To counter gun violence, he recruits police from the communities most afflicted

The new Linden Community Center in Columbus, Ohio, isn’t just for kids. Built in 2021 among a series of new buildings in a gentrifying neighborhood, it’s also one of the places where the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office is recruiting candidates for the department, The Trace reports. On a recent weekday, trainees could be seen completing workouts under the watchful eyes of deputies and volunteers, who assessed their fitness in running, bear crawls, squats, push-ups, and dragging a 100-plus-pound dummy across the gym. 

“To see deputies at the community center doing something good for the community, that’s huge,” said Chief Deputy Marvin Hill, who oversees the department’s recruitment efforts. “We’re trying to show people that we’re part of the community, too.” 

This is a novel approach. In 2022, after three decades of climbing the ranks within the Ohio State Highway Patrol, Hill was hired as the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office’s first Commander for Recruitment, Diversity, and Inclusion. He and his recruiters go to barbershops, community centers, pop-up events, and anywhere residents gather in the hopes that the people they connect with will apply for positions in the Sheriff’s Office. They specifically target the most gun violence-afflicted neighborhoods, like Linden, just six miles from downtown and where many of the city’s gun deaths occur. Their central aim: representation.

“A big segment of community engagement talks about how people want to be policed by people who look like them,” Hill said. “My thing is to try to get my officers or recruiters into those urban neighborhoods where police don’t typically go.”

Hill, who is Black, remembers the violence when he was growing up in Warren. When he graduated from college in 1988, he said, a war broke out between rival drug dealers, and gangs were “walking down the street with rifles and guns in their hands, shooting at each other like the O.K. Corral.” His father was a police officer in Warren and kept a watchful eye, steering Hill clear of the streets. Others in his family weren’t so fortunate; one of his cousins, James Dotson Jr., served five years in prison for reckless homicide. He was released in 2015, but was shot and killed in a local parking lot within a year. 

Hill followed in his father’s footsteps, starting as a corrections officer and dispatcher before joining the Highway Patrol as a state trooper in 1992. His father didn’t want his son to join a police department that the community didn’t trust. “Warren PD had a bad reputation back in the day,” Hill said, recalling how Black residents complained of unnecessary use of force. “There were some bad eggs in the Police Department.”

More than 1.3 million people live in Franklin County, Ohio’s most populous, and nearly 70%  live in Columbus, the state’s largest city. Since 2021, Columbus has averaged 152 fatal shootings a year and 435 nonfatal ones, though both have steadily decreased since 2021. The numbers may appear small when compared to larger cities, but in tight-knit, majority-Black communities like Linden, each death carries a heavy toll.

“You can feel it walking around when a life is lost here,” said Ralph Carter, 38, a lifelong resident and founder of We Are Linden, a community organization that helps young people and their families through mentorships, marches, toy drives, and coalition-building. 

Decades of accumulated concerns were ignored, driving residents into silence, Hill said, contributing to a culture of impunity as people became unwilling to communicate or cooperate with police, even if they had witnessed a shooting. That silence, and his 30-year career with the troopers, inspired Hill to attempt to mend the combative dynamic between the police and communities plagued by gun violence in Ohio. In 2019, he started as the recruitment and diversity commander for the state troopers, leading to his new role with the Sheriff’s Office.

Policing tactics usually don’t emphasize building trust in minority communities, especially in Columbus, one of the most segregated cities in the country. That’s coupled with a pattern of Midwestern police agencies struggling with how they protect and interact with poor minority communities, especially in the wake of the 2020 murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. In the last decade, city departments throughout the region, in Cleveland, Detroit, Indianapolis, and Columbus, all faced scrutiny from the Department of Justice for violating people’s civil rights or engaging in unlawful stops, arrests, and excessive force. 

A 2024 DOJ report analyzing city police data showed that in 2022, the year Hill was appointed to lead the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office’s DEI efforts, 53% of people who reported use-of-force incidents were Black, despite accounting for only 29% of the population. (Black and white arrestees experienced the same rates of use of force, according to the DOJ report). As Black residents on the disenfranchised outskirts of downtown were routinely dealing with aggressive stops and searches by racially biased officers, according to the DOJ report, Hill was getting his recruitment strategies off the ground, figuring out the areas that made the most sense for community relations efforts. It’s a position that didn’t exist before he joined the Sheriff’s Office and one that doesn’t typically exist in other agencies. “We were the first and built it from the ground up,” Hill said.

