Safety Ambassadors

It’s 10:45 on a Tuesday morning in downtown Indianapolis. Scott Person, wearing a red jacket emblazoned with the words “Safety Ambassador,” has already given directions to a tourist, helped a food delivery worker find a blocked entrance, and noticed a man sitting against a building who hasn’t eaten in four days. Person, who carries no weapon and has no power to arrest anyone, takes the man to get a meal. Later that afternoon, a stranger taps him on the shoulder. “Just wanted to say thank you for what you do,” the man says. “It makes a difference.”¹

Cities that have publicly documented why they launched ambassador programs describe a consistent set of conditions.

Five program types resemble or are compared to safety ambassadors: traditional policing, private security, social workers and outreach teams, volunteer neighborhood watch programs, and CCTV surveillance.

Each section below documents what ambassadors do in specific situations, using the programs that have reported on it.

Four categories of evidence appear across documented programs, at different levels of independence and rigor.

Documented ambassador programs operate in San Francisco, Duluth (Georgia), West Hollywood, Indianapolis, Denver, Arlington (Texas), Minneapolis, Oakland, Gainesville, Austin, St. Louis, Seattle, Honolulu, and Cleveland, as well as university campuses at UGA, Cornell, VCU, and UW.

A Safer Cities national survey of 2,400 registered voters found that 77% describe safety ambassador programs as “effective” at making communities safer, with only 15% saying they are not effective, a 62-point net positive.¹ A separate Safer Cities poll of 2,503 voters produced near-identical results: 78% effective, 17% not effective.²

Safety ambassador programs involve more distinct constituencies than most public safety initiatives because their scope touches commercial interests, law enforcement, vulnerable populations, property owners, and residents simultaneously. Understanding who holds a stake — and what they stand to gain or lose — shapes where political support and resistance will concentrate.

Three documented program failures and their identified causes. The evidence gaps in what programs have and have not measured.

The activation question for ambassador programs is fundamentally different from the activation question for mobile crisis teams or other emergency-response models. Mobile crisis teams are dispatched through 911 when a call comes in. Safety ambassadors, by design, do not wait for calls; they are deployed proactively into assigned areas and are already present when situations arise.

Safety ambassador programs use a wider variety of funding mechanisms than most alternative public safety programs. They are not Medicaid-billable (ambassadors do not provide clinical services), not primarily funded by federal public safety grants (few existing programs fit the grant categories designed for law enforcement or clinical programs), and not typically covered by the dedicated tax streams that fund police and fire departments. What they have is a set of institutional relationships (with commercial property owners, city governments, transit agencies, universities, and private businesses), each of which can support a program but each of which carries structural limitations on what it covers and how durable it is.

Safer Cities polling across three surveys — 1,249 likely voters (conducted with Data for Progress), 2,400 registered voters, and 2,503 registered voters — has identified three core arguments for safety ambassador programs, in order of tested effectiveness.