Estimated reading time: 12 minutes
The march does not spiral out of control.
There is no surge, no clash, no sudden order to advance a line. Instead, the crowd moves, hesitates, then settles. Protest leaders talk among themselves. A Dialogue Officer walks alongside them, not to command, but to listen. Traffic reroutes. The moment passes without becoming a crisis.
From the command post, the screens quiet. Radios stay calm. What should have been the hardest decision of the day becomes unremarkable and that is precisely the point.
This is where Part 1 ended: with a department that chose restraint and saw crowds regulate themselves rather than escalate. The study by Clifford Stott and Shahidul Hassan, conducted in close partnership with Columbus Police Department officers Duane Mabry, Steve Dyer, and Kolin Straub, documented how that choice played out across dozens of protests.
Part 2 begins where the cameras turn off.
Because the success of POPS was not accidental. It was built through deliberate reflection on what worked, what nearly failed, and how each deployment sharpened the model. This section distills those lessons including the operational adjustments, leadership decisions, and relationship-building practices that allowed POPS to mature from an effective response into a repeatable approach.
What follows is a deeper look at how Columbus translated live events into durable practice, and how other agencies can apply those lessons before the next protest line forms.
The Hardest Part: The Challenges — and How They Fixed Them
The POPS model is often told through its successes, but its resilience was built through repeated failure. The Dialogue Team faced resistance from every direction: protesters, internal enforcement units, political leadership, and the public narrative. Each setback forced the department to refine what legitimacy required in practice.
Optics and perceived bias.
Early deployments showed that friendly gestures such as smiling, casual conversation, even a congratulatory high-five were easily reframed as favoritism. Although well-intentioned, these moments eroded the perception of neutrality and triggered backlash that threatened the program. CPD responded by formalizing standards of professional distance: no physical gestures, no celebratory optics, and consistent messaging about the team’s neutral role.
Isolated Dialogue Officers
In early deployments, Dialogue Officers often operated in relative isolation. They were frequently pulled into traffic management and minor enforcement tasks, which diverted attention from their core mission of communication and crowd engagement. This not only reduced their effectiveness but also risked undermining their role as neutral facilitators in the eyes of protesters. CPD refined the POPS framework into three coordinated tiers: Dialogue Units focused on engagement, Bicycle Rapid Response Teams (BRRTs) managed traffic and cordons, and Arrest and Control Teams (ACTs) handled targeted interventions. By the 2023 anti-war protests, BRRTs established “safety bubbles” around marchers, freeing Dialogue Officers to focus entirely on relationship-building and risk mitigation. This clear separation of roles allowed each unit to operate efficiently contributing to efficiency and supported perceived legitimacy.
Being blocked by protest intermediaries.
Some groups refused to engage. They appointed ‘liaisons’ whose real purpose was to block access to the influential people inside the crowd. This kept CPD in a reactive posture, responding to events as they unfolded rather than anticipating them. Over time, Dialogue Officers adjusted. They expanded beyond formal protest structures and built relationships with informal leaders and diaspora figures who carried real credibility within the crowd. As those relationships deepened, the balance of influence shifted. Individuals who arrived seeking confrontation lost their audience, and escalation stopped being rewarded. During the Gaza protests in particular, organizers who tried to shut down communication gradually disappeared, replaced by diaspora leaders who chose to cooperate with Dialogue Officers and actively de-escalate their own members. What ultimately distinguished the Columbus model was not a single tactic, but how trust reshaped incentives inside the protest itself, changing who held influence and which behaviors gained traction.
Internal pressure to revert to enforcement.
Some of the most persistent resistance to the dialogue-first strategy came from inside the department. When crowds violated ordinances without immediate consequence, officers and supervisors questioned whether restraint signaled a loss of authority. At critical moments, commanders faced pressure to escalate simply to reassert control. CPD worked to address this tension through retraining supervisors, reinforcing command discipline, and using after-action reviews to demonstrate how premature enforcement had repeatedly accelerated disorder rather than resolved it.
