By Andrew Zaleski

When Mike Koval, the police chief of Madison, Wisconsin, abruptly resigned on a Sunday in September 2019, the community’s relationship with its men and women in blue was already strained. Use-of-force issues hung over the department after the killing of a Black teenager in 2015. Then, months before Koval left, another Black teenager, in the middle of a mental health crisis, was beaten on the head by an officer while being restrained by three others.

The process of selecting a new police chief followed a standard formula. A five-person team of mayor-appointed, city-council-­approved commissioners would make the ultimate decision, allowing for public comment beforehand. But this time, the commissioners wanted that public input to involve more of the local community than just the folks who regularly appeared at town-hall-style meetings. 

To gather more meaningful community feedback based on “lived experiences,” the commission took a new approach in which small groups of citizens—many from Madison’s most underheard neighborhoods—were brought together in a nonthreatening environment. Facilitators guided people who differed in age, ethnicity, gender, and socioeconomic status through intimate discussions on topics including what their own relationships with the police were like; whether they trusted or feared them; how they’d seen officers interact with kids and adults; and what type of training they thought police should receive to deal with stressful situations.