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COLUMBUS, Ga. — Police chief Freddie Blackmon prepared his “strategic plan” for the department after being required by city council to present it within thirty days. Blackmon has had two years, three months, and twenty-two days to enact a plan to improve the department. He has failed.

The slides of Blackmon’s “plan” can be viewed through the city council website within the agenda packet for the March 14, 2023 council meeting — though be forewarned that an actual strategic plan is nowhere to be found. 

Unlike police chief Freddie Blackmon’s crayola crayon pile of disconnected and incohesive buzzwords arranged on a series of slides in a way that does not serve to communicate nor achieve any sort of desired end-state through lines of effort, we independently developed a proper strategic approach for CPD in literally a single afternoon.

Through our example below, you can immediately notice the differences between a proper Strategic Approach Diagram and Blackmon’s hooked-on-phonics alphabet soup. 

A Strategic Plan and accompanied Strategic Approach Diagram uses a procedural methodology to identify a desired end-state, and then reverse-plan interconnected lines of effort consisting of interdependent tasks. These tasks are laid out chronologically from left to right, providing a timeframe for when these sequential objectives should be completed. Each line of effort serves to support the others, eventually culminating in the achievement of the desired end-state.

Here’s what an actual strategic approach looks like, and how four lines of effort can achieve overmatch and dominance over our city’s criminal adversaries. The full document hosted on Scribd also contains a full-page version of the Strategic Approach Diagram shown below.

Sua Sponte.

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Here’s the full text of the document independent of the hosted PDF:

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THE COLUMBUS POLICE DEPARTMENT STRATEGY

INTRODUCTION — The CPD Strategy articulates how the total Columbus Police Department achieves its objectives defined by the CPD Vision and fulfills its duties in accordance with the Columbus Georgia Code of Ordinances. Its primary inputs are the city’s current threats of gang-related violent crime, lack of unity within the department due to extreme leadership failure, and the findings of the Operational Assessment of the Columbus GA Police Department produced by Jensen Hughes.

The CPD Mission — our purpose — remains constant: to prevent crime, enforce the law, and strengthen the community we serve through effective communication, transparency, responsive law enforcement, and  commitment to our Core Values. The CPD mission is vital to our city because we are the law enforcement agency capable of defeating our city’s criminal threat and indefinitely seizing and controlling those things our criminal adversaries prize most: our land, resources, and population.

Given the threats and challenges ahead, it is imperative that CPD have a clear and coherent vision to unify our department, rebuild, and attain overmatch in order to isolate, disintegrate, compel, and control our city’s criminal adversaries. As such, the CPD Vision — our future end state — is as follows:

COLUMBUS POLICE DEPARTMENT VISION

The Columbus Police Dept of FY2026 will be unified, well staffed, and rebuilt to meet the increased growth of gang-related violent crime throughout our community. Our unified department will ensure officers have faith in their leadership to provide them with a common sense of purpose and direction. Our department’s improved leadership model will set the example for officers and the community as we attract and retain officers to increase our staffing to meet our city’s current rates of violent crime. New staffing will enable us to improve our task-organization model to best combat gang-related violence. In tandem, this will allow us to deploy new tactics, techniques, and procedures to provide us with overmatch against the threat. We will then turn that overmatch into complete and utter dominance over crime  through constant assessment, ensuring our resources continue to hold violent crime at bay for our city.

To build the more unified and effective police force outlined in our CPD Vision, it is important to understand the key parts of that Vision:

• Unified — The CPD must provide its officers with a common purpose and direction that organizes and draws out strengths  — through the application of effective leadership — to amplify the maximum initiative, knowledge, proficiency, and esprit de corps of each individual officer within the department.
• Well-Staffed — The CPD must identify an appropriate objective metric by which to consistently measure the staffing level of the department as it relates to the annual rise and fall of crime within our city, while simultaneously employing mechanisms to exceed those staffing requirements through retention and recruitment.
• Leadership Model — The CPD’s leadership must set the example — every day and through all actions — for how officers within the department must be expected to perform themselves. Leaders within the department must train, coach, and mentor their subordinates while providing them with a common purpose and direction through clear, concise, and consistent communication.
• Task-Organization — The arrangement and staffing of subordinate units within the department to achieve the operational requirements of the department.
• Tactics — The arrangement of police elements and resources in relation to one another within our city’s operational environment, serving to achieve the operational requirements of the department.
• Techniques — Non-prescriptive ways or methods used to perform functions or tasks.
• Procedures — The CPD’s standard, detailed steps that prescribe how to perform specific tasks.
• Overmatch — The CPD’s ability to apply a learned skill, employ equipment, leverage technology, and apply proper force to create an unwinnable situation for our criminal adversaries.
• Dominance — The CPD’s ability to sense, understand, decide, act, and assess faster and more effectively than our criminal  adversaries.