The consequences of misalignment, however, were not abstract. In one high-visibility incident at a busy intersection, an officer arrested a protester in a decision that later became the subject of a civil lawsuit. Regardless of the legal outcome, the operational impact was immediate: months of trust-building by the Dialogue Team were set back almost overnight. The incident forced the department to confront a question most agencies avoid: whether the short-term control achieved through strict ordinance enforcement is worth the long-term damage caused by visible uses of force. Time and again, CPD found that “winning” a moment through arrests often meant losing credibility for future events, underscoring that trust, once broken, is far harder to restore than authority is to assert.
Information gaps in fast-moving events.
Dialogue Officers frequently understood crowd dynamics before commanders did, but early operations lacked a system to translate that insight into deployment decisions. Commanders started to join the protest on the field, so they can see how the crowd is reacting in real-time.
Political vulnerability.
Every decision to hold back force carried political risk. Restraint could be misread as weakness or complicity. CPD learned that Dialogue Policing required preparing city leadership and communications teams in advance so that dialogue-first decisions were defended publicly rather than second-guessed after controversy erupted.
POPS endured not because these challenges vanished, but because the department treated them as operational feedback. The Dialogue Team matured from an experiment into a durable function by recognizing that legitimacy is fragile, slow to build, and easy to lose.
The Successes — And Why They Worked
If the challenges reveal how fragile legitimacy can be, the successes show how deliberately CPD cultivated it. Over two years of protest policing, several practices consistently stabilized crowds and prevented escalation.
They treated dialogue as an operational function, not a courtesy.
Dialogue Officers were embedded in command decision-making and given discretion to shape tactics in real time. Their observations (crowd mood, emerging flashpoints, or tensions between groups) directly guided adjustments to routing, officer posture, and staffing. This high-level discretion allowed commanders to anticipate behavior instead of reacting, turning dialogue into actionable operational intelligence rather than an afterthought. By linking field insights to strategic decisions, CPD could maintain safety, preserve trust, and reduce the need for visible force across large-scale protests.
They staged force out of sight.
Arrest teams and heavy equipment were kept invisible unless truly necessary, reducing visual triggers that often escalate hostility. Protesters were met by officers in soft uniforms who could speak plainly, encouraging cooperation.
They negotiated behavior, not just compliance.
Rather than enforcing every ordinance, CPD made hard choices about when strict enforcement was truly worth it. During the Justice for All and the Gaza protests, unlawful marches were allowed to proceed. Instead of disorder, officers saw fewer arrests, fewer confrontations, and crowds that gradually complied with informal boundaries. By focusing on facilitating lawful behavior and framing choices in ways that mattered to participants, officers let the crowd regulate itself rather than relying on coercion.
They let relationships drive intelligence.
CPD supplemented traditional surveillance with trust-based intelligence by building relationships with protest organizers, diaspora leaders, and informal influencers. These connections provided advance insight into planned marches, crowd dynamics, and potential flashpoints, giving commanders a clearer understanding of events. While conventional monitoring remained in place, trust-based intelligence allowed for more precise staffing, lighter deployments, and reduced reliance on visible force all while maintaining safety for officers, protesters, and bystanders. Establishing rapport with protest leaders proved especially valuable, as shared information helped anticipate challenges and support crowd self-regulation.
They allowed crowds to solve their own problems.
Internal conflicts, minor scuffles, and friction with bystanders were often defused by the crowd before officers intervened. This allowed the crowd to manage its own behavior, reduced the need for arrests or force, and kept the event running smoothly.
They prepared before the first chant.
Successful events were rarely improvised. Dialogue Officers met with organizers ahead of time, commanders ran through possible scenarios, and city leadership was briefed on the plan. By the time crowds arrived, everyone knew their roles and how to respond, allowing the department to manage the event smoothly rather than reacting on the fly. This approach was especially effective during the June Pride event, where careful preparation kept the parade running with minimal disruption.
They made learning part of operations.
Embedded researchers allowed mistakes to be examined immediately and translated into policy revisions, training updates, and deployment protocols. This accelerated the learning cycle and allowed the model to evolve at the speed of real events.
