Marietta GA April 7 2018 With about six months of service under their belts, Marietta’s Public Safety Ambassadors appear popular with residents.

The ambassadors drive around town in silver vehicles with amber lights on top. They wear uniforms with bright reflective yellow torsos. Their job is to assist Marietta Police in a wide variety of duties, such as filing reports, directing traffic and investigating crime scenes. The idea is for them to handle less-dangerous, day-to-day duties so officers can focus more on fighting crime. Ambassadors do not carry weapons and cannot make arrests.

An Open Records Request with the city found there have been no complaints filed against any of the ambassadors since they went on duty in October.

Mayor Steve Tumlin said he has only heard positive comments from citizens and considers the ambassadors a positive for the city.

“Everywhere I go, I see them, whether it’s a school event, out taking reports,” he said. “I think it’s been very good … From what I’ve seen, it’s been a major success. I think the chief and the majors had a good plan.”

Chief Dan Flynn said the plan was to bring the ambassadors on to serve as eyes and ears for the police, to be manpower multipliers for the force and to be go-betweens for officers and civilians.

“At the time we implemented the PSA program, Marietta was enjoying a long-term decline in crime rates, but at the same time a long-term increase in total calls for police service,” Flynn said. “Thus as the community has evolved in trusting the MPD more to the point where they feel comfortable calling for a wide variety of reasons, many of which are non-criminal in nature, our overall workload has been increasing and the PSAs are designed to help alleviate it before our response times began to suffer.”

Flynn said despite some initial concerns, the ambassadors have done better than expected.

“We had some initial concerns that the public may not accept the PSAs and instead only want to deal with regular officers; the officers may not accept that the PSAs were designed to help relieve officers’ workload, or that PSAs would not know exactly when to disengage from a potentially dangerous situation,” he said. “None of those concerns came to fruition and instead our PSAs have become a vital part of our public safety workforce.”

Residents seemed to agree.

The MDJ posted on social media, asking Mariettans to share their interactions with the ambassadors. Of about a dozen responses, most were positive.

One woman said the ambassadors helped find her lost child during Taste of Marietta.

Business manager Andrew Rutherford said he has seen the ambassadors at convenience stores checking security camera footage.

mdjonline.com

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