Transit Ambassadors

The Los Angeles Times editorial board described the scope this way: “the vast majority of safety concerns cited by riders are about comfort and cleanliness,” specifically “homeless people sleeping on the trains and buses” and “people experiencing mental health crises.” [1]

The second consistent theme addresses the specific transit safety problem that law enforcement cannot solve: the time gap between when a problem occurs on a moving train or underground platform and when police can physically reach it.

BART Deputy Chief of Police Ja’Son Scott stated publicly: “We didn’t have all the tools as police officers to deal with all the issues that you see in BART, and it’s not always necessary for a police officer” to respond to these situations. [1]

Ambassadors carry naloxone and are trained in its administration. David Moreland, an LA Metro ambassador, reported personally administering Narcan to resuscitate three people. He reported resuscitating two additional people through CPR. [2] Across the LA Metro program, ambassadors saved 334 lives through Narcan and CPR as of July 2025, according to Metro’s official board records. [2]

The evidence base for transit safety ambassadors is uneven. Some outcomes — lives saved through naloxone administration and CPR — are directly countable. Others — crimes deterred through visible presence, escalations prevented through de-escalation — are harder to measure. Most documented data is program-reported rather than independently evaluated. And the evidence comes almost entirely from large urban transit systems in cities with established transit infrastructure.

The life-saving outcomes are directly documented and specific. The crime reduction and ridership recovery outcomes are promising but based on limited, self-reported data from programs operating in specific contexts.

Transit safety ambassador programs are operating in transit systems across the United States. In 2025, Illinois passed state legislation creating ambassador programs for the Chicago metropolitan region under a new transit authority — the first time this program model has been written into state law.

A Safer Cities national poll found 75% of voters support “the creation of an unarmed transit security ambassador unit where they live.” That number holds above 70% across party affiliation, race, gender, age, and educational attainment. [1]

LA Metro’s board voted to make the ambassador program permanent after finding that ambassadors had “improved public safety and helped increase ridership on its transit system.” [3] D.C. Metro General Manager Randy Clarke described ambassadors as “another additive layer to make sure we have more visibility for safety, security and more thinking about the customer in everything we do.” [6]

Sacramento Regional Transit’s board voted unanimously to expand its ambassador program with a $1 million budget increase. Board member Roger Dickinson (who subsequently won election to the Sacramento City Council in November 2024) described the expansion as “calibrated to have the right level of response for the particular incident.” [4]

Illinois lawmakers passed the Northern Illinois Transit Authority Act in December 2025, mandating transit ambassador programs for the Chicago metropolitan region with implementation targeted for 2027. [Illinois Governor’s Office, December 16, 2025]

Three documented incidents and several structural patterns define the known risk profile for transit safety ambassador programs.

The activation model determines whether ambassadors are primarily preventive (deployed proactively before incidents occur) or reactive (called to specific incidents after they arise).

Los Angeles Metro, Washington D.C. Metro, and Sacramento Regional Transit fund ambassadors through transit agency operational budgets. [1, 3, 4]

LA Metro’s board voted to make the ambassador program permanent in 2023, finding that ambassadors had “improved public safety and helped increase ridership on its transit system.” [1] The July 2025 in-house Teamsters transition set the authorized workforce at 439 positions with a daily deployment target of 322 ambassadors, adding $11.8 million to the FY2026 budget. [1]

Ambassador programs funded through operating budget line items face annual competition with other transit priorities where they lack the institutional protection that comes with a legal mandate or dedicated funding stream. [10]

LA Metro ambassadors are funded for active deployment. The organizational capacity required to maintain more than 400 trained, equipped, supervised workers — training infrastructure, program leadership, workforce development, ongoing quality assurance — competes with the salary line item for budget priority. [10, UCLA ITS December 2025]

Transit safety ambassador programs have responded to thousands of situations across American cities, medical emergencies resolved in minutes, conflicts de-escalated without arrests, vulnerable riders connected to services, and 334 lives saved in Los Angeles as of July 2025 through Narcan and CPR. The leaders who have launched and expanded these programs communicate the rationale in a consistent pattern: transit systems have a problem that police weren’t built to solve, and ambassadors are the right tool for the job.