Summary:
- To assist police departments, municipalities across the state have begun creating community safety departments.
- These departments work with existing police forces to address the more sensitive challenges in ensuring public safety.
- When done right, these programs ease pressure off of police departments and ensure public safety issues get the response they need.
As traditionally constructed, policing is a near-impossible job. Departments and officers are expected not only to enforce the rules of one of the most complex legal systems known to man but also to generally ensure public safety and maintain order in an incredibly complex world. At any given moment, officers can be expected to respond to an active shooter situation, a robbery, a domestic disturbance, a mental health crisis, or virtually any other task that could fall to those we task with maintaining law and order.
To assist in this effort, towns and municipalities nationwide have adopted the philosophy of community policing and made its principles manifest in Offices of Community Safety or Community Safety Departments. North Carolina is no exception.
What is Community Policing
Community policing, as defined by the Department of Justice, is “a philosophy that promotes organizational strategies that support the systematic use of partnerships and problem-solving techniques to proactively address the immediate conditions that give rise to public safety issues such as crime, social disorder, and fear of crime.” Given the flexibility inherent in this philosophy, an effective community policing strategy looks different in different towns, cities, and communities.
With policing being primarily a municipal responsibility, individual cities have the option to establish their departments or agencies focused on incorporating specific community policing principles, depending on what their community needs at a given time. In North Carolina, this means that different municipalities have differently structured departments with similar, but not the same, priorities.
North Carolina Departments
Likely the most diverse in purpose, in Greensboro, there is the Community Safety Department, the CSD, formerly known as the Office of Community Safety, or OCS. Described in its mission statement as “a cooperative effort between the residents of Greensboro, City of Greensboro leadership, and the Greensboro Police Department to develop a safe and healthy neighborhood,” its objectives include increasing public safety through a holistic and trauma-informed response to calls for service, allowing for transparency and accountability for our public safety systems and community, and enhancing partnerships within internal City of Greensboro departments and with community stakeholders to strengthen community engagement and build trust and legitimacy within public safety.
To do this, CSD has four programs under its supervision: the Greensboro Criminal Justice Advisory Commission, Behavioral Health Response Team, Violence Prevention, and Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion Division.
The Greensboro Criminal Justice Advisory Commission is a 9-member advisory commission that “reports directly to City Council and the City Manager’s Office” on various law enforcement and public safety issues, primarily focused on the public’s interactions with law enforcement. The Behavioral Health Response Team – the product of a very deep partnership with GPD – helps respond to mental health crises using specially trained GPD officers and CSD clinicians. The Violence Prevention Program takes more proactive steps, working with violence interruption groups to encourage “neighborhood participation and engagement in reducing violent crime.” Finally, the Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion team provides GPD officers with an alternative to the criminal justice system: giving them the option to divert individuals towards the appropriate community resources.
To hear CSD Director Latisha McNeil – whose parents and stepbrother are retired law enforcement – tell it, CSD serves the community and the GPD. From direct assistance through the BHRT to providing community-focused options with LEAD, the CSD complements the GPD. While still young, so far, the results of this partnership have been very promising, with over 250 conflict interruptions, 100 mediations, 100 referrals to services, and 35 community outreach events in the first quarter of 2024. However, regardless of the numbers, the goals of getting the community involved in public safety, building relationships with law enforcement, and lightening the load of officers are worth pursuing inherently, and other cities have taken note.
Durham has a similar program called the Durham Community Safety Department (DCSD), which functions almost like an expanded BHRT program with its Crisis Call Diversion (CCD), Community Response Teams (CRT), Care Navigation (CN), and Co-Response (CoR) organized under its Holistic Empathetic Assistance Response Team (HEART), coupled with community collaborations to promote public safety. Fayetteville now has its own Office of Community Safety, after advocacy by Fayetteville Freedom For All, inspired by other cities. Their strategic pillars are community-based violence prevention, homelessness response, mental health response and diversion, and youth initiatives.
These programs help support their respective police departments by addressing sensitive community issues and providing direct assistance in handling complex public safety issues. In building public safety systems that address not only disorder in the moment but the causes of disorder and its aftereffects, these community safety departments are a critical tool in the municipal toolbox and, when properly integrated with existing police forces, help make North Carolina a safer place for all.
