Public Safety Is a Relationship: Restorative Approaches to Rebuilding Trust

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ASPA as an organization.

By Tanya Settles
April 24, 2026

Efforts to improve public safety often focus on structural reforms. Civic leaders envision new policies, oversight mechanisms or enhanced training programs. Public safety leaders emphasize tactics, strategy and culture. These tools matter, but they are often applied as if the problem is primarily technical. Fix the system, and the problem disappears. In reality, public safety is what scholars describe as a “wicked problem.” That is, a problem defined by complexity, uncertainty and competing values. Communities want enforcement but also fairness. They want transparency but also privacy. They want accountability but also trust. These are not disagreements about facts. They are tensions between legitimate public values. In this context, progress is not about finding the right answer. It is about navigating what cannot be simultaneously achieved.

The Limits of Reform Alone

Traditional approaches tend to emphasize control over systems. Recent efforts, including the United States Conference of Mayors’ report on police reform and racial justice, focus on structural and systemic change. These efforts often follow high-profile incidents that shock the public conscience, prompting calls to tighten policies, increase oversight and improve compliance. In many municipalities, communities that feel harmed by the actions of public safety officials seek accountability through community oversight, and there is benefit to that. These efforts are essential for accountability, but they have limits. These strategies are designed to answer questions like:

• “Were procedures followed?”
• “Were actions within policy?”
• “Were outcomes compliant with standards?”

Despite best intentions, structural reform efforts are less equipped to address a deeper question: Do communities trust the system, and do they feel seen within it? When reforms focus only on systems and not on relationships, they can unintentionally deepen the divide they are trying to close. These questions cannot be answered through systems alone. They require examining and rebuilding the relationship between public safety institutions and the communities they serve.

A Different Starting Point

Research shows that perceptions of fairness and legitimacy shape public trust as much as outcomes. If public safety legitimacy is a relationship, then rebuilding it requires more than structural change. It requires processes that allow communities and institutions to work through tension together and the willingness to take strategic risks to move forward.

This is where restorative approaches offer something different. A growing body of research shows that restorative approaches can improve participant satisfaction, accountability and long-term outcomes. Often associated with diversion programs or alternatives to traditional discipline, restorative justice offers far more. Traditional approaches focus on assigning blame and determining punishment. In contrast, restorative practice focuses on repairing harm and building relationships. Rather than automatically assigning blame, restorative practice creates space for people to:

• Share experiences and perspectives
• Acknowledge harm and its impact
• Identify responsibilities
• Co-create paths forward

In the context of public safety, this approach shifts the question from “How do we fix the system?” to “How do we repair and strengthen the relationship?”

Navigating Tradeoffs Together

One of the most important contributions of restorative approaches is the ability to surface and navigate value tradeoffs. Rather than avoiding tension, restorative processes make it visible. For example, a community member may express a need for safety and protection. Another may emphasize fairness and freedom from bias. An officer may describe the realities of responding to volatile situations. Each perspective reflects a valid concern.

Restorative processes do not attempt to eliminate these differences. They provide a structure for working through them. This is particularly important in wicked problems where competing values cannot be resolved through policy change alone. They must be negotiated, understood and balanced over time. And because the problem is “wicked,” when a bridge is built between communities and government, stakeholders are better prepared as conditions evolve.

Restorative approaches in public safety can take many forms:

• Facilitated community-police dialogue focused on shared experiences
• Restorative responses following critical incidents
• Ongoing engagement processes that build relationships outside of crisis moments

What matters is not the format but the function: creating a consistent, credible process for engagement. These processes do not replace accountability systems. They complement them by addressing the relational dimension of trust.

A Path Forward

Restorative approaches offer a path forward not because they eliminate conflict, but because they create a structure for working through it. In an era of complexity and competing values, the future of public safety may depend less on finding the perfect solution and more on building the capacity to navigate tension together.

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Author: Tanya Settles is the CEO of Paradigm Public Affairs, LLC. Tanya’s areas of work include relationship building between local governments and communities, restorative justice, and policy and program strategy and evaluation.  Tanya can be reached at [email protected].  The opinions in this column and any mistakes are hers alone. 

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