City hall needs broader advice on security
City council is listening to experts on bringing in bag checks and metal detectors for members of the public hoping to attend council meetings, and erecting a half-wall in council chambers, but it’s not getting the straight facts.
Councillors have heard only from their own internal security team. It should come as no surprise that these professionals — who would have to answer if something goes wrong at city hall — conducted a safety audit in August 2016 and came up with 80 recommendations.
“If you ask a plumber to find leaks, he’ll find leaks,” said Coun. Scott McKeen. “They’re not going to say, ‘Oh, everything is OK.’
“They’re doing their job ... But my concern is we live in a world where fear is being heightened and marketed, and when we react to that, I think we make it worse.
“Something bad could happen to any of us, anywhere, any time, but if you measure the risk, there’s much more danger when you’re having a shower in the morning than there is any time in this building, which is the public’s building. And, frankly, I just think we’ve really over-reacted here.”
Council will debate the matter next week. Councillors appeared split Tuesday, with Mayor Don Iveson saying he wished administration had simply made the decision on its own rather than letting it get political.
It’s crucial to note such new security measures come with a price — more than $100,000 per year. They also send a message to Edmontonians that council doesn’t trust them. If it brings in these measures, council will also be buying into the fake news that our world is an increasingly sinister and dangerous place, as opposed to the safer place that it actually is.
Since the 1970s, violent crime has dropped in Canada. The violent crime index has been a wee bit volatile in recent years, going up and down and up, but it was 31 per cent lower in 2015 than it was in 2005, reports StatsCan. In its report to council on this issue, city administration and security staff couldn’t find any examples of a major violent crime at a Canadian council meeting. Nonetheless, they painted a grim picture of an increasingly violent city.
“Random acts of violence are a reality and we must be prepared,” deputy city clerk Denis Beaudry told a council committee on Tuesday.
Dean Sydlowski, director of security, insisted there’s a growing problem.
“We are definitely experiencing incidents in Canada that we aren’t accustomed to seeing over the last 10 years,” he said, then cited such examples as the man who police shot when he brandished a gun on a city street Monday and the road rage incident that saw a woman followed home and assaulted with a crowbar last week.
Those incidents were indeed frightening, but horrific crime is not unique to our time, to this decade. And as StatsCan numbers show, violent incidents are dropping, not going up.
Council would do well to get advice from other kinds of experts on the risk of violent crime and the proper responses to it. A leader in this field, Prof. Walter Enders, a University of Alabama economics professor and a leading researcher on terrorist networks, says little work has been done looking into the need for security at municipal council meetings largely because there have been so few violent incidents at such meetings.
Why then the urge to bring in metal detectors at public arenas and public meetings?
“I just think it’s fear of making a mistake,” Enders says, adding: “I think most people are very willing to tolerate what pre-9/11 would have been viewed as an infringement to their civil liberties.”
I’ll leave the last word to Enders; his advice to council on metal detectors and bag checks: “We haven’t seen any indication that these things are necessary. We haven’t had any horrible scenes. That doesn’t mean that it could never happen, but you can’t protect against everything. I don’t think it’s a good idea. I think it sets a bad tone in those circumstances.”