With a week until Fayetteville’s public safety summit, city staff released more information about the upcoming event during Monday’s Fayetteville City Council meeting.
The summit will take place from 1 to 3 p.m. April 30 at Fayetteville State University’s student center. The public safety summit signifies a major step in Fayetteville’s plans to bring the Office of Community Safety to fruition, fleshing out previous informal discussions about building out the office.
The OCS is an alternative model for public safety that has social workers, peer support specialists and mental health professionals work alongside first responders in addressing non-violent 911 calls. It has been successfully implemented in some of Fayetteville’s peer cities in North Carolina, including Durham and Greensboro.
Assistant City Manager Jodi Phelps said at Monday’s meeting that the city had finalized most of the details and logistics for the upcoming summit, which is open to the public. Phelps said the summit was designed to provide a “landscape analysis” of the current services, needs and gaps in the city’s community safety infrastructure. The data presented at the summit, Phelps said, will also help guide the future OCS director by creating a “foundation and a built-in network for them to rely upon trusted partners in the organization.”
Mayor Mitch Colvin encouraged the public to attend the summit and reiterated the council’s unified support for the OCS.
“We need the community's help because it's only successful if you and the partners are with us every step of the way,” he said. Colvin said there would be more community discussions on the OCS in the future.
Phelps said there were several dozen confirmed attendees, including groups and individuals whose work specializes in mental health, homelessness, violence prevention and youth violence intervention programs. The meeting’s diverse attendance list may represent “one of the broadest cross sections of groups and professionals that this city has brought together to address these issues,” Phelps said.
Like the mayor, Phelps indicated there would be more opportunities for community engagement and participation in future discussions as the process to build out the OCS continues.
“This is not, in staff's view, a one-and-done for community involvement and engagement,” Phelps said. “I think what we see — and hopefully what the new director and hopefully this council will see — is that we need to continue to engage with the community and discuss this as we move forward.”
Here’s what else happened at Monday’s meeting:
The next Fayetteville City Council meeting, a work session, is at 2 p.m. Monday, May 6, at City Hall, 433 Hay St.
Contact Evey Weisblat at eweisblat@cityviewnc.com or 216-527-3608.
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