The Future of Policing in Columbus

Columbus City Council Member Emmanuel Remy is the Chair of the Public Safety Committee. In the 2023 budget, the council approved a new Office of Violence Prevention to be housed in the Mayor's Office. Rena Shak was appointed to be the first director after serving the Mayor as in-house counsel for the previous nine months. This episode discusses how and why the new office was created. Shak shares her vision for the office's impact on violence prevention in Columbus.

Marian Stuckey, LISW, is the section chief for Neighborhood Social Services at Columbus Public Health Department.  In the last year, she has taken the reins on the mental health crisis response programs that were previously run by the Columbus Division of Police.  But the police are still heavily involved in the responses, which distresses Kevin Truitt, the Legal Advocacy Director at Disability Rights Ohio.  Last year, Kevin got us started in Episode 1 of Crisis Intervention and still has many of the same concerns.  Marian explains how the process is working currently and how she hopes to expand it in the coming months.

Jacqueline Hendricks began her work as the first Inspector General of Columbus, Ohio in February 2022.  Her position was created by a charter amendment overwhelmingly passed by voters in November 2020.  The charter specifies July 2022 as the first time the Inspector General’s office must be available to receive complaints about the actions of sworn officers. In this episode, we learn how Hendricks is preparing for that opening and what the community can expect from this new process.

Dr. Aaron Chalfin received his doctorate in Public Policy from UC-Berkeley.  As an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania, his research interests include the costs and benefits of policing, the preferences of police officers, place-based crime prevention, and the determinants of crime victimization.

In this episode, Bad Apples, your host, Edie Driskill asks Dr. Chalfin to explain the difficulty of reducing risk profiles of police officers to simple statistics.  He helps her unpack the fallacy that many have proposed – getting rid of the few bad apples will greatly reduce the overall risk profile of policing.

The Columbus city leadership resisted the Department of Justice’s attempt to impose a consent decree twenty years ago. Some local activists want them to try again. We talk with Dr. Allan Jiao of Rowan University, Attorney Sean Walton, and Rev. Dr. Susan Smith for insight into how this intervention might solve Columbus’ policing problems.

This episode was originally published on June 18, 2021.

The Columbus Division of Police received over 22,000 calls for service to help with mental health crises in 2020. In this episode, we explore different models for crisis intervention that are in use or being considered for use. Join Edie Driskill as she interviews Dr. Harold Pollack from the University of Chicago Urban Health Lab, Kevin Truitt from Disability Rights Ohio and Commander David Hughes of the Wellness Bureau at the Columbus Division of Police.

This episode was originally published on May 25, 2021.

De-escalation tactics are offered up as a solution to reduce excessive use of force by police officers, with state leaders like republican Governor Mike DeWine even calling for the training to be mandatory statewide. In May, the Columbus Division of Police brought in national expert Mark Lowther to train officers in de-escalation. In this episode, host Edie Driskill talks with Lowther to find out exactly what de-escalation tactics are and how they might work.

This episode was originally published on April 27th, 2021.

Columbus will be welcoming a new police chief in the next few weeks. We will discuss the challenges ahead for this chief with an activist, a cop, a minister and a member of the chief’s advisory panel.