Professor Stott: What we are seeing in Portland, with the experience that I have of looking at crowds all over the world, I would argue that had there been a different policing model in place in Portland, we might not be in the same situation. We might not have that emergent norm of a protest community deeply wedded to the avoidance of confrontation. Announcer: I'm Sergeant Kevin Allen with the Portland Police Bureau. In this episode of the Talking Beat, we explore how the Portland Police Bureau manages public order during large gatherings, balancing public safety with the rights of free speech and assembly. Joining our host, Terri Wallo-Strauss, is Assistant Chief Craig Dobson, who leads our operations branch, and Professor Clifford Stott, a social psychology expert from Keele University in the United Kingdom. On today's Talking Beat, we discuss the values of learning from the past, the elements of crowd psychology, and why dialogue policing can lead to reducing violence and increasing effectiveness of policing during public order events. Now, let's jump into the episode. Host: It's October 2025, and we're in an interesting time in the Portland area. Craig, welcome. Thanks for coming. AC Dobson: Thanks for having me again. Host: For our regular listeners, you might remember that Assistant Chief Craig Dobson was here in an earlier podcast to talk about crowd management and the science behind it. For those of you who haven't listened, I encourage you to go back if you're interested in this topic and listen to that episode. We're also joined today by Professor Stott, and we're going to delve into more of this subject and the role that he is taking with the Portland Police Bureau to try to accomplish some new things in the area of crowd management and public order. So welcome, Professor Stott. Professor Stott: Nice to be here. Host: Let's start with you and how you connected with the Portland Police Bureau and your background. Professor Stott: Well, I think the major catalyst for all of the work that I'm doing in the US was the crisis of 2020, the murder of George Floyd. The subsequent wave of protest and riots led to a crisis in American policing. And unfortunately, it is the case in this particular field that crisis is the motivator of change. And I think that that crisis led lots of different law enforcement agencies across the US to start reflecting on their practices and how they manage crowd events. Through that process came across my work on crowd psychology and its implications for policing, where I've been working for decades in the European context on helping police forces to better understand the social psychological dynamics of crowds and how they operate. Because a lot of times, a misunderstanding of those dynamics is what lies at the heart of why confrontation develops in crowds. So it's really important to help police agencies understand the science of crowd psychology, update themselves on where that is, and help improve the way that they go about managing crowd events. And it was really in that process that we came into contact with Portland Bureau of Police. Host: And tell us, though, how you really started being interested in this field. Didn't it start with soccer? Professor Stott: I did my PhD... Oh, God, I'm so old now. In 1989, I started my PhD, which is a year of tragedy in the UK, where we had an event called the Hillsborough stadium disaster, which is a soccer stadium in the UK, where poor police crowd management processes led to the death of 97 soccer fans crushed to death. And that tragedy and crisis motivated a program of work that I was interested in. But it wasn't just soccer crowds; I was also interested in protest crowds. And what I began to study across the next four or five years was the process through which peaceful crowds become violent, both in soccer and in protests. And through that work, we developed a theoretical understanding of the dynamics of crowds that recognized that the way crowds are policed is often fundamental to the way that they behave. That crowd psychology isn't just about crowds and the people in crowds, it's about the interaction between police and crowds, and between crowds and police. And those interactional processes are profoundly important in shaping the trajectory of how that event evolves, and really began to understand the implications of particular models of policing. So when I began this work, I began this work as a soccer fan and as a protestor, and seeing these events play themselves out, and then beginning to use that as data to help develop our theoretical understanding of crowd psychology and dynamics. And through that, began a program of work to try to help police agencies draw from that knowledge and theory. Host: And Craig, how did you connect with Professor Stott, and what did you think that he could bring to the Portland Police Bureau? AC Dobson: So in my studies of trying to better understand how to police groups, his name was one of the foundations of a lot of different research that has been done over the years. And through that, I was able to reach out to him and connect. And then, through a grant, we were able to start working together over this project. Host: So tell us a little bit more about the project. AC Dobson: So the project is based on dialogue, and it's how do you position officers who are trained to basically communicate with the crowd, to work within the crowd better, to understand where the crowd is at and how to help facilitate that crowd so that the folks that are involved in it can move in a way that the police are there to help facilitate as opposed to being in opposition to what they're trying to accomplish. Host: So we created the dialogue liaison program. AC Dobson: We did. We started it back in 2016 and had some bumps along the way, but we after 2020, really wanted to look into the science of how crowds interact and really embrace it a new and better way. And so we applied for a grant, and were able to get that grant and have Professor Stott to come and help us understand better holistically how to look at crowds and work with those crowds so that we're following all the fundamental principles of the science. Professor Stott: So let's evolve the conversation a little bit to talk a little bit more about why