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'Special constables' alarm civil libertarians
By Dallas Hansen
August 13, 2006
Arriving in Montréal to spend the rest of the summer, I didn't
have to look far for the sort of “vibrant and exciting”
street life that Mayor Sam Katz says downtown Winnipeg needs.
Amid the posh boutiques along St. Catherine Street and the
upscale restaurants up St. Lawrence boulevard there can be found a
veritable urban carnival of sidewalk commerce: a man with a loud
portable tape player dancing in a Spider-Man costume, five guys
drawing a crowd with their rhythmic drumming on overturned plastic
pails and trashcan lids, vendors moving everything from beaded
bracelets to political newspapers sponsored by U.S. Democratic Party
black sheep Lyndon LaRouche.
Observing this chaos, I sadly noted it just couldn't happen in Winnipeg, named in an infamous 2002 front-page story in the National Post
as Canada's most regulated city. If my own frequent observations of
sidewalk culture in Winnipeg are any guide, the Downtown Winnipeg
Business Improvement Zone's Downtown Watch patrollers would soon
approach the men banging on pails and trash lids, demanding they move
along in accordance with the new anti-panhandling bylaw. Spider-Man
would be sent swinging for violating noise ordinances. Vendors,
upon failing to produce a license, would be sent packing.
“That blows my mind,” says Micheal Vonn, a civil
liberties lawyer and policy director of the British Columbia Civil
Liberties Association (whose Manitoba counterpart, the Manitoba
Association of Rights and Liberties, has closed their offices for
summer holidays).
“Our primary concern is, What kind of authority does someone
have to move you along? I can't imagine they would have any more
right than any other citizen. As a general rule, it would be like
your neighbour coming by and making a citizen's arrest for having your
grass too long.”
In Vancouver, Ms. Vonn's office has dealt with such a number of
complaints against that city's Downtown Ambassadors that they moved to
publish a pamphlet informing citizens of their rights.
“[Downtown Ambassadors] will come along citing a bylaw, and
unless you have a copy of the legislation in your back pocket they'll
threaten to call the police.”
Recently, however, it was announced that six members of Winnpeg's
Downtown Watch would be granted “special constable”
status, enabling them to detain intoxicated persons and
“aggressive panhandlers.” Ms. Vonn noted that while
British Columbia hasn't planned anything similar, she finds the move
“deeply troubling.”
“Where did we get this idea that the police are somehow
insufficient?” she asks. “That's the crux of the
idea—that we need to take matters into our own hands.”
Criminal harassment, she notes, is already prohibited under the
criminal code. And really, isn't “aggressive
panhandling” just an euphemism for robbery?
“Whenever you have such an unorthodox policing situation,”
she says, “certain basic principles kick in: that private
interest not be funding the police. The independence of the police
must not only exist but be seen to exist. At the point when private
interests appear to be funding law enforcement, that's problematic,
constitutionally—and ripe for a challenge.”
Robert W. Galston, 24, a Point Douglas homeowner (and chair of
the neighbourhood's Residents' Association), urbanist blogger
(riseandsprawl.blogspot.com) and part-time crisis worker at the Main
Street Project—which operates what is commonly known as
“the drunk tank"—has his own concerns. With only 20
holding cells at the Main Street Project he wonders whether
“there wouldn't be room for people who are a real threat to the
public safety because our cells would be full of people who were
panhandling outside the MTS Centre.”
Mr. Galston also shares Ms. Vonn's concerns about public
accountability. “When the Main Street Project wanted to make a
complaint of allegations of abuse to certain street people, they had
no one to go to but the people at the BIZ office; there was no LERA
(Law Enforcement Review Agency)-type option.
“It's kind of like having a labour dispute and having to go to management instead of a union.”
Mr. Galston also wonders what sort of precedent this might set.
“For now,” he says, “it's just a pilot project
of six officers, but of course they'll want to expand it. The
Osborne Village BIZ, Corydon BIZ, West End BIZ, Selkirk Avenue
BIZ—they'll all be saying, 'Hey, we want this too.'”
Mayor Sam Katz has said that critics of the BIZ's new initiative,
“are probably the ones who are never here.” But not only
do I find offensive the notion of private enterprise regulating public
space, I'm downtown every day, where I prefer the unregulated chaos
of the busker, the street performer, the unlicensed vendor, even
the benign public drinker, to the oppressively scrutinizing gaze of
overzealous young patrollers.
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