They understood that trust compounds over time.
The model does not produce instant results. Each successful interaction builds trust that shapes how future protests unfold. By the time Pride arrived, Dialogue Officers were able to handle potential disruptions directly. This meant that the department could rely on a smaller, more focused team to manage high-risk moments, demonstrating how accumulated trust allowed CPD to influence crowd behavior without a heavy, visible presence.
Together, these practices transformed protest policing from a contest of control into a managed civic process. CPD did not eliminate conflict, but consistently reduced its capacity to spiral, not through superior force, but through credibility that crowds were willing to honor.
Resources: Implementing POPS in Your Agency
Agencies that are intrigued by POPS often assume the hardest part is tactics. In practice, the real work happens long before the first protest line forms. Departments that have successfully implemented this model treated it as an organizational change initiative, not a crowd-control experiment.
Command-level buy-in and retraining was the starting point. Chiefs and deputy chiefs have to publicly commit to the philosophy and, more importantly, relearn how success is defined. POPS is not measured by arrests or dispersals. It is measured by whether legitimacy is preserved when tensions rise, such as maintaining peaceful crowd behavior during high-risk events or limiting the use of force to fewer than three incidents across thousands of participants.
That commitment has to be paired with a deliberate approach to political risk and optics management. POPS requires visible restraint in moments when political leaders, media outlets, and even internal stakeholders may be demanding a show of force. Agencies need to prepare mayors, city managers, and communications teams in advance so that restraint is understood as the strategy, not weakness.
The next hurdle is internal resistance from enforcement-first cultures. Dialogue Officers often faced skepticism from peers trained to equate authority with control. This can be addressed this by coaching supervisors, using roll calls, after-action reviews, and performance evaluations to reinforce the model. Over time, these practices helped embed POPS into the department’s professional routines rather than treating it as an optional experiment.
Operationally, POPS only worked when there was real integration across dialogue, bike, and arrest teams. Dialogue officers were not a standalone unit; they were the connective tissue. Their information flowed in real time to commanders, bike officers adjusted posture based on their read of the crowd, and arrest teams were held in reserve as a backstop rather than a front-line presence.
Finally, agencies had to commit to long-term relationship building with protest communities. POPS is not something that turns on the morning of a demonstration. Dialogue officers met organizers months in advance, learned which grievances were symbolic and which were non-negotiable, and carried that institutional knowledge from one event to the next. Over time, that continuity is what allowed crowds to self-regulate.
To support this work, there is now a structured five-day ESIM / Dialogue Policing training that has been delivered to more than 40 agencies nationwide, giving departments a practical pathway from interest to implementation.
Final Thoughts
Columbus did not arrive at this model by accident. It emerged from federal court oversight, civil litigation, public anger, and a department forced to confront how quickly protest policing can fail when trust collapses. What followed was not a cosmetic reform, but a ground-up redesign of how the agency understood power, authority, and public order.
Community policing, they learned, does not end at the patrol beat. Fairness had to be visible in the most politically charged settings, not just in routine calls for service. When protesters experienced procedural justice in the street, they were more willing to extend cooperation in moments that mattered.
POPS is not a silver bullet. It does not work overnight, and it cannot be imposed by policy alone. As trust builds and the department earns credibility, the benefits grow much larger over time. Columbus demonstrated that when police stop treating protests as enforcement problems and start managing them as civic processes, the outcome is not just fewer arrests. It is a fundamentally different relationship between the public and the police.
In today’s environment, where demonstrations are frequent, politically charged, and amplified instantly online, agencies no longer have the luxury of improvisation. Protests are not anomalies. They are a permanent feature of democratic life, and every poorly managed encounter becomes a national case study within hours.
The lesson from Columbus is not that force is obsolete. It is that force is no longer sufficient. Control of space does not translate into control of behavior. Legitimacy does. And behavior is what ultimately determines whether a protest ends as a peaceful exercise of rights or as another headline that reshapes a department’s future.
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