riots happen. So what we begin to find through the work very early on is that the transition from a peaceful protest into violent confrontation is often precipitated by forms of overly aggressive, disproportionate, heavy-handed policing. And the reason that occurs is because it shapes a particular intergroup relationship in the context of the crowd, where people in the crowd feel like their rights are being confronted, that they feel that the way that they're being policed is illegitimate. And when that use of force by the police is affecting lots of people at the same time, it creates a social context in which a sense of identity is created that defines itself in opposition to the police. And because that's happening to lots of people in that moment, at that time, it makes those people feel as though they're empowered. So it's a combination of a situation where they feel that they have the legitimate right to resist the police, and are empowered enough to do that, you get the emergence of collective confrontation. Now that often then feeds back into policing. Because, of course, as soon as the police are trying to deal with the situation and they're confronted by people being confrontational, that affirms their idea that this is a disorderly crowd, so they escalate their intervention. That brings more people into the dynamic, and we get this escalatory process that isn't a result of people going into the crowd or even to the police. Nobody intended that to happen; it just comes about because of the way in which the situation evolves, and the interactions and behaviors within it. So once we began to realize that, we began to recognize that there might be better ways of policing these crowd events. And the key issue that we want to try to engineer is a circumstance where people perceive the way that they're being policed is legitimate. Because if we can maintain police legitimacy, by definition, we can't get the psychology of a riot. So the question is how? How do you make policing capable of dealing with criminality when it does occur in a crowd, but do so in a way that doesn't create disproportional or heavy-handed, or unnecessary interventions? And that really has been the challenge for the last, I'd say, 20 years. And when we began to address that challenge early on, we did it in the arena of soccer-related public disorder in the European context. Because in Europe, that's really where most of the disorder goes on. Not necessarily in protest, but in soccer, week in, week out. So we set to work on trying to solve what many people call the English disease. And we did it in partnership with police forces, in particular, around one of the major European soccer tournaments way back in 2004 in Portugal. And we established a working relationship with the police in Portugal. And we worked with a group of commanders there who wanted to embrace a science-based approach. And what we did was design a policing model that didn't begin with large ranks of police officers in riot gear, giving a step out of line and we're ready to deal with you attitude, but was more focused on facilitating legitimate behavior, more focused on welcoming and engaging with fans through communication. Because, of course, that's the best way to construct a vision that the police is legitimate. And what we found was that when the police did that, disorder disappeared. There was no major rioting at that tournament in jurisdictions controlled by the police force that we were working with. And this was a major breakthrough because that hadn't happened for years in the European context. So people began to recognize that this way forward for policing was really effective. Now that basic model of policing has evolved over the years through various different iterations and collaborations in various different countries across Europe towards a model that we now call dialogue policing. And what dialogue policing is about is having police officers on the ground from the outset whose reason for being there is not necessarily to control crime but to facilitate rights, and to facilitate positive behavior, and to engage and communicate with people. To ensure that there is a positive relationship between the police and people in the crowd from the outset. And what we find is that where you get that kind of policing approach embedded is far more effective at dealing with problems before they escalate, preventing problems in the first place, and de-escalating and facilitating in ways that make it much less necessary for you to, as a police agency, react with overwhelming force. So we can de-escalate situations and pass off these events without the confrontation that you might otherwise see. So very much about a policing model that's tried and tested in European context. And the challenge post 2020 was, well, how do we inject that model into American policing? And that's the project that I've been involved in with other law enforcement agencies in the United States. And Craig and Portland have been at the forefront of the vanguard of driving this new model of policing into the American context. Host: I was going to ask you that because Portlanders really like to think that their city is unique, and that our way of protesting is unique. So what have you observed here, and do you think that this kind of policing can work here? Professor Stott: Well, in many ways, that's the kind of scientific question we're busy trying to answer. I think if we can make it work here, we can make it work pretty much anywhere in America. I mean, yes, you're absolutely right. The Pacific Northwest is historically a region that has been involved in left-wing movements, protests, strikes, all sorts of history there that feeds into the contemporary context of 2025. The protest community here is vibrant, and it is one where there is an embedded history of not-so-good relationships with policing. Not just here, but across the Pacific Northwest, Seattle, and so on and so forth. And 2020 is testimony to that. So what we are trying to do is to apply a set of principles that have worked elsewhere into a new context. But we're already seeing some very, very beneficial outcomes from that that are entirely consistent with what happens elsewhere. And we should never lose sight. Underneath all