Inside Highland Park's Unusual Public Safety Model: One Officer, Three Roles

In Highland Park, the person responding to a police call may also be trained to fight a fire or provide advanced emergency medical care. It's one of the less visible ways this small town operates differently from the city surrounding it.

Highland Park is often explained through the things you can see: Turtle Creek and Lakeside Park, Highland Park Village, carefully maintained streets and public spaces, and houses representing more than a century of Dallas architecture.

Some of the things that make the town distinctive, however, aren't nearly as obvious.

The Highland Park Department of Public Safety is one of them.

Rather than maintaining completely separate police, fire, and emergency medical departments in the conventional municipal model, Highland Park combines all three disciplines within one public safety organization. Its Public Safety Officers are cross-trained as police officers, firefighters, and paramedics, rotating among those responsibilities during their shifts.

It's an unusual model and a useful window into how this independent town functions.

One Officer, Three Disciplines

The concept sounds simple until you consider what it requires of an individual officer.

A Highland Park Public Safety Officer isn't merely familiar with three emergency-service functions. Officers are trained and certified across law enforcement, firefighting, and emergency medicine, and their assignments rotate among those roles.

An officer might spend part of a shift working in a police capacity and another portion assigned to an ambulance. Patrol vehicles carry law-enforcement equipment along with firefighting and first-aid equipment. Officers on patrol carry their bunker gear with them so they can transition into a fire or EMS role when needed.

That level of cross-training isn't how most municipal emergency services are organized. Many cities may place police, fire, and EMS beneath a shared public-safety administration while the personnel themselves remain specialists. Highland Park uses the less common model in which its Public Safety Officers can respond in multiple capacities.

For a town covering only a few square miles, that creates an unusual degree of flexibility.

The Model Reflects the Town

To understand why Highland Park operates this way, it helps to understand Highland Park itself.

The Town was incorporated in 1913 with roughly 500 residents. Soon afterward, its Town Council authorized the purchase of a fire engine and the construction of an engine house. When Dallas later attempted to annex Highland Park, residents fought to preserve the Town's independence.

More than a century later, that independence is still visible. Highland Park has its own municipal government, library, parks department, public works operations, and public safety organization, even as Dallas surrounds it on every side.

HPDPS is part of that larger story. It's a local system built for a town that chose to remain a town.

A Very Local Scale

Highland Park is divided into just two police patrol districts, further organized into geographic beats. Its emergency communications operation handles police, fire, and EMS calls for the Town around the clock.

The department also describes community policing as foundational to its approach, with interaction between officers and residents forming part of its public-safety strategy.

Its small scale doesn't mean Highland Park operates alone when emergencies occur. HPDPS works with the University Park Fire Department and Dallas Fire-Rescue through automatic-assistance and mutual-aid arrangements when incidents require additional personnel or equipment.

The town is independent, but its emergency services are still part of a much larger city around it.

Town Hall Tells Part of the Story

The history of Highland Park's civic complex reaches almost as far back as the town itself.

Its first fire facilities followed soon after incorporation. In 1924, Highland Park built the Spanish Colonial Revival Town Hall that remains one of its most recognizable civic buildings today.

Designed by Dallas architects Otto Lang and Frank Witchell, the building originally housed municipal offices and a public auditorium. A new fire station was constructed alongside it that same year, followed by a library and art gallery in 1930.

The complex has evolved considerably since then, including the construction of a new public-safety facility in the early 2000s and substantial Town Hall renovations completed in 2014.

Yet the location still says something about the town. Government, public safety, the library, and other pieces of civic life aren't headquartered somewhere across a sprawling municipality. They're right here, embedded in the community they serve.

That may be the more interesting story behind Highland Park's unusual public safety model.

The cross-training is distinctive. But so is the fact that a town surrounded by Dallas has spent more than a century building and maintaining civic systems of its own.