Public safety research & planning
The Evidence Behind Your Next Public Safety Decision.
We are a specialized consulting firm that takes on the questions local governments find hardest to settle alone. How many officers and firefighters do we need? What will a new facility cost? Is this contract still the right one? And how do we pay for any of it? More than 350 engagements in every region of the country stand behind our answers.
Why agencies retain us
Most Staffing Decisions Are Still Made With a Ratio and a Hope.
Officers per thousand residents is a comparison, not an analysis. It tells a city council what other places have chosen. It cannot tell that council what its own community demands, what its own people are doing with their time, or what happens to response times if nothing changes for five years.
Our work replaces that guess with a measurement. We build staffing findings from computer-aided dispatch records, case files, payroll and timekeeping data, and the department’s own operating profile. We then show the arithmetic, line by line, so that anyone who wishes to challenge a number can see exactly where it came from.
| Division and position | 2021 | 2025 | 2030 | 2035 | 2040 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Administration | |||||
| Subtotal | 6 | 6 | 8 | 9 | 9 |
| Field services | |||||
| Red rotation patrol | 28 | 49 | 55 | 59 | 63 |
| Blue rotation patrol | 28 | 49 | 54 | 59 | 63 |
| Traffic | 3 | 3 | 4 | 4 | 4 |
| Subtotal | 61 | 103 | 115 | 124 | 132 |
| Support services | |||||
| Subtotal | 56 | 59 | 63 | 66 | 69 |
| Communications | |||||
| Call handler | 19 | 43 | 47 | 53 | 57 |
| Subtotal | 24 | 48 | 53 | 59 | 63 |
| Total staff | 147 | 216 | 239 | 258 | 273 |
What we do
Our Services, and How They Connect.
Most clients come to us for one of these and discover that the questions connect. A vacancy problem turns out to be a pay problem. A staffing finding changes a space program. A space program changes a cost estimate, and the cost estimate changes the funding strategy. We are structured to follow that thread rather than hand it off.
Staffing & Deployment Studies
Workload-driven staffing analysis, response time and demand modeling, investigative workload, and multi-year staffing projection for police, fire, and communications.
Compensation & Benefits Studies
Salary benchmarking against a stated peer set, total compensation and take-home analysis, retirement system review, and retention strategy built on separation data.
Space Needs & Facility Planning
Room-by-room programming, existing facility assessment, site evaluation, and estimates of probable cost for stations, headquarters, EOCs, and justice complexes.
Feasibility & Transition Studies
Independent analysis of whether to form, consolidate, contract, or in-source a department, with full startup capital, operating cost, and implementation planning.
Owner’s Representative
Your advocate through design and construction: scope definition, RFQ and RFP preparation, selection support, and oversight from concept to occupancy.
Grants & Funding Services
A career government relations practice identifies and pursues federal, state, and local funding, including the AFG, SAFER, and HMGP programs and related resilience funding.
Professional education
Public Safety Facilities Planning Seminar
Alongside our consulting work we run a working session for chiefs, administrators, and the staff who carry a facility project, covering how these projects are planned, funded, and built, well before the first dollar is committed. The next session is March 11 and 12, 2027 in Orlando.
Our approach
Five Phases, From First Data Request to Day-One Operation.
The sequence below is the same whether the engagement is a single station study or the creation of an entire department. What changes is depth, not order.
Assessment & Baseline
We establish what is happening now. Document review, customized data collection instruments, structured interviews with leadership, staff, and labor representatives, and analysis of dispatch, payroll, case, and budget records. The result is a quantitative baseline rather than an impression.
Strategic Design & Operational Planning
Organizational structure, command relationships, and staffing models built from the baseline, paired with financial analysis across five-, ten-, and twenty-year horizons and an early read on the funding sources that could carry it.
Infrastructure & Resource Preparation
Operational plans become physical requirements. Room-by-room space programming, facility options analysis, technology and equipment planning with lifecycle cost, and the policy and procedure documents the organization will run on.
Implementation & Risk Management
A sequenced transition roadmap with explicit contingency planning for recruitment shortfalls, technology delays, and schedule float, together with the intergovernmental agreements that keep mutual aid and shared services intact throughout.
Finalization, Approval & Hand-Off
The integrated plan, the public communication strategy for any referendum or bond question, the presentation to council, and a hand-off that leaves your staff able to operate without us.
National practice
Work in Every Region of the Country.
Police departments and sheriff’s offices. Fire and rescue services. Emergency operations centers and 911 communications centers. Municipal courts and county justice complexes. Universities. Towns of two thousand and cities of three hundred thousand.
The breadth matters because it is what makes a peer comparison worth anything. When we tell a client where they sit against comparable agencies, we are drawing on a body of work built over nineteen years rather than a literature search performed last month.
Selected engagements
A Sample of Recent and Representative Work.
Laredo, Texas
Comprehensive Public Safety Assessment
Compensation, benefits, retention, and operations examined across the police and fire departments of a border city and inland port, with five-year fiscal modeling.
View project
Deerfield Beach, Florida
Public Safety Feasibility Study
Contracted county service and independent municipal police and fire rescue departments modeled on the same basis across a twenty-year horizon.
View project
Woonsocket, Rhode Island
Police, Fire & 911 Study and Owner’s Representative
Space needs programmed across three agencies and seven facility configurations priced, followed by owner’s representative services through project delivery.
View projectCommon questions
Straight Answers to the Questions We Hear First
A fuller set is on the questions and answers page, organized by service.
What does The Center for Public Safety do?
The Center for Public Safety is a public safety management consulting firm that studies how police departments, fire and rescue services, emergency communications centers, emergency management offices, and courts are staffed, paid, and housed, and then tells the governing body what the evidence supports. The firm has completed more than 350 engagements for local governments across twenty-one states over nineteen years, and works from Winter Park, Florida, for clients nationwide.
What services do you provide?
Six service lines carry most of the work. Staffing and deployment studies determine how many people an agency needs and when they are needed. Compensation and benefits studies determine whether pay is competitive and what it would cost to fix. Space needs assessments and facility planning determine how much building an agency requires and for how long. Feasibility and transition studies answer whether to form, consolidate, contract, or bring a service back in-house. Owner's representative services protect the jurisdiction's interest through design and construction. Grant and funding services identify and pursue the money that makes a recommendation buildable. We are also retained on their own for technology needs assessments, hiring and retention planning, organizational development, site selection, and corrections staffing and compensation.
Where do you work?
We work nationwide. The firm is based in Winter Park, Florida, and has completed engagements in twenty-one states: Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Washington, and Wisconsin. Travel to the client is part of every engagement, because the work depends on seeing the operation and talking to the people running it.
Are you architects?
No, and the distinction matters. We define what a building has to do before an architect is asked to design it, establishing the operational program, the space requirement, the adjacencies, the growth horizon, and the budget envelope. The architect then designs to that requirement. Agencies that skip this step frequently discover during design development that the building being drawn is the wrong size, and by then the correction is expensive.
Start the conversation
Tell Us What Your Agency Is Facing.
Most agencies call us about a budget request, a growth pressure, or the start of a facility project. A short conversation is usually enough to tell you whether a study is the right next step, and what it would involve.