To some extent, this is a reflection of broader trends. Like most cities, Columbus saw a spike in shootings and homicides during the pandemic. The worst of the problem has subsided.
But Columbus police aren’t just riding the demographic waves. Under Chief Elaine Bryant, the division has overhauled almost its entire leadership, including a multimillion-dollar buyout of deputy chiefs who resisted her initiatives. The department has also expanded its attention to non-fatal shootings, altered its approach to investigating homicides and devoted additional resources to the mental health of officers.
“There’s not been one single initiative that I’ve brought to the mayor where he said, ‘I don’t think you should do that,’” Bryant says. “He’s given us pretty much everything that we’ve asked for, and he’s backed us on everything that we brought to him, because it was well thought out.”
Bryant is a rarity — not only one of the few Black women to lead a police department but the first Columbus chief in memory to arrive from outside the city. Governing spoke with Bryant and Robert Sagle, one of her deputy chiefs, about the changes they’ve brought about. An edited excerpt of that discussion follows:
Governing: There aren’t many women police chiefs, and you were new to the city and the department. What was that transition like?
Bryant: Being a new chief coming into a city, there was a time where morale was low, productivity was low. There was a disconnect between the community and the police department. My job was to come in here and try to figure out, how do we change all those things?
We immediately started going out to the community and actually giving people a voice and letting them speak. A big part of that was talking to the officers — going into the roll calls, trying to figure out what they want from their leadership. The overwhelming response was that they were not disgruntled in terms of the work. They just wanted leadership, and they wanted somebody to have their back and give them a clear path to what they should be doing.
What sort of specific changes did that lead to?
We restructured a lot of the police department. We changed how we managed our investigative units. Our homicide units started working collaboratively together, as opposed to just getting case after case after case. Because of that, we saw a significant increase in our closure rates.
We held our supervisors more accountable. We wanted them to do case management. We wanted them to be more hands on. When I first got here, all of the bosses, all the deputy chiefs and the commanders, were sitting at headquarters. I’m like, if everybody’s here, then how are we understanding what’s happening out in the community? Officers would say, we never see our commanders, we never see our deputy chiefs. Some of them couldn’t even tell me who their bosses were, which is insane. And so one of the first things we did was we put the commanders actually back in the precincts and back in the community, so that officers can have more access to them.
Can you offer some specifics about violence reduction?
Sagle: The Central Ohio Crime Gun Intelligence Center has been a huge initiative around here. It’s taking shell casings that may be our only evidence and, instead of just necessarily looking for a suspect, what we’re actually looking for is that crime gun. Before we opened up the center, we were looking at 45 days — sometimes up to 60 or 70 days — before evidence was entered. That means a detective is literally sitting there waiting for that trace evidence to get back to him so that they can further that case. We’re now down to two to three days, which is considered ATF [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives] gold standard.
The byproduct is we solve all these crimes along the way as well. It’s another form of disruption and it’s opened up incredible partnerships with all these other law enforcement agencies.
You’ve placed a special emphasis on solving non-fatal shootings. Talk about how that’s helped.
Bryant: We all know that a non-fatal shooting is just simply someone with a bad aim. Their intention was to kill someone, right? But our non-fatal shootings weren’t necessarily getting the attention that we felt as a division that they should get, because a lot of our people that are committing these crimes are repeat offenders. In a city of a million people, fewer than 500 people were committing 50 percent of the violence.
So the best way to prevent homicides is to solve non-fatal shootings, because so often what was a non-fatal this week is a homicide next week. We were talking about a small group of people that are creating most of the havoc in a city, and so we decided that we were going to create a non-fatal shooting pilot, and that pilot is focused on treating non-fatal shootings the same way we treat homicides.
All the same resources, all the same thought process that we use with homicides, we put into our non-fatal shootings. People weren’t necessarily on board. Now we’ve got people begging to be part of these teams, and we just got the approval from the union to be able to expand the program. Just that one team in the pilot program alone went from about a 15 percent closure rate in that particular area, and are now looking at almost a 90 percent closure rate, which is why we’re so excited about being able to expand that.
