CBPSC, Community-Based Public Safety (CBPS) Collective, is a relationship-based violence prevention and intervention model in which residents are employed and trained as credible, trusted public safety professionals who create safety in their own neighborhoods.
Aqeela Sherrills leads the national movement for community-based public safety to build healing-centered ecosystems in some of the country’s most impacted neighborhoods.
“CBPSC is an outgrowth of the work I did in Newark, New Jersey with the Newark Community Street Team,” Sherrills says. “We hired and trained residents and credible messengers to leverage their relationships to intervene and mediate conflicts to peace. In the first five years of our work, we had double digit reductions and homicide in the city, and was invited by other cities across the state of New Jersey to replicate the strategy to help them reduce violence.”
CBPSC continues to expand nationally, supporting grassroots organizations even amid federal funding challenges over the past six months. One powerful example is the Circle of Brotherhood in Miami-Dade County.
“CBPSC wrote the grant for the Circle of Brotherhood in Miami-Dade County, it was a $2 million grant spread over three years which allows them to hire critical staff and be able to pay them livable wages,” Sherrills says. “There was a report that was just released last week. That violence is down 83% and two of the most violent zip codes in the city. On April 22 they got the letter, just like many of us, cutting their grant including a new federal grant that they received. The collective went to work and we raised $850,000 from partners and we re-granted those funds to 12 organizations across the country. And the Circle of Brotherhood was one of them. They’ve gotten a lot of traction, they didn’t have to layoff the staff as a result of this and so that’s a huge success story for us.”
CBPSC doesn’t just measure success in statistics, it redefines what meaningful evaluation looks like.
“We value both qualitative and quantitative research,” Sherrills says. “We advocate for participatory research, not just evidence-based approaches that extract data from communities without returning value. We say: Nothing about us without us.”
Rather than evaluating entire cities, CBPS conducts landscape analyses to target specific zip codes where violence is concentrated. The goal: reduce violence by 50% in those areas, then expand outward in concentric circles.
“Violence persists and ripples through communities largely because there’s little infrastructure for healing,” Sherrills emphasizes. “We’re building that infrastructure, both people who can navigate the system and institutions that can provide care.”
The Healing & Safety Conference takes place in Atlanta on Aug. 21-23. For more info visit CBPS Collective.