of this, we're all human beings. And there are some basic, universal social psychological processes at work in crowds. And once we begin to work with them, we can create an environment, create forms of policing that are not just really effective at reducing confrontation, they're also fundamentally democratic, they're also fundamentally about the facilitation of First Amendment rights, they're also fundamentally about proportionality in the use of force. So this would relate to... I think it's the Fourth Amendment and the Fourteenth Amendment in the US context. But in the European context, we reference this through the European Convention of Human Rights. So there's a synergy between what we're trying to achieve democratically and what we know we need to do scientifically. Host: Craig, our DLO program, our dialogue liaison officers, they're the ones out there, our community should know, in the white shirts, and they've gotten a lot of media attention and a lot of attention, I think, from the community down there, and we've gotten a lot of praise. And then there's also people who don't really understand what their mission is. How are they navigating it? What kind of feedback are you getting from them? AC Dobson: That's a great question. As we develop this program and work through it, part of the science is talking about the different groups that you're going to be dealing with. And some of those groups you're never going to be able to connect with and have any kind of meaningful influence or relationship with. And the focus is to ask our dialogue folks to find those folks that are either organizers of the group that are willing to work with you to help facilitate those, or communicate what they need to be done, or just the participants and those that are around that are willing to see the value of having a conversation with the police to help guide that conversation. But we always recognize that there will always be a few folks out there that don't want that connection or don't want to have interaction with the police. Host: Now that we've established the program, what are the next steps? I mean, what does the process look like? Professor Stott: A good question. I mean, America is moving through unprecedented times. There's no doubt about that. And the issue of protest and the protest arena is where a lot of these political issues are being played out. And they're being played out on streets of Portland and other major cities. So this is a very difficult time to predict what the future is going to be. So let's be clear about that. But I think what we are seeing in Portland, from my point of view as an observer, with the experience that I have of looking at crowds all over the world, what I see here is the emergence of a political movement in resistance to what is happening. And that is a movement that appears to me to be wedded to and embedded in norms of nonviolent protest. What's the emerging symbol of the protest movement? At the moment, it's a frog. An inflatable frog has gone literally global as the brand identity of what this protest movement is about. And it's very, very symbolic. It's not just a funny thing, it's a deeply meaningful, symbolic gesture. In the face of overly aggressive policing tactics, what we see is a protest community embracing a symbol of peaceful resistance. Instead of anarchists throwing Molotov cocktails, you've got frogs dancing in the street, and that, in my mind, is an outcome. It's an outcome, it's an achievement. I would argue that had there been a different policing model in place in Portland, we might not be in the same situation. We might not have that emergent norm of a protest community deeply wedded to the avoidance of confrontation. There are other factors at work. Don't get this wrong. There's multitude of factors playing into why this is playing out in the way that it is at the moment, but the policing model is one of those. And I think if we had a different model, if we'd not had dialogue in place, if we'd not had an education program to educate the police commanders here and to collaborate with Craig and others in the police bureau to construct this policing model, we wouldn't be in the same place. I think that's an important lesson for us, and it's important evidence that the model does work here. But as you quite rightly point out, what's the future? How sustainable and resilient is this model of policing, and what can we do to embed it even further so that we can navigate through this difficult territory with this policing model intact? I think it's important also just to reflect on the historical origins of policing itself. The model of policing that this grows from is a civic model of policing that was born in the 1820s, effectively. The first civic policing organization was the London Metropolitan Police, and that model was quickly adopted in the emerging industrial cities of America. Boston Police Department, New York Police Department, Portland, Seattle, and so on, they're civic policing models. And civic policing models are based on the idea of policing through consent. They're based on the idea of policing communities through legitimacy, and that's what this model is adhering to. And I think that what we need to recognize and what we need to embrace is that fundamental to the Democratic project is civic policing, and we need to do absolutely everything that we can at this moment in time, at this moment in history, to protect that model of policing because it's fundamental to what it means to be a democracy. Host: And today we've been talking a lot about dialogue policing, but Craig, can you help us understand a little bit more about the different layers of our response to crowd management? AC Dobson: Part of the model is having layers so that not only are you there to facilitate the peaceful protesting, but you're set up so that those agitators or those individuals within the crowd that could possibly be a tension point or have criminal intent in their nature, you're able to then go and pluck those people out very carefully so that you're not affecting the rest of the crowd, and what they're trying to accomplish. Old models where you would see that tension point and deal with the entire crowd instead of going out and laserly-focused removing just the