Uptown Adds Safety Ambassadors to Help Revive the District

The unarmed ambassadors, who are not police, began working Uptown on Nov. 8 after roughly a year of operating along Lake Street and Franklin Avenue under a city pilot, the city said in an April update. Before the Uptown expansion the program ran seven ambassadors on Lake Street and five on Franklin Avenue, according to the city's Community Safety Ambassadors page.

The ambassadors provide safety escorts, wellness checks, first aid and Narcan, help people file police reports, and connect residents with services, and a dedicated dispatcher fields calls for those requests, the city said. They do not carry weapons or make arrests.

City officials have tied the expansion to a broader push to revive Uptown that also includes the planned Lake Street Safety Center. At an April briefing, the city reported that drug-related calls for service in the ambassador zones were concentrated in February and March, with only one such call in April 2026, according to MinnPost.

Whether the program changes how Uptown is used over a full season — more evening foot traffic, fewer empty storefronts — will be the test backers point to. For now the city is staffing the corridor and tracking the calls that come in.