Denton considering uniformed safety and hospitality team for Square: Here’s how it works in other cities

In cities around the country, the downtown ambassadors have been called “guardian angels" and “homeless patrol.”

As part of a team of hospitality and safety personnel, they appear in places such as Salt Lake City, Santa Monica, California, and St. Louis. In Austin, they also use power washers to clean the streets, pick up trash and offer directions to tourists unfamiliar with the downtown area.

“Our ambassadors are the smiling faces that people see downtown,” said Brandon Fahy, director of downtown experience with the Downtown Austin Alliance. “... Ambassadors build relationships with people they see frequently, from the building manager and building security to the people on the streets. ... That is the key to this program: relationships.”

During the March 7 City Council meeting, Denton city staff described them as kind of like school resource officers helping visitors, offering homeless outreach and providing a neighborhood watch for the downtown area. 

Only these neighbors are visible in their colored polo shirts and on their motorized scooters, zooming down the sidewalks in front of businesses downtown. They've been called a "crime deterrent," like security guards but only friendlier and without law enforcement powers.

In Denton, they could also help address a 26% increase in the top 10 law enforcement calls for service in the downtown area between 2021 and 2022, according to the March 7 city staff presentation to council members.

“[The Downtown Ambassadors Program] provides additional eyes and ears downtown to support public safety,” Courtney Douangdara, deputy director of Denton community services, told council members. “They are becoming increasingly common. They can handle general nuisance issues and not have to rely on law enforcement.”

The proposed downtown ambassador pilot program in Denton would send people in recognizable uniforms (color to be determined later) to the downtown area to address issues in public spaces — not private ones. They wouldn't act as enforcement, but rather would provide directions, hospitality services, referrals to social services and safety escorts.

The pilot program would be funded by the city's general fund for up to three years with the option of renewal. City staff presented two options for a “safety & hospitality team” to council members:

• Partial implementation consists of five ambassadors and one supervisor with shifts from 7 a.m. to midnight Thursday through Sunday.
• Full implementation offers nine ambassadors and one supervisor with shifts from 7 a.m. to midnight seven days a week.

The City Council agreed unanimously to give direction for staff to move forward with soliciting pricing for both options from third-party vendors.

“Lastly, from a safety standpoint, we have employees leaving [late at night] and if it’s dark, they add another layer of just visibility to making back to their cars,” Mayor Gerard Hudspeth told council members. “... We have a lot of vacancies downtown, and I think that this will help resolve some of that.”

The ambassadors would also help resolve the cleanup services needed downtown that the city does not currently have adequate staffing to address, City Manager Sara Hensley told council members.

Both implementations offer an option to include a clean team

“That’s why we put this [cleaning option] in here,” Hensley said. “I’ve made a point to go down to the Square at different times of the day and in the evening and what we’re finding is there is an ongoing need-to-clean effort there. Parks [and Recreation] currently doesn’t have that funding."

Douangdara said that after the pilot program ends, funding would need to be secured to continue the program. Many cities, such as Austin and Fort Worth, have designated public improvement districts to fund it by taxing business owners.

(Public improvement districts are defined as geographical areas established to provide specific types of improvements or maintenance, which are financed by assessments against the property owners within the area.)

Hensley mentioned two companies that were recognized that operate PIDs nationally, but didn’t mention their names. Stuart Birdseye, a city spokesperson, confirmed that they are Block by Block, which operates in PIDs in Austin, Fort Worth and 98 other districts around the country, and Streetplus, which contracts with business improvement districts in places such as Chicago, New York and New Haven, Connecticut.

Brandon Fahy, director of Austin's downtown experience, said that Austin once provided an in-house ambassador service but, seven years ago, began contracting with Block by Block. 

Fahy offered similar reasons to Denton city staff's at the March 7 council meeting, such as the proprietary system that tracks ambassador work to better utilize their services.

“The vendor specializes in public improvement,” Fahy said. “This is their wheelhouse and the arena that they do business in.”

How an ambassador program works in practice

Austin has 60 ambassadors in three tiers of service who, Fahy said, cover 1.2 square miles of downtown Austin: cleaners who walk 12 miles a day, pushing a cart and emptying out trash cans and dealing with nuisance messes; the safety ambassadors, who walk in pairs throughout the PID and provide information about resources to the unhoused community; and hospitality ambassadors, who provide customer service.

According to the 2022 annual report by the Downtown Austin Alliance, ambassadors made 57,971 hospitality contacts, offered 938 safety escorts and removed 26,486 graffiti and posters. The 2022 annual report showed they spent more than $5.56 million on safety and hospitality.