These key terms required by the manifestation of our Vision translate into the following Strategic CPD Objectives:

• Common Purpose — Provide officers with a clear and concise common purpose and direction.
• Faith in Leadership — Select and employ leadership personnel whom officers trust to lead them.
• Staffing — Exceed recruitment and retention goals to match new operational requirements.
• Operations — Exceed operational and logistical requirements to achieve dominance over our criminal adversaries. 
• Overmatch — Deploy new operational tactics, techniques, and procedures by leading officers to obliterate our city’s violent crime rates.
• Dominance — Continuously assess performance to maintain cohesive unity, in order to sustain dominance over our criminal adversaries.

THE STRATEGIC ENVIRONMENT — Today, our city’s rates of violent crime are overwhelmingly attributable to gang-related activity and retaliatory violence. When coupled with the geopolitical climate of anti-police sentiments, the environment itself presents a challenging rise of violent crime even when not accounting for the currently—degraded state of CPD. This, of course, is extremely amplified through the city’s rising rates of poverty and drug use which, statistically, are also large contributors to the probability of at-risk youth becoming violent criminals themselves. Without CPD’s full operational capacity for the past several years, violent criminals have remained on our streets interacting with our at-risk youth population and thus increasing the number of criminals in our city through a positive feedback loop. The semi-urban and suburban environments of Columbus also present the optimal conditions for drug and gang-related activity to flourish, thus becoming severely amplified by the positive feedback loop of criminal diffusion described above.

STRATEGIC APPROACH — The CPD’s central challenge is achieving overmatch against our criminal adversaries and sustaining that overmatch through the application of dominance within our operational environment to achieve our CPD Vision. The CPD Strategy establishes four lines of effort with specific objectives to chart a path of irreversible momentum towards FY2026. These lines of effort are Leadership, Organize, Deployment, and Sustainment. The CPD Strategy will unfold over the next three years in a series of phases as priorities shift across these lines of effort (See Figure 1). Underpinning this strategic approach is an enduring commitment to take care of our officers and residents alike by living the CPD Values of Professionalism, Respect, Integrity, Duty, and Empathy in everything we do.

‍Prioritization — While we proceed along all four lines of effort simultaneously, our top priority through June 2023 is unifying the department through the selection, employment, and application of exceptionally outstanding leadership. As that leadership begins to activate the department through clear, concise, and effective communication that provides a common purpose and direction for our officers, officers will once again begin to develop faith in their leadership’s ability to lead. This initial sense of unity and purpose will enable the conceptualization of how to best organize, deploy, and sustain the department’s personnel, resources, and assets to achieve overmatch and dominance over our criminal adversaries.

Implementation — The Columbus Georgia Code of Ordinance and the Operational Assessment of the Columbus GA Police Department shall act as the governance and assessment process to ensure synchronized implementation of the CPD Strategy. The department’s leadership will designate organizational leads for supporting strategic efforts, develop intermediate objectives, track progress, and assess risk. Current department policy shall remain in effect but shall be subject to change in order to achieve the strategic objectives of the CPD Strategy in accordance with the governance and assessment process.

Lines of Effort — The following lines of effort (LOEs), implemented through the governance and assessment process, are how the Total Department will achieve the CPD Vision.

LOE 1: Leadership — The department unifies through the selection, employment, and application of exceptionally outstanding leadership. As that leadership begins to activate the department through clear, concise, and effective communication that provides a common purpose and direction for our officers, officers will once again begin to develop faith in their leadership’s ability to lead. This initial sense of unity and purpose will enable the conceptualization of how to best organize, deploy, and sustain the department’s personnel, resources, and assets to achieve overmatch and dominance over our criminal adversaries. This is achieved through a two-pronged approach that culminates in a unified department within the immediate-term timeframe of roughly 90 days:

• Faith in Leadership — The current command climate has continued to demonstrate a failure of leadership so powerful that officers have resigned from the department at a rate 6.2 times the national average for several consecutive years. It is not possible to recruit officers to the department under such command climate conditions. Officers must have faith in their leadership’s ability to lead; this is not possible for the current department’s leadership personnel to achieve, not now, nor at any point in the future. The trust and fidelity of officers both within the department, interagency, and potential recruits is irreparably diminished. To restore that trust, fidelity, and faith, the department’s leadership must be carefully replaced with leadership personnel who: (i) possess and exemplify extraordinary leadership ability, and; (ii)  officers will trust to lead them.
• Common Purpose — For the CPD to achieve its mission and manifest its CPD Vision through this CPD Strategy, officers must be inspired to perform to their full excellence (i) as an individual officer; (ii) as a member of a small-unit team, and; (iii) as a member of our department as a whole. Through the application of direct leadership, it is imperative that the department’s leadership personnel instill a sense of duty, responsibility, and esprit de corps by placing the needs and welfare of their officers above that of their own, each and every day, through every action they take. This will be accomplished by leaders living and teaching the CPD Core Values of Professionalism, Respect, Integrity, Duty, and Empathy through their own actions, both on and off duty.

