Downtown ambassadors, police relations and ‘clean and safe’ security

Abstract

This article investigates uniformed patrols called ‘ambassadors’ that are increasingly providing security in the cores of western cities. An analysis of texts and interviews with key institutional actors in three cities reveals ambassador operations and practices are shaped and made possible by relations with police that entail exchanging knowledge for limited training and tacit tolerance. Ambassadors are imagined remaining distant from police and private security self-designations, operations and appearances to the benefit of police and downtown business-oriented associations, but not so remote as to lose vital benefits of these links. Ambassador practices include acting as police ‘eyes and ears’ and governing ‘nuisance’ using indirect and unauthorised strategies. In these arrangements ambassadors are not so much ‘steered’ by police as they are ‘anchored’, suggesting notions of ‘networked governance’ and government ‘at a distance’ while otherwise valuable approaches are inappropriate here. Making sense of ambassador practices and relations with police is better accomplished through reference to a lower level ‘clean and safe’ rationality that constitutes ambassadors as both its agents and targets.

Keywords:

• private security
• urban
• public police
• governance

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Notes

1. The authors contributed equally to the theoretical and empirical development of this article.

2. In Sheffield, for example, the ambassador programme is managed by a Town Management Centre (Sheffield City Council 2008) rather than a BIA.

3. This perspective overlaps with the body of work called ‘governmentality studies’ (see, for example, O'Malley 2001).

4. In the broader governmentality literature with which the sociology of governance overlaps, relying on neo- or advanced liberalism as an explanation of governing practices is increasingly seen to overlook contingencies and nuances, especially when neo- or advanced liberalism is deployed in a ‘systematizing’ manner in analyses (see O'Malley 2001; cf. Rose et al. 2006). Our attention to lower level rationalities is not inconsistent with the notion of governing ‘from below’ (see Lippert and Stenson 2007).

5. Similar programmes use ‘host’, ‘customer service representative’, or ‘public safety guide’ rather than ‘ambassador’. We use ‘ambassador’ in place of these other terms in interview and document excerpts where necessary for consistency and to maintain anonymity of interviewees. Greater detail about the cities in which the three programmes operate was also omitted for this latter reason.

6. Operational documents included a presentation about one programme's operations, police training materials, and daily activity report sheets. To avoid revealing the location of the ambassador programmes and identity of interviewees, cited documents are referred to as Manuals 1, 2, 3.

7. Most interviews were about one hour in duration. Names of interviewees and cities were anonymized.

8. In this and other ways Canadian programmes are more modest than programmes in US cities such as Baltimore and Philadelphia, one of which employed 50 ambassadors (Interview 18).

9. Ambassadors in Vancouver, Canada are staffed by a private security firm and provided with a direct radio channel to police (Huey et al. 2005), an exceptional arrangement in Canada and one to which we return in the conclusion.

10. Media coverage of ambassador programmes has been unabashedly positive (e.g. Carmichael 2009), undoubtedly due in part to the media strategies described above.