ORLANDO — What if the way police respond to a demonstration can influence whether it becomes confrontational in the first place?
That question is at the heart of a shift in public order policing underway in Columbus, Ohio, where police leaders have moved beyond traditional crowd-control tactics toward a strategy grounded in dialogue, research and a different understanding of how crowds behave.
“What we realized is that changing our tactics was not enough,” Columbus Assistant Chief Greg Bodker told attendees at IACP 2026. “We had to change our strategy.”
The resulting approach, developed with input from crowd psychology researcher Dr. Clifford Stott, challenges longstanding assumptions about demonstrations and the role police play in shaping crowd behavior.
At IACP 2026, Stott joined Columbus Lt. Kolin Straub and Sgt. Steve Dyer, along with representatives from the Spokane Police Department, to explain why dialogue is more than a communication technique — and why adopting it requires changes in how agencies prepare for demonstrations, deploy resources and make command decisions.
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Understanding how police actions influence crowds
Stott, whose research has helped shape public order policing internationally, told attendees that one of the most consequential mistakes police can make is treating a crowd as a single, unpredictable entity.
“Crowd action is not chaotic and random,” he said. “It is deeply normative and it is highly patterned.”
People attending a demonstration do not automatically abandon their judgment or adopt the behavior of the most confrontational participants. Their actions are influenced by shared identities, expectations and perceptions of how others — including police — are behaving. Those perceptions can change during an event.
When police respond to the unlawful actions of a few individuals by treating everyone present as a threat, otherwise peaceful participants may begin to view themselves as collectively targeted. That shared perception can increase solidarity against police and create conditions for broader confrontation. But the opposite can also occur.
When officers distinguish between lawful demonstrators and those engaged in criminal behavior, they can help preserve cooperation among the larger crowd. Participants who believe police are acting fairly may be more willing to discourage unlawful behavior themselves.
For commanders, the implications are significant. Police are not simply responding to crowd behavior; their own decisions can influence how that behavior develops.
Stott emphasized that the purpose of public order policing should be to prevent collective confrontation rather than simply prepare to suppress it. “Your job as the police is to prevent riots,” he told attendees.
That requires understanding the different groups within a crowd, recognizing their intentions and considering how police actions may be interpreted. “Dialogue is not just talking to people,” Stott said. Instead, it is an operational capability that allows officers to establish relationships, gather information, explain police intentions and identify opportunities to resolve tensions before they escalate. Importantly, the approach does not mean abandoning enforcement or allowing unlawful behavior to continue.
“This is not about diminishing tactical options,” Stott said. “This is about increasing the range of tactical options that commanders have available to them.”
The distinction is critical. Dialogue can help commanders identify when intervention is necessary, which individuals are involved and how to act without unnecessarily drawing the broader crowd into conflict.
As Stott explained during the session, the challenge is often identifying the relatively small number of individuals engaged in criminal behavior within a much larger group.
“The problem is that in that crowd of a thousand people, it’s generally two or three people that are engaged in criminal behavior,” he said. “The problem is, how do you differentiate?”
The research is also helping shape national guidance for American law enforcement. Stott has contributed to the development of the
Portland Framework for Dialogue Policing, a collaborative effort led by the Centre for Policing Research and Learning and supported by U.S. Department of Justice-funded projects.
Published in 2026, the framework draws on international experience while addressing the legal, constitutional and operational realities of policing demonstrations in the United States. It provides agencies with guidance on implementing dialogue policing, including operational standards, officer competencies and training.
How Columbus put the research into practice
Columbus began reconsidering its public order approach following the demonstrations of 2020, when criticism and legal challenges prompted the department to examine how it managed crowds.
An Ohio State University review helped inform that process, and officers traveled to Europe to observe dialogue policing firsthand. They returned with ideas for introducing the approach at home, including the distinctive blue vests worn by European dialogue officers to make them easily identifiable during demonstrations.
Columbus Lt. Kolin Straub and Sgt. Steve Dyer helped explain how the department translated those lessons into practice. Dyer recalled ordering blue vests from Amazon and asking a neighbor to stencil “Columbus Police Dialogue Team” onto them.
But adopting the European model required more than replicating its appearance. Dyer acknowledged that he initially misunderstood what dialogue policing was intended to accomplish.
“I did what I thought I was supposed to do as dialogue,” he recalled. “Just talking to people.”
The team soon learned that effective dialogue required more than conversation. Officers needed to understand the groups attending demonstrations, build relationships with participants and communicate information that could help commanders interpret what was happening.
At one event involving several groups with opposing views, dialogue officers learned that a group’s movement toward a church was intended for a photograph rather than a confrontation.
