New Yellow Springs police chief wants to regain community’s trust

When you ask Yellow Springs Police Chief Brian Carlson what are the characteristics of a good officer, he’ll tell you in addition to integrity and honesty, police should be patient, compassionate and forgiving.

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It’s those last three characteristics that the new Yellow Springs police chief said he’d like to see more of in today’s law enforcement.

“Officers are a great group of people,” said Carlson, who grew up in Chicago and admired the police there who walked the streets and knew the residents by first name. “It’s sad that nationally (officers) are so looked down upon because of a few bad ones.”

Village council hired Carlson as the new chief Monday night with an annual salary of $78,000. He was appointed interim chief in January following an altercation between officers and the public at the village’s New Year’s Eve celebration.

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“Chief Carlson was the standout in the public forum, based on citizen comments and emails,” Village Manager Patti Bates said in an email.

“The programs and changes he initiated as interim chief have gone a long way toward healing the department and the community. His appointment to the permanent position will give him the opportunity to build upon the changes he has put in motion,” Bates said.

Regaining the community’s trust is a priority for Carlson, who wasn’t working on New Year’s Eve. The incident drew harsh criticism from residents and led to the resignations of the former Police Chief David Hale, one officer and the loss of another who was let go as part of a mutual agreement with the village.

“Building the trust with the community, that will be a daily strife,” he said. “An officer can have a bad night, and with social media, trust can be destroyed in an instant.”

Righting the ship means dipping into the small department’s training budget. Since January, Yellow Springs police have completed 16 hours of de-escalation training and four hours of implicit bias training.

Carlson said the de-escalation training is important and de-escalating situations should be a high priority for an officer going on a call.

“From the moment you get out of your cruiser, people are watching. You can de-escalate immediately with facial expressions and gestures,” he said.

All of the department’s 12 officers are slated to get crisis intervention training at the Montgomery County Board of Developmental Disabilities.

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That’s unusual for a small department. Larger departments, Carlson said, typically have just a handful of officers trained in crisis intervention so that at least one will be working on each shift.

Policing is not his only job. Carlson continues to be a minority owner in CJ Bryson Inc., a company he founded that builds science labs at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Carlson enjoys playing guitar and carpentry in his free time.

The 54-year-old lives in Miami Twp. with his wife, Shannon, of 29 years. They have two daughters — Megan, a swimmer who recently graduated from the University of South Carolina, and Anna, a sophomore in high school.

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