Aggressive library security the wrong approach

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 25/02/2023 (972 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The violence that occurred at Millennium Library was an unacceptable tragedy. Safety is vital for staff and community members who use the facility. To create true safety, the library needs to be fully resourced, not turned into a fortress.

This is not an ideological stance — it is rooted in extensive research on what works to make everyone safer.

The decision to re-implement the same kind of aggressive security screening that failed in 2019 — complete with armed police, increased security personnel, metal detectors and wanding — is heartbreaking.

No other library in Canada employs this strategy. It rolls back two years of collaboration and progress in repairing relations with the community and relies on strategies that increase the escalation of incidents while putting some library users in danger as they are pushed out of a safe space.

We have been involved with many others in work to move Millennium Library away from these discriminatory and ineffective approaches to security toward an effective, community-led and evidence-based strategy that makes people safer.

We were proud to stand with library staff and management to launch the Community Connection space. The space welcomes people at the door, offers a place to have a coffee or a snack, use the phone, access supports from community or crisis workers, and to invite people into Millennium through support and community.

This seems small, but it’s an evidence-based investment for preventing the escalation of incidents within the library.

The Community Safety Host program, as part of the hub, has been the most innovative of Millennium’s evidence-based community safety work. It brings community development, de-escalation, and harm reduction based in Indigenous values of kinship and inclusion to the centre of the space. Community safety hosts are trained in security, but also in anti-racism, de-escalation, and harm reduction, and bring their lived experience and relationships with communities into the space as a way of preventing incidents in the library.

City hall, however, always refused to properly fund Community Connections, relying on existing overstretched library staff to work the limited hours it was open. Even the granola bars and snacks the Connection space provided were donated, not funded by the city. Owing to this lack of funding, the Connection Space was closed on evenings and weekends — times when more serious, and now tragic, incidents occurred.

Now they have found money for police, metal detectors and security guards wielding intrusive wands — strategies we know will cause library attendance to plummet and make many people less safe — while the Community Connections space remains fully closed, with no plan for reopening.

None of the reasons security was removed in 2020 have changed — it was a failed policy. Screening will devastate gate counts: in 2019 we saw an almost 30 per cent drop in users because of screening. Users who most need access to the library will be pushed away because this screening discriminates against Indigenous people, Black people, people of colour, LGBTTQ+ people, refugees, poor people, people with disabilities and other minoritized people. And research shows it simply doesn’t make anyone safer.

To advance a community-safety strategy that can create a culture of safety rather than exclusion and displacement, the city management must:

1. Develop an exit strategy with community partners and library workers to plan for the removal of police from Millennium Library. The longer police are in place, the more people will not access the space because of the threat of violence and all they represent. While a small percentage of users may feel more comfortable, the reality is that police do not prevent harm, and in fact escalate altercations and drive people away.

2. Prioritize reopening the Community Connection space and fully resourcing it. Adequately staffing the Community Connection space includes hiring a dedicated librarian, two crisis workers and a library assistant to ensure the space is open whenever Millennium is open.

3. Commit to hiring a full complement of community safety hosts and remove the escalatory elements in the entry that undermine their ability to do their work.

4. Hire so library staffing levels are brought in line with other comparable library systems. Winnipeg’s library system, through ongoing austerity and neglect, is dangerously understaffed. Studies consistently show more employees on the floor make everyone safer.

5. Bring the security team in-house, stop the revolving door of security guards, and instead enable long-term relationship-building, appropriate training and feedback, and good jobs.

It’s time for Mayor Scott Gillingham to invest in the strategies that have been laying the groundwork for success at the library, rather than removing every effective intervention and replacing them with police. Rather than allocating more resources to the failed interventions of policing and securitization, put those resources — and more — into building up a library system where welcome, supportive relationships, adequate staffing and a culture of safety make a positive impact on our communities.

Joe Curnow is a member of Millennium for All, the Millennium Library Community Working Group, and a scholar of learning, racial justice, and community development.