AlliedBarton’s “security ambassadors” are keeping watch at school crossings that don’t have crossing guards.
BY YANNIC RACK
The controversial security guards who now patrol Battery Park City have taken on a new role that may earn them some points with the community — watching over local school crossings.
AlliedBarton, the private security company whose hiring by the Battery Park City Authority late last year to replace the neighborhood’s Parks Enforcement Patrol raised an uproar, has started keeping an eye on notoriously dangerous street crossings near three schools in the area while the First Precinct struggles to hire crossing guards.
“We’re doing assistance at the schools during arrival and dismissal time, and we’re now at Stuyvesant High School, PS/IS 89 and PS/IS 276,” said Patrick Murphy, the company’s account manager for operations in the neighborhood.
Murphy said he started deploying guards there about a month ago, after Community Board 1’s Battery Park City committee asked him whether the “security ambassadors” — as the company’s yellow-clad patrols are known — could lend a hand at the schools.
“We keep an eye on the crossings, but we’re not crossing guards,” said Murphy, emphasizing that his people aren’t — and cannot legally act as — actual crossing guards, who are hired by the NYPD and have authority to halt traffic. “My guy’s not stepping out in the street to stop a car — we’ll call the First Precinct and tell them there’s an issue, and then they’ll make sure to give out the tickets.”
The extra attention from the AlliedBarton personnel is welcome news for local parents, even though the NYPD last month agreed to dispatch uniformed officers and traffic agents to secure crossings around eight Downtown schools that have gone unwatched due to the chronic crossing guard shortage in the area.
“They seem very open and willing, and anything that can help provide a safer environment for the kids is great,” said Tammy Meltzer, a community board member who lives in the neighborhood and has three kids at PS/IS 276. “It definitely seems to have calmed the corner [at the school],” she said. “They have been helping augment, they can be a visual presence. And I would say we’re still in the learning process of how they can do best, so I’m really looking forward to see how [their involvement] grows.”
Murphy told members of the CB1 Battery Park City committee earlier this month that the extra eyes have led to almost two dozen tickets issued over the preceding month — and that’s just at one single location.
“We worked with the precinct, and I asked them to come over to PS/IS 276 concerning [drivers disregarding] the stop sign on Battery Place,” he said, adding that the officers handed out 22 summonses for cars that didn’t stop at the sign, as well as six more for other violations such as driving without registration.
AlliedBarton initially faced intense opposition from the community board when it took over security for the neighborhood earlier this year, largely because its guards do not have real enforcement powers like the Parks Dept.’s PEP officers who patrolled the area for decades and could both issue summonses and make arrests.
Meltzer said that although she would rather see real crossing guards deployed wherever possible, the fact that AlliedBarton has stepped up is a good sign of faith. And since the issue at hand is the safety of school children, she added that any help was welcome.
“It’s just better to have somebody there,” she said. “At the end of the day, if it prevents one person from getting hit, it was worth it.”