problem out of the crowd by the individual. It's much like if you were at a sporting event and you had someone who had drank too much and they were starting to cause a ruckus within the crowd. The folks around them have paid to be there. If you asked for security to come, they want that person removed, but if the security came and was overtly knocking other people down to get to that person, the folks around them would then perceive that as inappropriate and very well would turn on the security that they've asked to help remove that person because now they're doing it in a way that's inappropriate, and it's not proportional to what they're seeing or having happen. And so that's where the transition has happened for us, of looking at how do we set ourselves up in a layered approach so that we can be out there to facilitate those that are peacefully and lawfully doing their job, but also be ready to deal with those that are intent on causing harm or criminal actions. And that's where I think the model has been extremely successful for us. In that, we're not treating the entire crowd as that criminal individual, but that we're differentiating the bad actors from the rest who are there peacefully and encouraging the peacefulness to continue while we extract the bad actor, if it be that. Host: I'm glad you explained that model because we do get a lot of questions about how we handle more violence in the crowd or how we address those certain bad actors. But back to you, Professor Stott. When it comes to the DLOs, what is their role in the crowd? Professor Stott: Well, as Craig's been describing there, central to the model is the idea of differentiation. We have to recognize that police are there to keep people safe. And one of the core functions they perform in keeping people safe is preventing or reacting to criminality, or as you describe it, the tension points. So that raises a whole set of challenges about how this policing model can differentiate. So what I've begun to understand through this, what we call graded tactical intervention, is that the front end of it are these, what we call dialogue officers, or you call DLOs. These officers, their primary role is to not enforce the law but facilitate rights. Now, obviously, they're still police officers, and if crime happens in front of them, they have to react to that. So it's not stripping them away of their duty as police officers, so more as it is changing the emphasis of what it is that they're there to do. And their role is really to build trust and confidence, to develop positive relationships with the protest community, such that they can negotiate and deal with emergent problems. But also through that, they are part of the overall policing response. And because they're embedded in the crowd and because they're working constructively with the participants in the crowd, they're often far more attuned to where the problems are. And if problems do then start to emerge, they can work with other units that are there to make arrests, for example. If it's necessary to make an arrest, then the information about who is causing the problem can feed back into command decision making so that if an intervention is judged necessary, it's more likely to be accurately targeted against what the problem actually is rather than act in a misinformed way and come in and start exercising police powers against people who haven't done anything wrong. That's the challenge. And dialogue policing is central to meeting that challenge in a way that enables a more differentiated approach to behavior in real time as an event progresses. So dialogue officers are there really as the front point of that tactical orientation. They're the primary tactical intervention built around a strategy of facilitation, the facilitation of rights, working with protestors and people in the protest community to facilitate those rights, and as a contact point between them and the policing operation. And then on top of that, there are different layers of intervention that are available to the police, such that if the situation behaviorally within the crowd begins to escalate, they can respond proportionately to the level of threatened risk that is actually present in the situation. Because, of course, it does sometimes escalate. There are circumstances where these tension points cascade out into violent confrontation, and the police have to be ready to react to that in order to protect public safety. But what we're trying to engineer here is a policing approach that's balanced to the actual levels of threatened risk that are right there in that crowd at that moment in time. And also a policing model that is oriented to try to negotiate out problems from the outset as early in the processes as possible to achieve. And when all of those things are in place, we're in a very, very good position for policing because policing then is creating a relationship to the crowd that people are more likely to see as legitimate. So if people come along and try to destabilize the situation, try to create confrontation, people in the crowd kind of look at them and think, "Why are you doing that? Why are you trying to create problems when everybody here is just here to facilitate, is just here to exercise their rights." So it's about the normative environment, it's about the policing context, and the relationship between those two things in the crowd that lies at the heart of why our theory is so effective in helping move the situation forward to one where we're less likely to encounter the kinds of situations that confronted America in 2020. Host: I'm curious, though, over the years, has it changed with the... With cell phones now, with social media now, with a lot of people wanting to stream and catch that viral moment, and do you think that crowd behavior has changed because of that? Professor Stott: In a way, yes, things happen much more quickly. So an incident of interaction between the police and a protest can cascade out very, very quickly because those images, those videos feed out into a global audience within seconds. So, of course, yes, there is a factor here. What we saw in England, for example, we had a wave of riots in 2024. We call them the xenophobic riots because they were anti-immigrant riots. And within