Seizing the Opportunity: How Active Bystandership Saves Costs and Culture
Seizing the Opportunity: How Active Bystandership Saves Costs and Culture
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Description
For municipal risk pools, reducing claims and controlling costs often starts with helping member organizations prevent problems before they escalate.
Active bystandership training offers a proactive approach to risk mitigation. It equips employees to recognize when something is going wrong—and gives them the skills, confidence and organizational support to step in before a mistake, misconduct or other preventable incident becomes a costly liability.
Join Heroes Active Bystandership Training for a live webinar exploring how this approach can help public-sector organizations reduce risk while strengthening workplace culture.
In this session Jonathan Aronie, Partner at Sheppard Mullin and Leader of Organizational Integrity Group, and Steve Hansen, CEO-CFO of Utah Local Governments Trust, share findings from their latest research on the organizational and financial impact of active bystandership training.
You’ll learn:
- How intervention can prevent problems from becoming costly incidents
- Why traditional “speak up” approaches often aren’t enough
- How organizations can create cultures where employees are prepared and empowered to intervene
- How active bystandership can complement existing risk-management and compliance efforts
- Why giving personnel the opportunity to intervene can be a powerful tool for mitigating risk
For organizations responsible for managing public-sector risk, the opportunity is significant: fewer preventable incidents, lower exposure and stronger member organizations.

After graduating from Brandeis University in 1990 and Duke University School of Law in 1993, Jonathan served as a law clerk to the Honorable Judge Patricia Wynn on the DC Superior Court. With 30+ years practicing law, Jonathan is the leader and founding member of the Sheppard Mullin Organizational Integrity Group, a cross-disciplinary team of litigators, regulatory specialists, federal monitors, and ex-prosecutors with extensive experience helping organizations prevent and defend against challenges to their organizational integrity.
In the early 2000s, Jonathan served as the Deputy Independent Monitor over the Memorandum of Agreement between the US Department of Justice and the DC Metropolitan Police Department. Subsequently, as an outgrowth of his internal investigation practice, Jonathan was appointed in 2013 by the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana as the Monitor over the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD). The Monitorship, which came to a successful conclusion in November 2025, involved former police chiefs, internationally-known professors, and other professionals who collectively were responsible for reviewing, assessing, and reporting publicly on the NOPD’s compliance with a far-reaching federal Consent Decree. As the lead monitor, Jonathan was integrally involved in overseeing the transformation of what was (but is no more) one of the nation’s most troubled law enforcement agencies. He spent his time in New Orleans meeting with citizens, business leaders, and civil rights attorneys, in addition to riding along with the police officers themselves in order to ensure that the consent decree was enforced fairly.
As a corollary to his work in New Orleans, Jonathan helped NOPD to create and guide the development of Ethical Policing is Courageous (EPIC), the country’s first department-wide peer intervention program for police officers. Subsequently, to make active bystandership available to police departments across the country, Jonathan co-founded the Georgetown/Sheppard Mullin Active Bystandership for Law Enforcement (ABLE) Project, for which he serves pro bono as chairperson of the Project’s Board of Advisors. Jonathan’s leadership has been instrumental in helping ABLE to change the culture in more than 440 police departments across North America, serving more than 100 million Americans.
Jonathan Aronie has written more than 150 articles, authored or co-authored three books, and speaks nationally on a wide range of topics, including procurement law, corporate ethics, and compliance programs, organizational integrity, and constitutional policing. He has taught at the FBI National Academy, the ATF National SAC Conference, multiple state police chief associations, the Darden School of Business, and the Walt Disney Company, among many other high functioning organizations.







