Ambassadors, Not Just Officers: How Transit Agencies Are Rethinking Safety on the Subway

When the MTA geared up for FIFA World Cup 2026 match days this summer, it deployed something alongside extra subway trains and suspended maintenance windows: hundreds of unarmed ambassadors stationed at key stations to help fans navigate, de-escalate friction, and keep things moving. It was one of the largest single-event ambassador deployments in MTA history and a signal of something bigger than crowd management. The World Cup transit picture is documented in our broader scorecard, but the ambassador story is worth its own accounting: it reflects a decade-long rethinking of who keeps transit safe, who gets to feel that safety, and what the data says about the tools agencies have been reaching for.

The Blueprint That Shaped American Transit Policing

To understand where transit safety policy is in 2026, you have to go back to the 1980s New York City subway. Crime was rising, cars were covered in graffiti, and the MTA hired George Kelling — co-author of the landmark 1982 Atlantic Monthly article introducing broken windows theory — to consult on the problem. The theory held that visible disorder, left unaddressed, signals that no one is in control and invites more serious crime. The prescription: aggressive enforcement of minor infractions.

In the 1990s, the theory moved from consulting report to operational doctrine. William Bratton, appointed Chief of the NYC Transit Police by Mayor David Dinkins in 1990, sent hundreds of officers into the subway system. His rationale became famous: "Not all fare beaters were criminals, but a lot of criminals were fare beaters." Agencies across the country took note. The result was a national model in which fare enforcement became the cornerstone of transit safety — a visible assertion of order that was supposed to deter more serious crime.

Thirty years later, TransitCenter, the nation's leading transit policy research organization, assessed that model in its 2021 report Safety For All. The verdict was measured but pointed: the causal link between broken windows enforcement and reduced crime remains "less clear" than its advocates suggest. Its link to racial disparities, however, is "clearer."

Who Gets Stopped: The Fare Enforcement Data

The disparity data accumulated across a half-dozen major systems is difficult to wave away as noise.

In New York, NYPD data covering October 2017 through June 2019 showed Black and Brown people accounting for 90% of fare-related arrests and 70% of summonses in a system where they make up roughly 24% of ridership. In Washington DC, 91% of fare evasion summonses between January 2016 and February 2018 went to Black riders — in a city where Black residents constitute roughly half the population. More than 2,000 people were arrested over those two years for fare evasion. The DC Council responded in November 2018 by decriminalizing fare evasion entirely: it is now a civil infraction with a maximum penalty of $50.

BART Director Janice Li put the institutional dilemma plainly: "We don't have data that shows that fare enforcement increases public safety or has any revenue recovery, but we do have data that shows huge racial disparities on who is impacted." At Sound Transit, where Black riders received 22% of fare enforcement citations while making up just 9% of ridership, the board voted in December 2020 to suspend fare enforcement for all of 2021 and committed to transitioning to a fare ambassador model — one of the most consequential institutional shifts of the reform era.

The MTA estimates $300 million per year in fare evasion losses, though independent analysts have questioned the methodology behind that figure. Zachary Arcidiacono of TWU Local 100, the union representing 40,000 NYC Transit workers, offered a more direct assessment: "You're not going to police your way out of this problem. This is a social ill that needs social solutions."

For a deeper look at equity in transit funding and service decisions, see our post on lessons from Oakland, California.

Safety Is Perception — and Perception Drives Ridership

Here is the practical transit argument for rethinking policing models, separate from the justice argument: perceived safety determines whether people ride.

A 2016 survey of former LA Metro riders found that 29% cited personal safety concerns as the primary reason they had stopped taking transit. Not actual crime victimization — perception. The FTA's 2022 Public Transit and Personal Safety report similarly found that perceived — not actual — crime rates are the dominant factor in rider hesitation nationally. That's a ridership-loss problem with direct revenue consequences, and the riders most likely to be driven away are often the ones who need transit most.

The perception gaps cut in different directions depending on who's riding. The 2018 Rudin Center for Transportation at NYU found that 54% of NYC women were concerned about harassment on transit, compared to 20% of men; 75% had experienced harassment or theft on transit, compared to 47% of men; and 29% avoided night travel altogether due to safety concerns. The National Center for Transgender Equality has documented that 34% of transgender respondents reported harassment or attack on transit in the past year. 10% of LGBTQ riders avoid public transit due to bias incidents. Pew Research has found that Black adults are five times as likely to report being unfairly stopped by police as white adults.

TransitCenter's analytical conclusion ties these threads together: for Black and Brown riders, more uniformed police presence can increase perceived danger rather than reduce it. That means well-intentioned enforcement surges may be simultaneously reassuring some riders and driving others away — a net ridership effect that agencies rarely measure.

What Agencies Are Actually Doing

The response from transit systems has been uneven, experimental, and — in the more developed examples — genuinely instructive.

LA Metro

LA Metro was among the first large systems to state the problem plainly. "We cannot police ourselves out of this," the agency said in its public communications about the homelessness and safety challenges on its system. LA Metro hired 40 full-time social workers alongside 22 targeted police officers for homelessness response, with LA County adding 40 more part-time social workers. Its Ambassador Program, launched around 2021–2022, now runs several hundred unarmed civilian ambassadors system-wide — in high-visibility gear, carrying radios and referral resources rather than badges or weapons, focused on de-escalation, wayfinding, and connecting unhoused riders with services.

BART

BART took a more targeted structural step in 2018, creating a civilian fare inspector position to shift routine proof-of-payment checks away from sworn officers. Teams of inspectors walk train cars asking riders to tap their Clipper cards. BART Police Chief Ed Alvarez defined the lane clearly: "Our police officers are allowed to ask for proof-of-payment, but only when you're detaining someone for another offense." BART has also introduced a Pit Stop Program — public bathrooms staffed by community organization attendants — and added elevator attendants to address quality-of-life concerns that don't require a law enforcement response. Even so, according to a 2019 survey by the Bay Area Equity Atlas, 45.3% of Bay Area students reported feeling unsafe on BART, a reminder that structural reforms take time to translate into perceived safety. For more on BART's current financial and operational situation, see our post on the FY27 balanced budget.

SEPTA's Hub of Hope

SEPTA's Hub of Hope in Philadelphia represents a different model: instead of deploying ambassadors to move people along, SEPTA partnered with nonprofit Project HOME and the City of Philadelphia to create a dedicated services center in the Center City sub-concourse — offering bathrooms, showers, food, health services, and case management. In its first six months, the Hub served 2,500+ individuals through 41,000+ visits, conducted 1,200+ case management visits, and achieved 1,240+ placements into shelters, treatment programs, or safe havens. On any given day, 350 to 400 people used its services. The Hub doesn't move people away from the system — it gives them somewhere better to go.

Sound Transit and King County Metro

Sound Transit and King County Metro in Seattle have gone furthest on the structural transition. After Sound Transit's 2020 board vote to suspend fare enforcement, it formalized a shift to fare ambassadors — a change in institutional architecture, not just a program add-on. King County Metro has since 2019 allowed riders to remedy fare evasion citations through two hours of community service or by loading $25 onto an ORCA card, decoupling minor violations from the court system.

TriMet

TriMet in Portland ran a Blue Ribbon Panel — a month-long public review of policing practices — before producing community investment recommendations and publishing the results transparently. It's a model worth noting for agencies that want process legitimacy, not just program announcements.

A Law That Changes the Equation: The Illinois NITA Act

The clearest signal that ambassador programs have moved from pilot initiative to policy mainstream came on June 1, 2026, when the Northern Illinois Transit Authority (NITA) Act took effect. The legislation's $132.2 million operating budget amendment explicitly funds three safety tiers in a single statutory framework: sworn police officers, crisis intervention and mental health staff, and transit ambassadors — roughly $60 million combined across all three tiers.

The broader context matters. NITA's safety provisions were politically necessary to secure the full $1.5 billion per year funding package. Without explicit commitments to safety, suburban legislators would not have voted yes — making this perhaps the first time in US law that the three-tier model wasn't just an agency choice but a legislative requirement for transit funding to flow. You can read more about Illinois's path to solving its transit fiscal cliff in our dedicated post.

Oboi Reed of Equiticity, a Chicago mobility justice advocacy organization, offered a clear-eyed assessment of what comes next (June 3, 2026): "NITA must be more than a new governance structure. It must become a public agency with an operational commitment to racial equity, mobility justice, and environmental justice baked into both policy and practice."

The Complications

None of this is straightforward. Two threads complicate the ambassador model's momentum.

First, homelessness. TransitCenter has been direct in framing this: "The primary cause of homelessness is the shortage of safe, affordable, and stable housing, and related support services for mental illness, throughout so many cities in the United States." Transit agencies can't build housing. They need city and county partners willing to expand shelter capacity, mental health services, and substance use treatment. Many shelters are feared for violence or lack capacity, making transit a rational refuge for people with nowhere else to go. New York State Sen. Liz Krueger has put it bluntly: "The vast majority of homeless people anywhere are more likely to be victims of crime rather than the people committing the crime." Agencies that treat the subway as both the cause and cure of homelessness will keep falling short. What agencies can do — coordinate with city diversion programs, fund outreach workers, and co-locate services as SEPTA has shown — requires sustained interagency partnership, not unilateral transit authority action.

Second, political backlash. California's Proposition 36, passed by voters in November 2024, raised criminal penalties for repeat drug and theft offenses — reversing significant portions of the 2014 Proposition 47 reforms. BART and LA Metro are now navigating how Prop 36 shifts the balance between social services referral and criminal justice involvement. Advocates are watching closely to see whether the new law pushes agencies back toward the punitive enforcement model that the data, repeatedly, has failed to vindicate.

Ambassador programs are not a magic fix. No single intervention resets a system shaped by decades of housing disinvestment, underserved mental health needs, and the accumulated consequences of enforcement-first thinking. The debates over fare-free access and safety are also deeply intertwined — how agencies price and police the fare affects who feels welcome at all, a tension explored in our piece on the case for zero fares.

But the evidence accumulating across New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Seattle, and now Illinois points toward a workable framework: one where police handle what police are trained for, crisis workers handle what crisis workers are trained for, and civilian ambassadors handle the vast middle ground of wayfinding, de-escalation, and connection to services. It's not a radical proposition. It's a more honest accounting of what it actually takes to make a transit system safe for everyone who rides it.