The St. Louis Public Safety Collaborative: Born from Frustration, Built on Hope

By Hans Menos, PhD, LCSW (Vice President of Public Safety Innovations, Center for Policing Equity) and Andrew Horn (Director of Growth, Simsi)

 What does it mean to reimagine public safety?  If you ask 100 people, you may get 100 different answers.  However, at its core, the movement to re-imagine public safety calls for a reconsideration of the status quo, enhancing community decision-making, and reducing reliance on punitive responses while taking modern approaches wherever possible.  

In 2021, St. Louis elected Tishaura Jones to be their next mayor.  Mayor Jones had run on a platform that called for a new approach to public safety.  She envisioned an approach where the Police were not the default solution and where the city could learn to offer each problem they encounter a congruent response.  

The St. Louis Public Safety Collaborative (STLPSC) emerged from this vision and from the support of community members who were done waiting for solutions from the outside. These weren't politicians or bureaucrats – they were everyday people who saw their city struggling with tensions between residents and law enforcement, particularly after the tragic death of Mike Brown in nearby Ferguson, and knew there must be a better way.

“The goal is to come together and rally everyone around the idea that there needs to be data-driven solutions to crime,” one of the early participants said. Farrakhan Shegog, a leader in the St. Louis Public Safety Collaborative, emphasized that the efforts must be  “resident-driven.” “Our expertise comes from the fact that we live here, as residents, homeowners, and business owners.” This grassroots movement found a home with the Urban League, which provided the structure needed to turn passion into action.

What makes this story particularly remarkable is how the community transformed from a diverse group of people with valuable insight and ideas to approach problems differently into a sophisticated and organized group working toward shared goals. When the Center for Policing Equity (CPE) was invited to partner with the city leadership and the St. Louis community, their goal was not to simply write another report to sit on a shelf. Instead, they connected the community with innovative tools through the DICE™ methodology, developed by experts at Rutgers University and implemented by Simsi. One of CPE's core values is the belief that those closest to the problem are closest to the solution. The DICE™/PSC model puts data into the hands of the community most impacted by violence; in this case, the collaboration was conducted directly with Black St Louisans in the northern part of the city. DICE™/PSC allowed for the genuine democratization of data, allowing residents to find true solutions with little police involvement.

Here's where this story takes an inspiring turn – the STLPSC became the third organization in the country to adopt the DICE™ model and the first to do it entirely through community initiative and leadership. The STLPSC built on past success and adopted the model to become their own while becoming an exemplar for others to replicate by demonstrating that the DICE model was effective and replicable - now on multiple occasions and settings. This wasn't merely about following a playbook; it was about residents learning to use data and collaborative tools to address the specific challenges facing their neighborhoods.  Project management principles brought to solve community safety problems, which the STLPSC used to help write the playbook that other cities can operationalize in efforts to reduce community violence in their neighborhoods.

The impact was so impressive that it caught the attention of the St. Louis Mayor's Office, which now provides sustained funding for the initiative. This isn't just another government program – it's a community-led movement that earned the support of city leadership through demonstrated success.

Today, as CPE prepares to release the results of a comprehensive community survey, they're proving that remarkable things can happen when residents lead the way in addressing public safety. The St. Louis Public Safety Collaborative isn't just changing how their city approaches public safety – they're showing communities across the country what's possible when citizens refuse to be passive observers and instead become active architects of their own public safety solutions and critical partners to governments and other stakeholders.

This is more than a story about a successful program – it's about a community that refused to accept the status quo and created something entirely new. It's about residents who believed they could make a difference and proved it through action. Most importantly, it's about how grassroots leadership, when given the right tools and support, can transform a city's approach to keeping its people safe.

Individuals like you power all of our work. Consider donating today to support programming like this and other critical public safety redesign work.

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