickup truck as they protest on one of the city’s main roads. Now Sergeant Dyer can alert the nine-officer bicycle patrol that will help direct traffic during the demonstration. The cruisers will follow the protesters. At the same time, the dialogue team will continue to mingle among the crowd.
There are only a few units in the United States specially trained for this type of policing. Columbus police try to ensure that marchers are able to exercise their rights to free speech and assembly. At the same time, they use engagement and dialogue with an aim to maintain peace and order.
“Their goal is to have their voices heard,” Sergeant Dyer says. “We will walk and work with those who are there to peacefully protest.”
His department’s dialogue unit has made Columbus a testing ground for a new approach to managing public demonstrations and other mass events.
“It’s been more of a one-way conversation in the past,” says Robert Sagle, a deputy chief of police in Columbus who oversees the dialogue team. Officers would warn protest leaders not to break the law. “Then, once that conversation was over, we returned to our command posts.”
Police officers are now trying to do more than issue warnings. Staying on the ground and walking with and talking to protesters, police hope to build legitimacy – a bridge of communication that could de-escalate potential conflicts.
This kind of policing stems from a more nuanced understanding of crowd dynamics, researchers say. It seeks to measure how officers’ words and deeds can steer participants toward peaceful self-expression.
As word has spread of what Columbus is doing, the department has begun to train police officers from other cities in crowd management. Last July, its dialogue officers worked outside the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee to help facilitate order and defuse tensions during protests.
Other law enforcement agencies have also been piloting new police approaches to protests and other public events, says Edward Maguire, a criminologist at Arizona State University who has studied how protesters perceive police.
In a country with about 18,000 police agencies, reform is diffuse and uneven; what works in Columbus may not work in a small town. Other departments still rely on a militarized type of policing, especially during racial justice protests, he says.
But Dr. Maguire sees signs that more departments are starting to rethink how to manage crowds. “There’s a groundswell of reform bubbling up from within the profession, and that reform looks very promising.”
Columbus is a case study into these kinds of reforms. Still, the violent responses of its police department during the racial justice protests of 2020 still hover over it.
The legacy of George Floyd protests as unrest over Gaza grows
The route of today’s protest in support of Gaza will pass the same corner where demonstrations, some of them violent, took place in May 2020, after a white police officer in Minneapolis murdered George Floyd.
Those events tapped a wellspring of racial tension in Columbus, say local activists. The demonstrations were animated by the pent-up frustration of people who didn’t trust Columbus’ mostly white police force.
As in many U.S. cities, the Columbus police were unprepared for the intensity and duration of the protests that followed. It was a destabilizing experience to try to maintain peace and order, many say, in a crowd directing its anger precisely at them.
Kyle Robertson/The Columbus Dispatch/AP/File
It also exposed a failure of civil leadership during a time of crisis, says Robert Meader, a police commander at the time. “These riots hit overnight, and we were all caught by surprise.”
Many police officers working 12-hour shifts showed restraint in the face of insults and volleys of bricks and bottles. Black officers were often singled out for abuse.
“The intensity of what happened in 2020 was nothing like anything I experienced as a police officer before,” says Sgt. Kolin Straub, a Black officer who worked the front lines.
Still, police responded aggressively, using rubber bullets, pepper spray, tear gas, and other violent tactics against protesters. Dozens were injured, including those protesting peacefully. Police made 147 arrests and fired 1,370 rounds of munitions, according to a city-commissioned report.
In July 2020, over 30 people filed a federal lawsuit against Columbus police, seeking damages for unnecessary brutality and violations of their constitutional rights.
In December 2021, Columbus settled the lawsuit, paying out $5.75 million in damages. As part of the settlement, a federal judge barred Columbus police from “using nonlethal force, including tear gas, pepper spray, rubber bullets, wooden pellets, and more on nonviolent protesters.”
“This case is the sad tale of police officers, clothed with the awesome power of the state, run amok,” wrote U.S. District Judge Algenon Marbley. His injunction against these tactics applied to police responses to acts of civil disobedience, including occupying sidewalks or streets, or “passively resisting police orders.”
The ruling rocked a department that was already in turmoil. Columbus Police Chief Thomas Quinlan was forced out in January 2021, and 100 of 1,900 city police officers accepted buyout offers, joining those who quit by the end of 2020.
In June 2021, Mayor Andrew Ginther, a Democrat who had clashed publicly with police leadership over the need for reform, appointed Elaine Bryant, a Black deputy chief from Detroit, to head the department.
She was tasked with maintaining peace and order during future demonstrations. After the fallout from 2020, nobody wanted to play riot cop again, especially since the court injunction made it legally perilous. Officers knew they needed a new playbook but weren’t sure where to look.
Duane Mabry, now a department commander and trainer, had an idea. He knew the Seattle Police Department was also conducting a top-to-bottom review of its response to the 2020 George Floyd protests. Commander Mabry had been in contact with Lt. Jim Dyment, a veteran officer in Seattle who ran the mountain bike unit.
Commander Mabry, then a sergeant, called Lieutenant Dyment to ask what Seattle was learning about crowd control. We’re going to see how they do it in Europe, he told him. Maybe you can join us.
He also gave his Columbus counterpart the name of a social psychologist from England who had some interesting new ideas they were considering. “Google him,” he said.
How Europe has been successfully managing unruly crowds
Clifford Stott has the blunt features, cropped hair, and furrowed brow of an English policeman, though he’s never served.
He grew up in a village outside London, dropped out of school at age 16, and joined protests against racism and far-right extremism. “I was antiauthoritarian, didn’t like the police,” he told a BBC radio show in 2020.
After enrolling at a community college, he began to learn about crowd psychology. He went on to earn a Ph.D. studying how crowds and police behaved during the poll tax riots in London in 1990. Now a professor of social psychology at Keele University in England, Dr. Stott has become an international expert on how to manage crowds, advising police forces around the world.
He fights against what he sees as old, flawed ideas about how crowds act. Many of these began to percolate in late-19th-century France, when authorities lived in fear of “irrational mobs.”
Conservative theorists argued that individuals lost all sense of reason within a crowd. They believed emotions were contagious, so riots grew out of angry individuals spreading anger to the point of mass violence.
By joining “an organized crowd, a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilization,” wrote Gustave Le Bon in “The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind” in 1895. “Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian – that is, a creature acting by instinct.”
Balderdash, says Dr. Stott. Decades of research into how individuals and crowds actually behave – as well as what drives them into disorder and violence – have debunked these claims. For police to treat a crowd as a violent mob, he says, is to goad it to act as one.
In 2004, Dr. Stott put his ideas into practice at the European Championship held in Portugal, where there were worries of hooliganism, a perennial problem in international soccer. He advised police to embed officers within crowds and have them speak to fans to encourage good behavior.
When they do it right, he says, fans will “self-regulate,” and police will have little need for force. “Where policing is seen as legitimate, disorder decreases,” Dr. Stott says.
His advice paid dividends in Portugal. Even hooligans were amenable to police dialogue. Now his methods are standard practice at most European soccer tournaments.
They are not common in the U.S., however. “Policing of crowds in America is about 20 years behind what it is in Europe,” Dr. Stott says.
A critical test case: Proud Boys protest in Columbus
In early 2022, Lieutenant Dyment and then-Sergeant Mabry traveled to Europe to learn from Dr. Stott and his network of police contacts. Seattle wanted to create its own dialogue unit. Commander Mabry brought two other officers from Columbus, including Mr. Dyer, who would later become a sergeant, to observe.
The trip yielded significant results. When both teams returned, they helped form dialogue units in both departments.
Four months after the trip, Sergeant Dyer was part of the first Columbus Police Dialogue team. Its officers were deployed during the city’s annual Pride march, and for the first time they wore the now-familiar powder-blue vests.