Just four years ago, it would’ve been difficult to get community members on board with Hill’s strategy. Among their reasons not to trust the police, longtime residents cite the shooting death of unarmed 47-year-old Andre Hill by a Columbus police officer in 2020. They point to the fatal shooting of Ma’Khia Bryant, a 16-year-old girl who was shot by a Columbus police officer after attacking another woman with a knife on the southeast side of the city in 2021. One shooting, in 2020, still casts a shadow over the city after the trial ended in a hung jury last February: A former sheriff’s deputy Jason Meade was following up on a sighting of a person with a gun when he came face-to-face with Casey Goodson Jr., 23, outside Goodson’s grandmother’s house. After an argument, Meade shot Goodson, who had a bag of sandwiches and keys in his hand, six times. A new trial is scheduled for early next year.

“The community was not engaged with the police at all. If anyone talked to the police, you weren’t just viewed as a snitch, you were viewed as part of the other side,” said Malissa Thomas-St. Clair, the founder of Mothers of Murdered Columbus Children, a local nonprofit providing resources and safe spaces to families affected by violence like her own. Thomas-St. Clair’s son, Anthony St. Clair, was killed in 2013 by someone he was selling drugs to, which propelled her into advocacy work. 

After George Floyd’s murder in 2020, it became paramount for the police to build trust, said Michelle Phelps, a sociology professor at the University of Minnesota. But in recent years, policing tactics in the Midwest have largely returned to their old form. “What we saw over the last couple of years is a real pushback against [calls to reform] and a sort of retrenchment of previous practices,” Phelps said, pointing to an emphasis on enforcement strategies like stops, searches, and hostility. Those practices make it difficult for police to build credibility and solve gun crimes in struggling neighborhoods. Research shows that training police officers to treat people with fairness and respect is much more effective in helping with crime prevention, while also building trust. 

Hill agrees that departments too often target entire neighborhoods, instead of taking a proactive investigative approach to find the specific people involved in gun violence. “Heavily enforcing an entire geographic area creates disdain for law enforcement,” he said. “People feel like they’re getting targeted and won’t have any incentive to speak with you when crimes occur.”

According to the Sheriff’s Office, less than 1% of Columbus’s population is responsible for 50% of its gun violence. 

If you go to some of the more troubled neighborhoods, you’ll find the majority of people who live there don’t want to be involved in violence. There’s a small number of people in those communities that are causing the violence,” said Sergeant James Jodrey, who runs the Central Violence Eradication Response task force for the Sheriff’s Office. “Our goal is to identify that .05% of the population.” 

The task force goes beyond simple enforcement. It’s working with the Ohio State Criminal Justice Research Center to analyze its data and determine where to focus proactive policing methods. It also encourages referrals, so people can reach out on behalf of those in need of job training, mental health services, and educational resources. Jodrey and Hill point out that the Sheriff’s Office knows the importance of building trust, which is why they’re able to emphasize it in their efforts. The office allocated around $11 million in its budget for community response and safety education in 2024, which is about 5% of the entire office’s budget and a 12% year-over-year increase. “I believe the relationship right now is pretty good, it’s never going to be perfect,” Jodrey said. “There are always going to be incidents where people make mistakes, and they’re going to give law enforcement a black eye.” 

The possibility of those incidents is foremost in the minds of community leaders like Thomas-St. Clair and Carter, who’ve seen the disconnect between the police and the community up close. “You had officers that just clocked in, wait for a call, and go do it,” Carter said of the lack of engagement. “Those are the police you really don’t want in your community.”  

Both Carter and Thomas-St.Clair readily praise the Sheriff’s Office and the Columbus Police Department for emphasizing engagement over enforcement in the fight to reduce gun violence, but each harbors a fear that one high-profile police killing could undo progress. “What we’re doing needs to be sustained, and the only way we do that is to keep working together,” Thomas-St. Clair said, pointing out that she hopes to see more Black people in the Police Department and the Sheriff’s Office. 

That’s where Hill’s strategy comes in, and so far it’s yielding results. In the first quarter of 2024, 44% of all new candidates accepted into the academy were Black, compared to 11% in the first quarter of 2023. Hill said his priority is in getting people to see each other as just that—people. 

“It’s good for the youth to see our people in that uniform,” Carter said. “My oldest son wants to be a police officer. It’s good to see people from the neighborhood doing that.”

This story was produced by The Trace and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.