City of Columbus - File #: 3290-2023

• File #: 3290-2023
• Version: 1
• Type: Ordinance
• Status: Passed
• File created: 11/16/2023
• In control: Public Safety Committee
• On agenda: 12/4/2023
• Final action: 12/7/2023
• Title: To authorize and direct the Mayor of the City of Columbus to accept a grant award from the Department of Justice, Office of Community Oriented Policing Services; to authorize Sgt. Straub, as the official city representative to act in connection with this grant; to authorize an appropriation of $175,000.00 from the unappropriated balance of the General Government Grant Fund to the Department of Public Safety, Division of Police, to cover the cost of this grant activities and expenditures; and to declare an emergency. ($175,000.00)

Date	Ver.	Action By	Action	Result
12/7/2023	1	CITY CLERK	Attest
12/6/2023	1	ACTING MAYOR	Signed
12/4/2023	1	COUNCIL PRESIDENT	Signed
12/4/2023	1	Columbus City Council	Approved	Pass

Explanation

BACKGROUND: The City of Columbus, Department of Public Safety, was awarded funding in the amount of $175,000 from the Department of Justice, Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) Fy23 Micro-grant. The Department of Public Safety, Division of Police, will use these grant funds to upscale and embed its pilot program of using specialist Dialogue Police as a primary crowd management tactic. These specialist officers are charged with the strategic goal of building relationships with protesters before, during and after events to facilitate peaceful demonstrations. These grant funds will be used to bring the leading academic expert behind these worldwide innovations in dialogue policing to the United States to partner with this agency to build, formalize and evaluate the concept. Specifically, the project will allow the CDP to expand beyond its pilot work and embed the dialogue police approach within our organization through developing policy, Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) and delivering training programs in how to use the new method.

In parallel, the project will develop an evaluation methodology that will be used to measure the effectiveness of the new dialogue led approach and provide a ‘cost-benefit’ analysis for the organization. The evaluation program will be developed using a Participant Action Research framework to draw in a) other police agencies interested in innovating their own crowd management practices and b) other US based Institutes of Higher Education to train new academics in the use of the methodology c) representatives of community organizations, police oversight bodies and other stakeholders. The ambition will be to create a network of experts and police agencies throughout the country to support, advise, innovate, and evaluate crowd management methodologies involving Police Departments nationally and regionally. Additionally, the data gathered from the observations will be used to create and deliver a train th...