“I thought my job was to talk to people, so I did,” says Sergeant Dyer. “I talked to everyone I could talk to about dialogue. … We took the ‘just do it’ approach,” he adds. “If you don’t start it, you’re not going to be successful.”
When images of Sergeant Dyer at the Pride parade spread on social media, feedback was mostly positive. Some of his fellow officers poked fun at him and his blue vest. But leadership welcomed the favorable publicity and was more open to Commander Mabry and his team’s innovations.
A bigger test came that December when two far-right groups descended on Columbus to protest a progressive church holding a holiday event featuring drag queens.
Sergeant Dyer and other officers went to talk to the protesters, some of whom were armed. They wanted to keep these groups a safe distance from counterprotesters near the church – which had canceled its event.
Sergeant Dyer’s job was to avoid escalation, not to settle a culture war. So when a group of Proud Boys made its way up the church’s driveway, he already knew it just wanted to take photos outside the church.
It looked like a clash was imminent – one that would require police units on standby to scramble. There were more than 130 officers, including a SWAT team and armored vehicles, ready to intervene.
But it was just a photo opportunity, and the Proud Boys snapped a few pics and then marched back to the road afterward without incident. None of the protesters from either side was aware of the massive police force standing by.
“That was the first tell. Wow,” says Cmdr. Justin Coleman, who was out of sight directing police operations during this encounter. “This is really a different approach, and this is something that could really work.”
Managing the pro-Palestinian protest on busy streets
At the pro-Palestinian protest, the march has begun in earnest to the rhythm of liberation chants, punctuated by occasional horns from passing cars. “Free, free Palestine,” they cry, waving flags and banners.
Ahead, the police bicycle patrol is stopping cars on side streets. The marchers are flanked by four dialogue officers who are relaying updates to their commanders. They are also watching for any clashes, with either a counterprotester or frustrated driver.
There is also an interested observer on the scene. Keeping pace with the marchers and wearing a black leather jacket is Dr. Stott from Keele University. Since the summer of 2023 he’s been a visiting professor at Ohio State University and a consultant to the Columbus Division of Police.
It appears his approach is working. Since October 2023, there have been more than 50 pro-Palestinian demonstrations held off campus with a total of about 13,000 protesters attending. During this time, police made only three arrests, despite “significant public order challenges,” says Dr. Stott. Police also recorded only two minor uses of force.
So far, Sergeant Dyer has never had to call for backup. “We work from the inside out,” he says. “So if tensions in the crowd are starting to change, we’re going to be the first to know.”
Protesters are about to reach a turnaround point. The pickup truck leading them parks diagonally and obstructs oncoming vehicles. What had been an inconvenience in one direction is now a blockage for both, a potential flash point.
But Sergeant Dyer has already radioed the command center to explain that this will only be a five-minute stop to make a few speeches. Then the marchers will head west. Hold back traffic till then, he says. Soon enough, the march heads down a side street.
A week earlier, the neighborhood also witnessed a march by a small group of masked neo-Nazis waving swastika flags and chanting racist slurs. When Sergeant Dyer stops to chat with a Black restaurant manager during the pro-Palestinian march, the manager is still upset by the neo-Nazi march. Sergeant Dyer tells him that police did investigate and that no laws were broken. “We can’t stop them coming,” he says.
“They’re calling me the N-word; that’s what they’re saying,” the manager says.
“That word is not hate speech,” Sergeant Dyer replies. Hate speech has a high legal bar, and neo-Nazis have free speech rights, too. He wishes the manager well and heads back toward the march.
As dialogue policing faces setbacks, an uncertain future
If the Proud Boys rally in 2022 provided a proof of concept for the Columbus police and city leaders, the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee in July 2024 provided a chance to put dialogue policing on a national stage.
Emotions were running high the week of the convention. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump had survived an assassination attempt just days earlier. City officials were braced for street protests.
Police departments from more than 20 states supplied thousands of officers to help Milwaukee’s with security. But only Columbus supplied a dialogue team.
On Day 1, Sergeant Dyer and other dialogue officers embedded within demonstrations, talking with protesters, standing between rival groups, de-escalating tensions.
