David M. K. Sheinin
This is the fifth in a series of articles on Toronto public housing in the late 1980s. All entries in the series will be collected here.
In May 1988, the Metropolitan Toronto Housing Authority (MTHA) launched a new initiative to improve tenant security across public housing in Toronto. It began with a letter soliciting residents for their views. “You are well aware,” the letter started, “that a serious problem exists in your building with drug dealing, prostitution, purse snatchings, assaults, and related criminal activity.” It went on to note that tenants sometimes became involved with drugs or sex work “and cannot get free from the persons who control these activities.” MTHA promised the deployment of more police officers in surveillance and investigation operations that would include stepped up raids on peoples’ homes. Advice from MTHA was jarring. Don’t carry a purse “if you really don’t have to.” Don’t carry cash “you don’t need to have with you.” Don’t thread a purse strap around an arm. You could be badly injured in a robbery. Apartment doors were to be kept always locked. “Sometimes, transients knock on tenant doors asking for a drink of water or to use the bathroom or to stay overnight. These are tricks that are used to rob unsuspecting tenants.” The letter was signed simply, “Management.” MTHA took as a given that violent crime was a dominant feature of life in public housing that sucked in vast numbers of residents. Despite that grim outlook, MTHA had no notion of how to improve resident life in the face of sometimes violent criminality. In what seemed to some MTHA workers a bizarre self-fulfilling prophecy of failure on the matter, MTHA also took it upon itself to modify the behaviour of all residents. Toward that end, it hired the criminologist and security “expert” Clifford D. Shearing to write a pilot study on how to solve MTHA security problems. What, Shearing asked in an Orwellian line at the outset of his work, “should we do to encourage the behaviour we want to encourage?”
Shearing formed three teams of MTHA employees to build strategy. However, by the mid-point in his work, he found that Community Relations Workers (CRWs) on the teams remained doubtful about his process. He admitted that team members were under considerable stress as a result. The primary focus of the project was a vague combination of what he repeatedly called “caring” (without defining the term) and maintenance of MTHA properties. The latter was identified by the project as a “source of symbolic echoes and resonances that, in addition to portraying a message of caring, can be used to establish an ambiance of symbolic restraint… that will promote safety.” This sort of ambiguous language in project reports featured prominently in Shearing’s approach and may well have generated the doubts he reported among MTHA employees working alongside him for security improvements. Meanwhile, as the project unfolded CRWs and other MTHA employees who worked directly with residents noted problems in Shearing’s plan that the project had no way of addressing. As always, an inadequate budget limited the parameters of the possible, from fixing elevators to making certain building doors locked on closure. Moreover, CRWs recognized that when ideas about maintenance and security were communicated to maintenance staff, that was done in haphazard form.
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