Introduction

Roving teams of brightly uniformed ‘ambassadors’ increasingly patrol the city centre frontiers of western cities as diverse and far-flung as San Diego (US), Nottingham (UK) and Winnipeg (Canada). According to one Canadian programme, ambassadors’ prime directive is to ‘welcome everyone’ to the city centre. Upon closer study, however, ambassadors are engaged in both more and less than this mantra suggests.

Ambassadors do more than this, by seeking to secure the frontier of urban consumption zones through an array of direct, oblique and occasionally unofficial strategies. Prohibited from acting or self-representing as public police or private security, occasionally ambassadors flirt with such appearances or feign direct communication with these authorities to their own advantage. These efforts are intended to encourage panhandlers/beggars, ‘loitering’ youths, homeless people and other street ‘nuisances’ to cease their conduct or to move on.

Thus, ambassadors also do less than ‘welcome everyone’ to the city core. Not unlike diplomats of dominant nations engaging less powerful ones, downtown ambassadors are, ultimately, backed up by coercive force, should their polite cajoling and visibility fail to deter undesirable conduct or spark a hostile reaction.

While typically initiated, financed and managed by downtown business improvement districts (BIDs) (sometimes called business improvement areas or associations) or similar entrepreneurial organisations devoted to urban revitalisation, ambassadors also require tacit cooperation from public police, who (still) possess coercive capacities and whose traditional territory they now patrol. How ambassadors relate to public police is therefore paramount to the ‘clean and safe’ security that ambassadors seek to provide and embody on city centre frontiers. This chapter focuses on these aspects.

Ambassador patrols

Ambassador programmes have appeared across North America in recent years, and their numbers continue to expand. The ambassador concept was developed in the US and transferred to Winnipeg and Vancouver, and later to the UK and beyond. There are currently at least 14 Canadian programmes operating in downtown BIDs, including in Winnipeg, Vancouver, Kamloops, Sudbury, Moncton and Thunder Bay. In the US, ambassadors have been operating for several years longer in even more cities (at least 31), including Cleveland, Baltimore, Philadelphia, San Diego, Boston, San Antonio, Seattle, Atlanta, Austin, Portland, Minneapolis, Santa Monica, Dayton, Nashville, Denver, Charlottesville, Milwaukee, Phoenix, Honolulu, Jacksonville, Cincinnati, New Haven and Berkeley.