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The director of Cambridge’s Community Safety Department is resigning after more than two years in the role — the latest turn for a department that has found itself embroiled in behind-the-scenes turmoil with the city’s police department.

Elizabeth M. Speakman, who was appointed as the department’s inaugural director in February 2023, confirmed in an interview with The Crimson that she is leaving her position this Friday. Speakman will transition to serve as the interim executive director of the nonprofit Boston Area Rape Crisis Center.

Speakman’s departure, which she said had been planned for several weeks, comes on the heels of flaring tensions between her fledgling department and the Cambridge Police Department over dual programs within the city that send civilian responders to 911 calls instead of just police.

CSD’s Community Assistance and Response Engagement team — which sends unarmed mental health clinicians and social workers to certain 911 calls — formally rolled out in July.

But the CARE team quickly ran into overlap with a similar effort launched by the police department’s co-response team, which pairs an unarmed mental health clinician and an armed police officer and can attach to any 911 call.

A Crimson investigation found that overlap between the two teams’ responsibilities and a lack of coordination between their launches led to persistent friction between the departments.

According to emails obtained through a public records request, city leadership had been made aware about worries over the overlap between the CARE and co-response teams for months.

At a Monday hearing in front of the Cambridge City Council, Speakman acknowledged the tense relationship between CPD and CSD. The co-response team sometimes responded to the same calls as the CARE team, she said, and 911 dispatchers were often reluctant to assign calls to the CARE team.

Speakman said that dispatchers were often “habitually sending” CPD to calls that fall under the CARE team’s purview.

“And so creating a new habit was something that we wanted to work on,” Speakman said.

The CARE team has been dispatched to an average of just 45 percent of eligible calls for much of the time since its launch, Speakman told councilors.

In an interview, Speakman cited this friction as both an “inevitable” part of CSD’s mission and a factor in her departure.

“Our mission is meant to create tension and create a sense of disruption, and so if we’re doing it right, we’re really disrupting the status quo,” she said. “We’re going to cause tension. We’re going to create tension. We’re going to find ourselves in the midst of a lot of tension.”

But “there’s a point at which it’s not sustainable,” Speakman added.

Speakman, who entered City Hall in 2014 as a coordinator for Cambridge’s domestic violence prevention effort, played a crucial role in CSD’s establishment and growth.

The CARE team responded to more than 200 calls within the first six months of its launch, nearly all of which were resolved without the police being called, according to a department report published last week.

“I am just leaving with a sense of pride that the disruption we’ve caused has resulted in the existence of a team that is going out every day and changing people’s lives for the better,” Speakman said.

Speakman’s departure was first announced in an April 17 email to city staff by City Manager Yi-An Huang ’05.

“She has done an incredible job setting vision, building a team, and establishing partnerships,” Huang wrote. “We are a stronger public safety team because of her work.”

—Staff writer Matan H. Josephy can be reached at matan.josephy@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @matanjosephy.

—Staff writer Laurel M. Shugart can be reached at laurel.shugart@thecrimson.com. Follow them on X @laurelmshugart.