Proactive Alliance® Relationship-Based Approach

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Safe Night delivers a complete, integrated, and credible process for solving complex socio-political problems. A city manager facing rising crime and declining public trust receives not just data, but a roadmap. The Proactive Alliance® framework offers a structured methodology for police, city agencies, and community stakeholders to work together to address those diagnosed environmental risks. Our expert team, with its blend of counseling, policing, and academic credentials, provides the unique credibility needed to bridge divides and facilitate this collaboration.

The Proactive Alliance® relationship-based approach integrates policing methods with adapted concepts from counseling psychology created by a licensed professional counselor and a police officer. This collaborative approach is a prevention model based on building relationships with the community in a variety of settings and using the humanity of the individual police officer as his or her most valuable instrument. 

Although forging collaborative relationships has been suggested and encouraged to most police departments, exactly how to develop and improve existing skills to achieve this goal has been uncertain. The ability to create lasting, purposeful relationships with stakeholders is not an innate skill but can be taught. While some police officers have a natural talent for social interaction, all personality types are capable of learning how to build productive relationships with the appropriate training. Building a productive relationship requires effective communication and empathy, but must also incorporate collaboration. Proactive Alliance recognizes the value of the transactional de-escalation techniques that police use to defuse adversarial conflict and empowers officers to actively engage with the public before a conflict occurs. When a crisis does occur, the relationship acts as a problem-solving medium, giving the officer more options than enforcement alone, including the ability to draw from the community for the most effective solution. 

The concept of Proactive Alliance®,  developed by Molly Mastoras, LPC, is a method of collaboration among police, businesses, and community members fostered by active listening techniques, effective communication, and empathy to develop purposeful and productive relationships. This approach draws from and adapts counseling psychology concepts including Family Systems Therapy, Motivational Interviewing, Person-Centered techniques, the Stages of Change, Trauma-informed techniques, and Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. 

To join  IACP's Trust Building Campaign, police agencies must pledge to implement the outlined key policies and promising practices. These policies and practices represent six key focus areas that are essential to enhancing trust and collaboration between communities and police.

• Bias-Free Policing
• Use of Force
• Leadership and Culture
• Recruitment, Hiring, and Retention
• Victim Services
• Community Relations

Safe Night provides training and technical assistance to help law enforcement agencies fulfill the IACP's Trust Building Campaign. Proactive Alliance relationship-based policing can help your organization meet several key focus areas, including community relations, leadership, and culture.

For more information on the IACP Trust Building Campaign or how Safe Night can help your organization fulfill its campaign pledge, contact mail@safe-night.com

To join the IACP Trust Building Campaign, click here.