LOE 2: Organize — The department will immediately begin to conceptualize its new task-organizational requirements in accordance with the recommendations made within the Operational Assessment of the Columbus Police Department. These new conceptualized organizational requirements will dictate the subsidiary units within the department, their resource allocation needs, and — most importantly — the staffing required to empower those units to achieve the CPD Strategy of overmatching and sustaining dominance over our criminal adversaries. While current recruitment and retention efforts can begin to be improved during this time, they must be conceptualized and planned so as to account for the extreme amplifying effects of having a reunified department. Once a critical mass of department unification occurs, recruitment messaging and department image will begin to dramatically increase throughout our community and greater region. Training facilities must prepare methods to increase their output by roughly double in order to achieve the potential inflow of recruits. The requirements and timelines of delivery for both staffing and organizational products will be codependent within a dynamic environment, placing direct small-unit leadership and crystal-clear communication as an absolute top priority during this LOEs initial commencement. Leaders must accurately account for and report the needs and feedback of their officers to the appropriate facilitators in order to ensure the proper development of policy and procedure for the department. Once staffing levels have exceeded the requirements determined in the onset of this LOE, and once the department’s task-organization has met the structure required by the applied recommendation of the Operational Assessment of the Columbus Police Department, this LOE culminates in the CPD being considered structurally rebuilt. This can be expected to be accomplished by March 2024 within the near-term timeframe of one year.

LOE 3: Deployment — From the immediate onset of this CPD Strategy, the department should plan its logistical mechanisms for acquiring the technology and tools it will need to achieve overmatch and dominance over our criminal adversaries through the processes being simultaneously carried out in the Organize LOE. Simultaneously, the department must begin conceptualizing and formally developing tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) to employ these technologies and tools within the task-organizational structure being developed within the Organize LOE. As time progresses and the department becomes closer to being rebuilt, the department can begin to rehearse its implementation of these new TTPs within its new task-org, maintaining unity and cohesion through effective direct leadership to ensure officers are being provided with the training, equipment, time, and care required to achieve the professional excellence they are capable of producing. Once the department is structurally rebuilt through the culmination of the Organize LOE, the department’s newly-developed TTPs will begin to be deployed within the real-world strategic environment through the department’s conduct of daily operations. As these TTPs are iteratively improved through real-world policing by a newly-unified, better-equipped, properly-staffed, and exceptionally-well-led police force, we can then expect our city’s crime rate to begin reducing. As this trend continues to unfold, overmatch becomes an inevitability for the CPD against our criminal adversaries, and thus creating a positive feedback loop of reduced crime throughout our city.

LOE 4: Sustainment — Through iterative revisioning and feedback provided by direct leadership at all levels within the department, officers will be provided with the tools, resources, time, and care required to employ any necessary changes to the newly-developed TTPs. It is imperative for leaders and officers alike to remember that the objective is not to blindly follow newly-developed TTPs, but rather to have those TTPs better enable officers to increase their performance — not hinder it. Leaders must ensure that appropriate feedback is being actively iterated upon  to ensure TTPs are altered accordingly to ensure their subordinates’ amplification of success. With these feedback systems in place, the ingenuity and experience of officers and leaders within the department can be expected to find new and innovative ways to employ the department’s technology, tools, and tradecraft to continue to sense, understand, decide, act, and assess faster and more effectively than our criminal  adversaries. This continued sustainment provides a serious leverage and momentum to the department that our criminal adversaries cannot outmatch, thus inevitably ensuring complete and utter policing dominance over crime within our city.

CONCLUSION —  The CPD Strategy describes the strategic environment and the lines of effort we will pursue to achieve the CPD Vision by FY2026. The Total Department will unify, rebuild, and attain overmatch in order to isolate, disintegrate, compel, and control our city’s criminal adversaries by achieving complete and utter policing dominance over crime in our city. We are confident that the CPD Strategy, when implemented with sufficient resources and through a sustained effort, will ensure the CPD remains our city’s dominant policing agency as we achieve our CPD Vision. 

Sua Sponte.

Facts are stubborn things — and we’ll keep publishing them, whether city officials like them or not.

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