If you read closely, you’ll notice Ground Truth NC describes its work as safety. Not security. Community safety planning, event safety, electoral safety, hospital workplace safety. Never community security, event security, electoral security.
The word choice is not stylistic. It is operational, it is legal, and it is values-driven — in that order.
The legal layer
North Carolina General Statutes Chapter 74C regulates the private security industry. To advertise security services in NC — guard services, alarm monitoring, private investigation, and a list of related activities — a person or company must hold a license from the NC Private Protective Services Board. Operating without that license, when the law says you need one, is a problem.
Ground Truth NC does not hold a §74C license and does not provide §74C-regulated services. We provide consulting, training, and advisory work. The careful and consistent use of the word safety rather than security across all of our materials is one of several practices that keeps the work clearly on the consulting-and-training side of that line.
This is not legal advice. Practitioners considering similar work should consult North Carolina counsel about their own positioning. The point here is just to be transparent about why the language is what it is.
The operational layer
The word security in contemporary American usage carries a specific operational implication: that someone is going to be protected by someone else, usually someone with a uniform and a tool of force. The verb is provided. Security is something you hire, deploy, or call. It is a service done to a situation by an outside actor with specialized equipment.
The word safety, by contrast, names a state. A community is safe or it isn’t. A workplace is safe or it isn’t. An event is safe or it isn’t. The state of being safe can be created by many things — organizational practice, training, infrastructure, relationships, planning, the right people in the right places — most of which are not bought from a vendor.
The choice of word matters because it shapes what kind of work the consultant is being asked to do. A client that wants security often wants someone to come solve a problem on their behalf. A client that wants safety is usually looking for help building the practice that will keep their people safe over time. The first is a transaction. The second is a partnership.
The values layer
Most of the communities Ground Truth NC works with have a complicated relationship with the security apparatus — private security firms, contracted protection details, plainclothes details, off-duty law enforcement working private gigs. Often that relationship has been adversarial in living memory. Sometimes it is adversarial right now.
Showing up to a community that has been over-policed and under-protected, and offering them security, is the wrong opening move. The word does not land where you want it to land. It calls to mind the actor that was the threat, not the actor that solves the threat.
The framing that does land: helping a community build the practice and infrastructure that lets them keep their own people safe. That framing names the community as the agent of its own protection. The consultant is a resource, not a savior. The community keeps the keys to its own safety architecture after the engagement ends.
This framing has a doctrinal lineage. The community safety field is rooted in the work of Vision Change Win, Critical Resistance, the Audre Lorde Project, and the broader movement to develop responses to harm that do not require carceral infrastructure. The choice of safety over security in that lineage is intentional and has been intentional for decades. Ground Truth NC inherits that vocabulary and the values that produced it.
What this looks like in practice
It looks like a Pride event with a trained safety team that has practiced de-escalation, mapped its perimeter, briefed its volunteers, and built a relationship with local law enforcement that defines who responds to what — rather than a Pride event with hired security guards.
It looks like a community organization with a documented safety plan, a designated safety lead, and a practiced rhythm of risk assessment — rather than a community organization that has hired a consultant to keep them secure.
It looks like a hospital with a workplace violence prevention program designed around staff capacity, de-escalation training, environmental controls, and post-incident support — rather than a hospital that has solved its workplace violence problem by adding more security personnel.
The work is harder. It takes longer. It requires the community to build muscle that hiring a vendor would not require. It produces durable capacity that survives the consultant’s departure. That is the trade.
So: safety, not security. The distinction is small in language and large in practice.