The Takoma Park City Council created the Public Safety Citizens' Advisory Committee (PSCAC) to facilitate communications between the Council and the citizens of the City. This document, Public Safety Recommendations, is a preliminary draft of the committee's recommendations to the Council. The final version of this document will fulfill this year's requirement of the PSCAC to provide the Council with an annual report of the committee's findings. It is the final version, not this preliminary report, which will include a thorough analysis of the results of the focus groups.

These Public Safety Recommendations are intended to provide the City Council with guidance on public safety issues. As the Council considers decisions, this document will provide information about the citizens' desires.

Since public desires and needs are ever changing, this first version of this document will soon be outdated. Because of that, the PSCAC envisions this as a "living" document. As the PSCAC continues its work, new findings and analysis will require the committee to refine and expand this document. Implementing changes too frequently, however, will defeat the overall guidance objective of this document. Therefore, the revisions to these recommendations will be made annually. (The final version of this year's document will be provided to the Council this summer.)

The reader should note that these recommendations are not offered as criticism of any portion of the City government. Frequently, this document states that a particular action should be taken, without recognizing that some aspect of the action may already be implemented within some City Department. For example, this document heavily proposes the implementation of Community Oriented Policing (COP), without providing a thorough analysis or even recognition that some COP approaches are used in Takoma Park. This deficiency in this document is merely a result of time constraints and certainly is not intended to reflect poorly on any group or individual.