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Every weekend, Eli McCarthy puts on his bright, highvisibility yellow vest and goes on shift for the D.C. Peace Team (DCPT). Every weekend, McCarthy reimagines public safety. And he’s been doing it for almost a decade.

When activists promote alternatives to the police, they’re often talking about devoting more resources to organizations like DCPT. Founded in 2010, the volunteerbased group specializes in nonviolent conflict resolution and restorative justice.

DCPT street teams offer a new model: security without armed force, but rather through de-escalation and community trust. “Our focus today is really on cultivating the habits and skills of non-violence in our daily life so our communities can better resist injustice and build a more sustainable, just peace,” McCarthy said.

McCarthy is a board member who works with DCPT’s most visible program: its unarmed civilian protection units. Donning their yellow vest uniforms, the units are deployed in response to demonstrations, ongoing neighborhood conflicts, or to protect individuals experiencing homelessness.

Civilian protection units survey their assigned areas like a patrol route, but rather than the District’s armed Metropolitan Police (MPD), they are composed of unarmed D.C. residents trained in conflict resolution. Unit members attempt to mitigate conflicts without involving police, and often by engaging more than police would, chatting with people and offering resources.

On weekends, McCarthy and his team can be found promoting nonviolent responses at the Columbia Heights Plaza, responding to conflicts between those living around the plaza and those experiencing homelessness who live in the plaza itself. The team has also begun sending units to the Sunday morning Dupont Circle Farmers Market, and is often present at marches and rallies that are expected to be contentious, such as this year’s Unite the Right rally.

“You’re not there to police the crowd, you’re there to intervene if you see things escalate,” Sal Corbin, another DCPT board member, said. “[The police] bring escalation, not de-escalation.”

On Oct. 23, McCarthy, who is white, arrived at the plaza around 5 p.m. to about a dozen people, predominantly Latino men, experiencing homelessness. The plaza is surrounded by buildings with security guards, who often physically remove unhoused city residents from their stairs and benches. That day, two MPD officers were standing in one corner of the plaza, and some of the men experiencing homelessness had been drinking. Any one of these factors could lead to conflict: a security guard violently handling a sleeping resident, a drunken fight, overeager policing.

Corbin, who helped set up the first plaza as a regular deployment, said the team chose that area because its designation as a cultural hub also comes with a fairly constant police presence. The police in turn can harass people experiencing homelessness, who congregate in the plaza on nights and weekends. “When everybody comes together there is celebration, there is festival, but there is also clashing,” Corbin said.

McCarthy spent most of the night walking between groups of residents in the plaza, many of whom he personally knows. A few new people were there, and he handed them pamphlets about resources in the area. One man approached, asking for housing. Another was waiting for his favorite DCPT volunteer, Elena, to come by tomorrow. McCarthy, who does not speak Spanish, was clearly on the outside of this community, but he wasn’t unwelcome. The residents might not have been sure exactly what he was there for, but they didn’t seem to mind that he was present.

This is a pretty standard response to DCPT’s presence, according to Corbin. “Community members are usually welcoming, especially if your presence is consistent,” he said. Deployments at both the plaza and the farmers market are weekly, and the same volunteers often return to the same spots.

DCPT volunteers and board members have been striving to build this sense of community trust for over a decade. The team launched in 2010, when Cortez McDaniel met McCarthy. McDaniel, who was previously incarcerated, wanted to help foment community connections that were so important to his return. After the two attended unarmed protection training, they began to collaborate with local groups to develop an unarmed civilian peacekeeping force, drawn from the communities they would work in.

By the next year, the team had trained 25 community participants, and was helping youth in at-risk neighborhoods get to school through a program called Safe Passage. Over the next few years, DCPT hosted a youth violence prevention conference and developed data collection programs to monitor police aggression during interactions with youth experiencing homelessness in Gallery Place. Since 2012, the team has focused efforts in neighborhoods with historic heavy police presence and high populations of people experiencing homelessness.

The core team meets once a month, in addition to training, committees, and street team deployments. DCPT is registered as a non-profit 501(c)(3) and is funded mainly through donations, including suggested donation rates for training.