Action

Working alone, at first, Heintze and I developed an integrated set of marketing and communications elements to ground our nascent practice: thought leadership white papers on key topics in progressive policing, website content and collateral, and a growing stream of blogs. While Heintze concentrated on leadership – recruiting retired major-city police chiefs and building out the team, I focused on our communications infrastructure. First, I developed high-impact proposals for a range of law enforcement consulting services. As we won and delivered work, I developed our assessment report structure and messaging and oversaw the multi-disciplinary teams that authored these reports, most of which our clients eventually released to the public.

Impact

Within 36 months, we had established a leadership position in the U.S. law enforcement consulting market and were recognized – in this small, elite community – as having a crisp, clear and actionable point-of-view on the leading issues in modern law enforcement. We were on-the-ground across the U.S. – in Seattle, Los Angeles, Cincinnati, Baltimore, Chicago, Cleveland, San Francisco, Oakland, Grand Rapids, Denver, Fort Worth, Boulder, Milwaukee. Many of our reports were public, national-level research and analysis publications and reports on police department operations, including analyses of police bias, investigation practices, complaint management optimization, interview policies and organization. We were communicating authentically and with authority about complex and nuanced issues at the heart of the police-community relationship in highly charged crisis environments. Two years later, one of the U.S. federal agencies responsible for overseeing state and local law enforcement selected our firm, from 20 or so competitors, for a $50 million, five-year contract to be the sole service provider for the largest U.S. program to advance police transformation in cities and universities across the nation.