When its downtown supervised drug consumption site in 2020 – the busiest safe consumption site in North America at that time – the community braced for what might follow.
A private security firm was hired to keep order in the city’s downtown park, where many unhoused people congregate. According to ÌìÑÄÉçÇø criminologist , an expert on homelessness and inner-city policing in Canada, private security often has a poor reputation — characterized as “controlling and punitive” — when interacting with houseless people.
Previous studies even claimed that “private security forces [have] surpassed the cops as the main violators of street people’s rights,” says Urbanik, adding that the growth of private security in urban spaces has been “explosive” in recent years to meet the demand for community policing.
So Urbanik and her research team decided to observe the potentially volatile relationship for themselves as part of the largest criminological study of homelessness in Canadian history.
After interviewing 50 houseless people in Galt Gardens — the city’s downtown gathering place — was unexpected.
“Most interviewees talked about how exceptional and wonderful these private security guards are, and that they want more of them 24/7,” says Urbanik, who collaborated on the study with and .
“We were really taken aback,” she says. “We thought we’d hear brutal accounts of securitization, displacement and criminalization, because that’s what we’d read in the literature."
The team heard multiple stories of security guards doing “really exceptional work,” providing compassion and care to populations “routinely dismissed and stigmatized,” she says. In the absence of a safe consumption site, the guards would be the first to respond to drug overdoses.
The park’s residents also appreciated the guards providing a sense of order in the park, establishing clear and fairly enforced rules. “They want safety and security, and they want it to be done in a compassionate way,” she says.
Urbanik’s team witnessed a sexual assault in the park, during which security stepped in to protect community members and “de-escalated something that was likely going to turn really violent.”
She adds there was no evidence of a mandated security training program to promote a culture of compassion and caring: “It’s just what they brought of their own personalities and behaviour, and it seemed to be well accepted, because as a result they were not calling the police 100 times a day.”
Using compassionate care instead of expecting the unhoused to fend for themselves saves lives, she says, with the added benefit of protecting downtown businesses.
In selecting interviewees for the study, Urbanik’s team avoided obvious recruitment sites such as soup kitchens, shelters and community organizations, having found that many do not use or trust those services.
“The entire study is street-based,” says Urbanik. “We let people know who we are and what we’re doing, so we get people’s perspectives with zero conflict of interest. The security guards don’t know we are researchers, so we’re kind of like flies on the wall trying to blend in.”
Urbanik argues that the security model her team found in Lethbridge could be used in other communities.
“As a criminologist and a sociologist, I never want to push for necessarily expanding the arm of the state in the lives of our most marginalized,” she notes. “But in an era of government cutbacks and social programs routinely being defunded, this could be an immense benefit to all, instead of reproducing the horrific abuses we have seen in the past.”
Urbanik’s has looked at 20 communities across Canada, and the team is hoping to eventually cover communities in every province.
The study has the impact of gang violence on houseless people in Edmonton, finding they feel less safe since the pandemic. Last fall Edmonton’s houseless population surged toward 5,000.
The team has so far interviewed more than 850 unhoused people across the country, and hopes to produce a number of published papers and a book-length study.
“We want to share our findings with whomever we can, bringing to light the actual experiences and perceptions of our unhoused community,” says Urbanik.
“They’re so much more complicated than what the existing literature and public rhetoric suggest.”