Commander Coleman was part of Milwaukee’s command center, relaying information from his team. After his unit worked a protest march that took place without any serious incidents, he saw the impression it made on other police.
“The next day, over the air, we kept hearing officers from other agencies throughout the country calling, asking for dialogue officers” to assist them, he says.
But the dialogue team’s time in Milwaukee was cut short after its initial success. The next day, officers from Columbus’ bike patrol shot and killed Samuel Sharpe Jr., a homeless Black man who was attacking another man. The man ignored calls to drop the two knives in his hands. Afterward, Columbus officials recalled all of its officers.
A month later, protesters gathered outside police headquarters in Columbus, chanting Mr. Sharpe’s name and carrying signs, one of which read, “Indict Killer Cops.”
That protest was led by Aramis Sundiata, executive director of People’s Justice Project in Columbus. He has deep reservations about this new method of dialogue policing. His experiences with Columbus police have always been confrontational – and confrontation was often the point.
In order to raise “global consciousness” and force political change, Mr. Sundiata says, peaceful demonstrators may find it advantageous when riot police attack them – and then make the evening news. “You need to think about, How are you going to really push the envelope?”
Talking to cops is a bad idea, he says. Telling them about your plans and who’s in charge is out of the question. When dialogue officers make nice, that “can be confusing for folks.”
The incoming Trump administration, too, seems likely to have reservations about dialogue-based crowd management for a different set of reasons. Given his first administration and his views of street protests, he may push American policing in the direction of more, not less, coercive crowd control.
In May 2020, then-President Trump urged state governors to be more aggressive in cracking down on racial justice protests that turned violent. He sent federal agents to Portland, Oregon, to defend a federal courthouse. He has since talked about deploying the military to counter future unrest in American cities.
Dr. Maguire, the criminologist, says this creates uncertainty over the direction of travel. The bottom-up reforms in policing in cities like Columbus will run into “an external sentiment from the Trump administration to kind of move things backwards. I don’t know how that will all shake out, but that’s the dynamic we’ll see unfold in the next two years,” he says.
Columbus Mayor Ginther, however, says dialogue policing is part of a broader reform effort to create a “21st-century community policing organization” in Ohio’s capital city.
“You don’t get to a point and then rest and think that everything’s going to work out OK,” says Mayor Ginther. “You’ve got to show continued commitment to change and reform; otherwise, elements of the old culture will creep back in,” he says.
Last month Dr. Stott packed his bags and left Columbus after his visiting professorship came to an end. His next advisory role is likely to be in Seattle – one of the host cities for the 2026 soccer World Cup.
His departure comes at a moment of uncertainty for the Columbus dialogue team. Despite its promising start, it remains an all-volunteer unit without a permanent leader.
There have been efforts to make it a special bureau. But for now Sergeant Dyer and other officers head the team on 60-day rotations, relying on volunteers to walk among and talk to people in protests.
Lieutenant Dyment, the Seattle officer who helped inspire Columbus’ innovations, retired in 2023. He now trains other law enforcement agencies in how to use bicycle patrols for crowd management.
Amid all the uncertainty in the U.S., Dr. Stott believes the data is clear. The coercive crowd policing of the past doesn’t work, and often makes tense situations worse.
The vast majority of people who attend mass protests do not see police as an enemy, he says. Most soccer fans aren’t looking for a fight. Most people at a demonstration want to protest peacefully. Each kind of crowd will respond positively to policing that upholds its right to assemble or express grievances.
Then, when force is used, he says, people will see police arresting troublemakers as a defense of those rights, not as an obstacle. Over time, nonviolent movements will begin to “self-police” their ranks, his research shows.
This doesn’t mean tensions between police and activists will end. “It’s not a panacea,” Dr. Stott says. “You’re not getting rid of social conflict. This is a way of managing social conflict to minimize the possibility of major confrontations.”
Editor’s note: This story was updated on the same day it was published to correct a typo in Deputy Chief Robert Sagle’s last name.
