Charlotte updates Safe Charlotte implementation, expands civilian crash investigators and crisis response teams

Charlotte City Council received an update Jan. 13 on the city's Safe Charlotte recommendations and related public-safety initiatives, including a new civilian crash-investigator unit and expanded civilian roles meant to free sworn officers for response duties.

City Manager Marcus Jones and Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department Chief Jennings told council the department has civilianized about 40 positions since 2020 and launched a civilian crash unit on Dec. 12 that has handled 497 calls for service and produced 306 crash reports so far. Jones and Jennings said those changes are intended to reduce the time sworn officers spend on low-risk work and to improve the department's capacity for crime response and community engagement.

The council was briefed on a set of reforms tied to the Safe Charlotte report, which the council previously adopted. Chief Jennings described seven implementation areas: better use-of-force and stop-data systems, adding a strategic policy unit, improving early-intervention (EIS) monitoring for officers, strengthening accreditation reporting, civilianizing certain responses and expanding crisis-response teams. Jennings said CMPD has improved its internal affairs case-management data, linked complaint records to CAD and other data sets for analysis, and is reviewing commercial IACMS options.

Jennings said the department's CARES (co-response) pilot was transferred to Mecklenburg County on Dec. 4 to align it with county mental-health resources, while the city's CPCRT (co-responder) teams were doubled several years ago and the clinicians who worked with CMPD recently became city employees. He described the clinician hires as intended to stabilize the program and said the CPCRT model has diverted people with mental-health needs from jail: the council was shown that 137 assessments by crisis teams led to 77 diversions from jail in the program's reporting.

Jones and Jennings also said CMPD implemented a new early-intervention system that aggregates complaints, arrests and calls-for-service data and that the department is piloting expanded civilian traffic-control officers and a larger pool for event traffic management. They said CMPD's training and recruitment changes include several civilian training positions, a curriculum developer and incentives for tactical medical and CIT training.

Council members asked for additional, program-level detail. Councilwoman Victoria Watlington asked whether the Safe Charlotte recommendations represented a departure from CMPD practice; Jennings said civilianization and broader, cross-sector approaches were the most significant changes since 2020. Watlington and others asked for qualitative evaluations of youth programming and what additional resources would be needed to scale prevention work. Jennings said outside evaluators (UNCC Urban Institute and ROI Impact Consulting Group) reviewed 3,768 youth-program participants and reported that 88 percent of participants did not recidivate during a 30-day to 36-month follow-up window; Jennings said 94 percent did not recidivate over an 18-month observation period for some program cohorts.

Other council members pressed for data-driven next steps. Councilman Bakari Burns (spoken comments) and Councilman Malcolm Graham emphasized the need to align policy and measurable outcomes as homicide and property-crime numbers are reviewed in more detail later this week. Council members asked CMPD and city staff to return with more detailed performance metrics and resource needs during upcoming budget and strategy sessions.

The manager said the council will discuss public-safety priorities again during the annual strategy meeting later this month and at a Feb. 10 session on violence as a public-health crisis. Council members and staff agreed that many of the violence-prevention efforts require cross-jurisdictional and nonprofit partners, and several speakers asked for continued coordination with the county, the district attorney's office and community providers.

Ending: Council members thanked CMPD and staff for the implementation work and asked staff to provide follow-up materials on youth-program evaluations, crisis-response performance, civilian hiring qualifications and 911/dispatch metrics ahead of the budget workshops and annual strategy meeting.