In June 2020, following the murder of George Floyd, the Chapel Hill Town Council passed a resolution on Developing New Community Approaches to Improve Racial Equity and Public Safety. This resolution helped to form the Reimagining Community Safety Task Force, which presented an update at last week’s Chapel Hill Town Council meeting.
The task force met more than a dozen times in the span of eight months and eventually presented 28 recommendations and 31 action items to the Chapel Hill Town Council. These recommendations fell into the categories of prevention, crisis response, and post-crisis follow-up within community safety.
“The task force was formed on the heels of a time when there was a real critical interest in looking at what policing could look like in communities,” Blue said. “That was part of their work but it was not the only part of their work. They looked at the reasons behind poverty, the reasons behind homelessness, the reasons behind substance abuse problems and mental health challenges. All of those upstream issues that sometimes lead to a law enforcement intervention.”
The task force said the top five recommendations are to increase community collaborations, expand existing policing alternatives, increase affordable housing opportunities, restructure 911, and fund the Street Outreach, Harm Reduction and Deflection program.
Blue said he believes many of those identified challenges are not best addressed by law enforcement.
“The task force recommended enhanced opportunities for diversion and specific policy language that we would draft that makes a real commitment to us diverting every single person we can out of the criminal justice system,” Blue said.
To help accomplish that, the Town of Chapel Hill hired Shenekia Weeks as its first Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Officer. Blue said Weeks is serving as the project manager for the task force implementation.
“We’ve got to put together a plan to put those recommendations into action and Shenekia is going to help guide us through that process,” Blue said. “In doing so [she will] make sure we apply a racial equity lens to everything we do.”
Blue said the Chapel Hill Police Department has “embraced” policing reforms and aims to lead the way on many of them.
“But that doesn’t mean there aren’t opportunities to continue to improve to continue to look for real disparities in our outcome,” Blue said. “There’s no question that some portions of every community receive policing services in a different way than others.”
Implementation plan for Town of Chapel Hill Reimagining Community Safety Task Force. (Photo via Town of Chapel Hill)
The Reimagining Community Safety Task Force plans to provide an update on its progress in winter of 2022 and aims to present an updated action plan to the council in spring of 2022.
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