Three Things To Read This Week

1. Police, Business Leaders Praise New Unarmed Community Safety Ambassador Programs. 

• New Safety Ambassador program launches in St. Louis. Sixteen new “Public Safety Ambassadors” will provide St. Louis residents with “safe walks, medical first response, [and] outreach to the unhoused,” John Gerding reports for Spectrum News. These ambassadors will “deploy by foot, bicycle, and marked vehicle” in “uniforms that clearly indicate their role in public safety efforts.” 

• Robert Tracy, the police chief in St. Louis, Missouri, welcomes the addition of public safety ambassadors because they “make people feel safer” and “help build on a positive experience for those who live, work and play downtown.” Meanwhile, Greater Saint Louis, the voice of the city’s business community, which is bankrolling the launch of the safety ambassadors program, has explained that the “mere presence [of safety ambassadors] deters crime” downtown and “adds to the sense of security for everyone.”

• The same enthusiasm for safety ambassadors as a crime reduction strategy is playing out in Duluth, Georgia. As Matt Johnson reports for WSB-TV, Atlanta’s local ABC affiliate, police leaders in Duluth consider their unarmed, civilian “public safety ambassadors” program to be “a game changer.”  Right now, these ambassadors assist mostly with “stalled or abandoned vehicles,” “private property accidents,” “traffic control, filing reports and community engagement.” However, the city plans to expand their program to answer a broader set of calls for service that do not require a police response because, as WSB-TV put the point, when “civilians take non-emergency calls, [it] frees police officers to focus on fighting crime.” 

• Zooming Out: Why would the mere presence of safety ambassadors deter crime? The concept that these leaders are expressing is sometimes called the sentinel effect, meaning that the physical presence of a person in a clearly identified public safety role sends the signal that a neighborhood, business district, park, or shopping area is being watched, which, in turn, “makes crime less attractive.” Deterrence experts believe that when it comes to crime prevention, the sentinel effect—making crime less attractive—is more important than even the power of law enforcement to apprehend a person who has committed an offense. 

2. Voters Agree That Safety Ambassadors Make Communities Safer, And They Support Hiring More Ambassadors Even Over Hiring Additional Police Officers.

Safer Cities recently conducted a national survey of 2,400 registered voters to gauge public support for Safety Ambassadors as a public safety strategy. We defined safety ambassadors as “a highly visible uniformed presence at the street level deployed along major streets, downtown areas, or residential neighborhoods” and explained that safety ambassadors can, for example, “help people get home safely by providing a walking escort or a jumpstart” or “help calm minor disagreements before they require police assistance.” 

Then, we asked: How effective do you think safety ambassadors are as a method of making your community safer?”

Here are the results:

• 77% Of Voters Say Safety Ambassadors Are “Effective” At “Making Your Community Safer.”

  • By a 62 point margin—77% to 15%—voters view safety ambassador teams as “effective” as opposed to “not effective.” 

  • These results also reflect broad bipartisan support, including 83% of Democrats and 74% of Republicans who say safety ambassador teams are effective.

• The Most Effective Arguments In Favor Of Safety Ambassador Teams. We provided participants with “a few statements about the effectiveness of safety ambassadors” and then asked them to tell us “how convincing, if at all” each of those reasons are “for implementing safety ambassadors as a public safety policy.” Here are the three most persuasive arguments, which closely reflect the statements that business and police leaders in St. Louis and Duluth articulated above:

  • +64 Net Effective (82% to 18%): “The jobs that safety ambassadors do are important for communities. Having trained safety ambassadors help people get home safely at night, de-escalate minor disagreements, or connect people in crisis to shelter and services lets police officers focus on more serious public safety threats like solving robbery, rape and murder cases.”

  • +60 Net Effective (80% to 20%): “Small businesses dealing with the threat of shoplifting need help, but stationing armed officers in front of their stores creates an unwelcoming and intimidating environment for some customers. By contrast, uniformed safety ambassadors provide the same kind of highly visible deterrent needed to prevent theft without inadvertently creating a sense that the store is a dangerous place.”

  • +54 Net Effective (77% to 23%): “It is far more expensive for a city to employ an armed police officer to serve as the needed “eyes on the street” deterring offenses like shoplifting. Trained safety ambassadors consistently and competently perform the same role for less cost which allows the city to have more safety ambassadors—and therefore more eyes on the street—for the same budget.”

• When Forced To Choose, Voters Prefer To Allocate New Public Safety Dollars To Safety Ambassadors Than To Hiring More Police Officers. In addition to exposing participants to a variety of arguments in favor of safety ambassadors, we also exposed participants to an equal number of arguments in opposition to spending more money on these programs.
  
  After participants heard arguments for and against safety ambassadors, we asked: 

“Knowing what you know now about safety ambassadors, if your city or community was looking to invest additional funding to make your city safer, would you prefer that they… spend the additional funds on safety ambassadors to address community safety [or] spend the additional funds on hiring more police officers to address community safety.” 

Here are the results:

• 52% = “Spend the additional funds on safety ambassadors to address community safety.”

• 37% = “Spend the additional funds on hiring more police officers to address community safety.”

3. Former U.S. Marine And Current Computer Science Student On How He Keeps His Campus Secure As Part Of The University Of Georgia’s New Safety Ambassador Program.

For The Red and Black, Zach Leggio reports that the University of Georgia is “rolling out a new safety ambassador program” with the goal being “not to catch students breaking laws or doing things they shouldn’t,” but to make sure the UGA student body is safe.”

Ambassadors provide a safe escort to students returning “to their dorms, cars, or late night library study sessions.” They also provide medical first aid; and are “CPR certified” and “carry naloxone to help a person overdosing.” Finally, to “ensure safety and accountability,” ambassadors wear “body cameras to record any interactions with students.”

Here’s a video of Cruz Albarran, who returned to Athens to study computer science after serving four years in the U.S. Marine Corps, explaining how the safety ambassador program works:

Related: For the Cornell Chronicle, Blaine Friedlander reports on the “new team of unarmed security professionals” on campus “intended to reduce law enforcement’s intervention in noncriminal and nonviolent incidents.” Every public safety ambassador at Cornell is required to be a “New York state-certified security guard” and receive “additional training in areas including communication, de-escalation and first aid.” The team functions similarly to the UGA safety ambassadors, and can also be utilized to “conduct checks of essential university facilities and equipment” and provide additional support at “high-profile events, from sporting events to student events to invited speakers.”