Participants will have to sign a liability waiver, Mattson said. Asked about whether it was a safety risk to have officers armed during the event, Mattson said that officers’ guns are “going to be in their holsters like they normally would, just like if we were chasing a suspect.”

If the officers are not uniformed or armed, it defeats the goal of helping community members overcome fear of interacting with officers as they are, Mattson said.

Every so often, I like to imagine someone explaining these things at the debriefing table where they’re all going over how it all went wrong, one step at a time, as someone is asking probing questions about the thought process behind it.