Josephine Smedley, Senior Community Engagement Coordinator
For generations, conversations about public safety have focused on what happens after a crisis — 911 calls, emergency response, arrests, and crime rates. While those measures matter, they only tell part of the story. What if the most important public safety work happens long before someone calls for help?
That question is reshaping how faith leaders, community organizations, and public safety practitioners think about safety itself. It also shaped the Center for Policing Equity’s (CPE) Reimaging Public Safety: Faith-Led Approaches to Community Wellness webinar, presented in partnership with Salvation and Social Justice (SandSJ), a Black-led organization working to abolish structural racism through faith-based advocacy. The conversation invited participants to consider a broader vision of public safety — one built by strengthening the conditions that help people, families, and communities thrive.
Moderator Melissa McKee with the Olympia City Council in Olympia, Washington, opened the discussion by challenging the traditional definition of safety. Public safety, she explained, is more than the absence of violence; it is the presence of stability, opportunity, and dignity. Retha Onteri of SandSJ expanded on that idea, describing safety as the presence of justice actively working in the lives of people and communities.
Throughout the webinar, three ideas emerged that challenge how we traditionally think about public safety:
1. Safety is built before a crisis.
Drawing on nearly three decades in law enforcement, CPE’s Senior Director for Law Enforcement Initiatives, Niles Wilson, reflected on an early experience that transformed how he understood public safety. After responding to a call involving a 10-year-old boy, Wilson recalled the child’s mother telling officers that she didn’t want her son back. It was a moment that compelled him to look beyond the immediate crisis and ask what conditions had failed the family long before police were called.
That experience continues to shape his work today. As Wilson explained, policing has increasingly become the default response to challenges rooted in housing instability, untreated trauma, poverty, and other issues that begin far upstream. If we focus only on the moment someone calls 911, we risk overlooking the conditions that made that call necessary in the first place.
2. The conditions that strengthen communities also strengthen public safety.
Housing. Health care. Education. Economic opportunity. Food security. Trusted relationships. Too often, these are treated as separate conversations. The panel challenged participants to recognize them as public safety conversations because they shape whether individuals, families, and communities thrive.
Diana Rogers, Executive Director of Greater Mount Zion Community Development Corporation, illustrated this connection through her work supporting Black mothers and families in Trenton, NJ. She described how housing instability, limited access to maternal health care, workforce challenges, and food insecurity are deeply interconnected. A safe community is one that is thriving, she said, where there is truly nothing missing.
Retha Onteri echoed that systems’ perspective through SandSJ’s restorative justice work. Instead of asking, “What rule was broken?” restorative approaches begin with a different question: “What happened to this young person, and what do they need in order to heal and move forward?” By investing in mentoring, employment pathways, healing, and community support, restorative justice addresses the root causes of harm rather than simply responding to its consequences.
3. Faith communities are public safety infrastructure.
One of the webinar’s most compelling insights was its reimagining of the role faith communities play in public safety. Rather than viewing faith leaders as partners who respond after harm occurs, the panel described faith institutions as trusted community infrastructure — organizations that strengthen relationships, connect residents to resources, advocate for equitable policies, and remain present before, during, and after moments of crisis.
As Niles Wilson observed, faith communities are “an everyday infrastructure.” Their enduring presence, local leadership, and deep community trust position them to address challenges before they escalate. Wilson also emphasized that communities are not problems to be solved, but partners to engage. Diana Rogers reinforced that idea, noting that when communities become fragmented, they lose the communal ties that help build community. Together, these perspectives illustrate that relationships are not simply an outcome of safe communities — they are part of the infrastructure that makes them possible.
The webinar ultimately challenged participants to rethink not only how communities respond to crises, but how they define public safety itself. If public safety is more than the absence of violence, then public safety must also be more than emergency response. Public safety, the panel argued, begins long before a crisis. As CPE’s Niles Wilson reminded attendees, stop confusing certainty with readiness. The conditions for safer communities are built every day through relationships, opportunity, and shared responsibility. The question is no longer whether these investments belong in public safety conversations, but whether we can afford to define public safety without them.
Related Resources from the Center for Policing Equity and Salvation and Social Justice: