Ambassadors on City Centre Frontiers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.147 | 0.017 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".