the context of those riots, there were social media influencers who were promoting stories about things that hadn't happened. And those stories were, for example, that protestors had been attacked by immigrants. And that amplified the dynamics of the situation and created disorder that otherwise probably wouldn't have occurred. So yes, absolutely, social media is a new dynamic here, and it's also part of the process that police agencies need to get up to speed on. Because public communication in these environments is absolutely fundamental to the perception of legitimacy. And there are actors out there who deliberately try to shape public perception in terms of their own political self-interests. And one of the things that police need to be able to do is develop a much more effective communication mechanism. But within that, you also have to have credibility. And that's one of the issues here. It's not just that the messages occur; people won't just believe anything. It's that they believe certain things, and they believe certain actors. So in order for your message to have traction, people need to trust the source of the message. So again, police legitimacy is absolutely central here. It's one of the most important things that we need to maintain. A relationship between the public and the police that is foundationally built on trust, confidence, and legitimacy. And when we have that, then we're going to be in a much, much stronger position to push through this really, really complex territory in a way that helps maintain a democratic system and peaceful norms on our streets, where we have the right to come out and protest, and we can do that without it escalating up into violence and confrontation. Host: So is that what success looks like? Is it a peaceful protest? Professor Stott: Well, some would argue, no, which is unfortunate. But as Craig's pointed out, there are people here who have particular ideological positions that want disorder. And we have to make sure that we don't create the stage for them to perform on. And so often in the past, that's been the problem, is that their jobs are made very, very easy because policing responses unnecessarily amplify the conditions under which they can gain traction, that they can gain influence. But from my point of view, politically, ideologically, what do I want? Yes, I want a society that is fundamentally peaceful, and I want a society where people have the right to come out and express their freedom of consciousness within the law, within peaceful norms, because that's fundamental to the democracy that I aspire to, and this policing model is part of the journey of trying to create that. AC Dobson: I think part of the challenge is when you don't have a model that has multiple layers to it, as a policing organization, you don't have the nimbleness to be able to respond appropriately. And so when you do have those bad actors who are trying to incite or increase the criminality, you don't have a nimble way of being able to extract those, and you can watch it blossom into other things rather than peaceful protesting. But with this model, by having dialogue out there, you have a good feel for the crowd. One of the byproducts of having those folks out there and building that trust amongst the folks that are there is that you also can have them influence the actors within it. The professor talked briefly about that, where you can turn to them and say, "Can we have you help yourselves make this peaceful?" and start to put pressure and influence on those folks that are trying to take this demonstration to a different area or a different level. And pushing that, what we've seen is we've actually had people affect the crowd or affect bad actors within the crowd to push them out, and control things. Professor Stott: Yeah, we're seeing that a lot. I mean, I've been doing some observations of some of the protests down at the ICE facility and on the No Kings on Saturday, and there have been tension points. There have been people turning up to these events who fundamentally disagree with those protests, and that's been creating tensions. And right in the middle of those tensions, there have been people who have been actively de-escalating the situation. They've been trying to calm... Well, in fact, not trying, they have been calming the situation down and reducing the tension. But that's one of the things that goes along with this policing model, is that what we see in this environment of this kind of policing is what we call self-regulation dynamic. And that self-regulation dynamic is actually the natural position for humanity, and it's actually underneath the civic policing model. There's the idea of what we call in the technical sense, the Peelian model of policing, is the idea that the public has a natural tendency to self-regulate, and the job of the police is to empower that natural tendency. And you are actually seeing that play itself out on the streets of Portland on a daily basis at the moment. And we need to celebrate that. We need to actually acknowledge it is going on, recognize that the people behind the peaceful norms that are self-evidently present in the protests going on on the ground in Portland at the moment are the people of Portland themselves. Those are the people that are delivering the solutions here. Those are the people who are self-regulating. Those are the people who are de-escalating, and the policing model is designed to facilitate that. It's designed to empower that, and that's why it's there. And it is working because when we see these kinds of policing models, what we tend to see is that dynamic of self-regulation. So you asked me earlier, will this policing model work here? Well, the evidence suggests that it does because we're here gathering that evidence, and that's exactly what we would expect to see. Host: We're going to leave that on that hopeful message of humanity and self-regulation. Thank you both for joining us today. Announcer: Thanks for listening to the Talking Beat. Do you have a question for Talking Beat? Send us an email at talkingbeat@police.portlandoregon.gov or give us a call at 971-339-8868. If you enjoyed this episode, please share with your friends. And for more episodes, visit our website, portland.gov/police/podcast.