That information helped commanders understand what they were seeing and avoid an unnecessary intervention. The event ended without arrests, injuries or uses of force, according to the Columbus presenters.
The lesson was not that talking to demonstrators eliminates risk. It was that information gathered through relationships can give commanders options they might not otherwise recognize.
Columbus also learned that dialogue should begin well before an event. The department now emphasizes preparation, including communication with organizers, understanding potential points of tension and assessing the risks associated with different groups.
Dyer described the importance of focusing on people willing to engage with police rather than concentrating exclusively on the most confrontational participants.
“We’re focusing on perceptions of legitimacy with a majority of the crowd,” he said.
That approach reflects Stott’s research: When most participants believe police are facilitating lawful activity and responding proportionately to unlawful behavior, they may be more willing to cooperate and discourage confrontation.
The strategy has also required cultural change within the department. Officers accustomed to traditional crowd-control operations initially questioned why colleagues were being assigned to talk with demonstrators. Over time, the Columbus team has worked to demonstrate how dialogue supports, rather than competes with, conventional police capabilities.
Today, dialogue is incorporated into the department’s planning and risk assessment processes, with information from officers in the crowd helping inform deployment and enforcement decisions.
Columbus has also taken its experience beyond the department, offering a 40-hour dialogue policing course to officers and police leaders from other agencies. The training combines crowd psychology, constitutional considerations, de-escalation and perspectives from community activists with practical scenarios designed to help participants apply the approach.
Why command decisions determine success
For all the attention given to dialogue officers, Stott and the Columbus presenters emphasized that the strategy ultimately depends on leadership.
Officers may develop relationships and gather valuable information, but those efforts can be undermined if commanders do not understand how to use that information or make decisions that contradict the approach.
Straub said one of the most common problems reported by officers attending dialogue training is returning to agencies where supervisors have not received comparable preparation.
The issue raises a broader question about how departments prepare newly promoted supervisors to manage complex public order events.
“Upon promotion to lieutenant, I was expected to make public order decisions over night without much preparation,” Straub said.
Those decisions can shape how thousands of people perceive police legitimacy, whether an intervention remains targeted and whether a confrontation spreads.
Stott emphasized that consistency is particularly important during demonstrations extending over multiple days. Relationships developed through dialogue can quickly deteriorate if a new incident commander makes different decisions without communicating the reasons.
“It’s not just about having the capability to do dialogue,” he said. “It’s also about creating a space within which dialogue can be effective.”
That means training commanders to understand crowd dynamics, incorporate information from dialogue officers and recognize how their own actions may affect escalation.
The approach is also being adopted beyond Columbus. Spokane Police Lt. Kyle Yrigollen and Officer Karl Richardson described how their department has incorporated dialogue-led practices into public order operations while retaining the tactical resources needed to respond to unlawful conduct.
Richardson emphasized that officers working within a crowd can provide commanders with information that surveillance technology alone cannot capture. “A sky view is not the same as being on the ground and taking in all of the senses,” he said.
Spokane’s presenters summarized the value of that information in a phrase that captures the strategy’s operational purpose: “Relationships create information, information creates options, options improve decisions.”
Four lessons for police leaders
For police executives, the experiences of Columbus and Spokane suggest several practical starting points:
- Reexamine how your agency assesses crowds. Are commanders distinguishing between lawful participants and individuals engaged in unlawful behavior, or treating everyone present as a potential threat?
- Build relationships before demonstrations. Establishing communication with organizers and community groups in advance can improve planning and create opportunities to resolve problems before they escalate.
- Make dialogue part of command decision-making. Information gathered by officers within a crowd must reach the people making deployment and enforcement decisions.
- Prepare supervisors to lead. Training dialogue officers alone is insufficient if incident commanders do not understand crowd psychology, differentiated responses and the importance of consistent decisions.
None of these steps requires an agency to abandon its existing public order capabilities. The objective is to make those capabilities more effective by improving the information and judgment behind their use.
For Columbus, that represents the fundamental shift Bodker described at the beginning of the session: moving from a primarily tactical response to a strategy that recognizes how police decisions can influence the behavior of the crowds they are responsible for managing.
The goal is not simply to respond more effectively when demonstrations become confrontational. It is to make unnecessary confrontation less likely in the first place.
Additional resources
- The Portland Framework for Dialogue Policing
- The Columbus Model — research published in Policing and Society
- Columbus Police Dialogue Team
- Spokane Police Department: Dialogue policing strategy and implementation (2025–2026 Strategic Plan, page 22)
Related webinar: Police1 will explore the operational, research and legal dimensions of dialogue-led public order policing in Rethinking public order policing: Crowd science, dialogue policing and the law on November 23, featuring Dr. Clifford Stott, Spencer Fomby and Chief Ken Wallentine. Register here.