Fahy said that Austin is the fifth-largest safe city in the U.S., and while pockets of downtown have more crime than others, the ambassadors’ red polo shirt uniform “deters negative behavior.”

On March 7, Mayor Pro Tem Brian Beck questioned if a downtown ambassador program was the right fit for Denton, given that the programs are often found in larger cities like Austin and Fort Worth, and wondered if it would be better served in-house instead of hiring another outside vendor to provide services.

Assistant City Manager Frank Dixon said an in-house program would be too costly and agreed with Hensley that it would be more cost effective to contract with a third-party vendor that specializes in the ambassador programs.

Denton’s program would be similar to the one in Fort Worth, which, Dixon said, covers the Sundance Square area.

“It’s not really a big urban area,” Dixon said. “It’s more like a tourism district down there. I think that it relates to Denton pretty well. If you look at the things that are on the Square now, and given our expectations when we’re scoping out that, what our expectations are and how they treat our citizens, I think it speaks for itself and is a lot easier to do.”

Tom Wright, the operations manager of the downtown Fort Worth ambassadors, said the ambassadors — 13 in number — cover 335 square blocks in the downtown area. They also offer a homeless outreach coordinator, but do not provide cleaning services since the city’s Public Works Department takes care of that.

Started in 2017, the program is financed by the PID through 2027. The cost is $685,000 per year until the 2025-26 budget, when it increases to $725,000 until the end of the 2026-27 budget, according to the city’s five-year service plan.

The ambassadors, who operate from 7 a.m. to midnight seven days a week, all receive training, Wright said, in how to talk with people and de-escalate situations, “to be professional and not talk down to people but actually listen.”

“We are not security,” Wright said. “We are hospitality, and we are to help people and not be here to be any sort of enforcement.”

Similar to the red polo shirts in Austin, Fort Worth ambassadors’ yellow polo shirts and vehicles “discourage crime, especially on the sidewalk and in parking lots, where most of the crime for convenience occurs,” Matt Beard, director of Downtown Fort Worth Inc., a public improvement district, wrote in a Tuesday afternoon email. “It is important to note that our ambassadors serve as a hospitality service rather than a security force.

"Our ability to discourage, observe and report are how we impact crime.”

Beard said that they’ve been tracking aggressive panhandling and actively discouraging it and noticed a 32% decrease from 2021 to 2022. He highlighted that other public and private security operations have also been working together downtown to curb it.

This “eyes and ears” to help deter crime was discussed at Denton's March 7 council meeting.

In a Tuesday afternoon email to the Denton Record-Chronicle, Amy Cunningham, a spokesperson for the Denton Police Department, said that the 26% increase in the top 10 law calls for service by Denton police breaks down as follow:

• 107% increase for close patrols from 29 in 2021 to 60 in 2022
• 43% increase for burglar alarms from 160 in 2021 to 228 in 2022
• 22% increase in criminal trespass from 225 in 2021 to 274 in 2022

But Cunningham said that all dispatched and officer-initiated calls for service were actually 50 fewer calls (a 2.2% decrease) around the Square in 2022 than 2021.

“Some of the call type increases can be attributed to the natural rise in downtown activity as COVID restrictions eased,” Cunningham said. “Bars and restaurants were operating at limited capacities while COVID restrictions were in place until March 10, 2021, so fewer people overall were in the downtown area.”

Cunningham offered some potential factors that may have contributed to the increase in the top 10 calls for service:

• Calls for close patrols likely increased as businesses requested patrols from the department. As mentioned in the presentation, officers and other city staff regularly hear from downtown businesses on a variety of concerns.
• The increase in burglar alarm calls could be due to more businesses installing alarms or more attempted break-ins.
• The increase in criminal trespass calls was consistent with what the department is seeing citywide. Criminal trespass offenses increased citywide by 23% (69 offenses) in 2022 compared to 2021.

Denton police recently assigned an additional officer whose duty is to “solely respond to calls downtown,” Cunningham said, and to serve as a downtown liaison who, similar to the ambassadors, “engages with residents, visitors and businesses daily.”

In the future, Denton police also plan to increase police visibility downtown as staffing and emergency call loads allow, Cunningham said, as well as collaborate with city departments, such as the Downtown Ambassadors Program with community services, to address concerns in the area.

As for Denton's Downtown Ambassador Program, city staff will present the cost breakdown by vendors at a future council work session.

“It’s better to start out with a pilot program, with a company that has tried and true done this work, has a reputation of training and see if it works,” Hensley told council members. “It’s not that we can’t come back and hire in five years or even in three years, but it’s better to start out with someone who has done this work, and who’s tried and true and go from there.”