Redefining Public Safety: Exploring Non-Enforcement Approaches to Crisis Response

Sadie Sheridan spent her summer interning at the City of Greensboro’s Office of Community Safety (OCS) and working on an independent project for her senior thesis. OCS, a local government office that offers non-enforcement public safety services, broadens the definition of community safety and who is responsible for community safety by including civilians in the public safety system. OCS acts as another option in response to violence, conflict, and crisis. For her internship, Sadie assisted with the OCS story. To help improve communication with the public, Sadie created flyers for OCS events, a brochure for the office, social media posts, and a standard operating procedure for the current OCS programs. Sadie shadowed each person in the office, attended OCS events, and accompanied OCS employees on outreach cases and community meetings. Her conversations and experiences informed her of the work of each program in OCS, which allowed her to articulate her perception of OCS’s story.

Along with Sadie’s internship at OCS, she conducted interviews with the Behavioral Health Response Team (BHRT) for her senior thesis. BHRT is the crisis response team under OCS that sends out an unarmed mental health clinician or peer support specialist alongside a BHRT-trained police officer to 911 behavioral health crisis calls. She met with clinicians, police officers, and peer support specialists to ask them questions about their perceptions of BHRT. She found these conversations to be some of the most rewarding parts of her summer. Sadie continued to conduct interviews over Zoom after the summer and analyzed the interviews the following semester.

While she had loose expectations going into the summer, Sadie knew she wanted to better understand OCS and witness the office’s relationship to the Greensboro community. She felt that she surpassed her learning goals for the summer—she learned about clinical work, had insightful conversations with frontline response workers, and got to see what it was like to be a part of an unconventional government office.