‘They wanted to prove they had authority’
Last month, Adrian Cornwell, a 22-year-old Edmonton man, told Postmedia he was violently taken to the ground by two security guards while attending a March 16 party at the West Edmonton Mall water park. He was then handcuffed and detained in a cell in his swim trunks for around two hours.
Cornwell said he was trying to meet up with his brother when a security guard repeatedly stopped him without explanation between the change room and swimming area. His phone was with his brother and he had no way of explaining where he was. When Cornwell tried to go around the security guard, two guards took him to the floor, leaving him with bruised legs and feet, and a baseball-sized contusion over his right eye.
“I don’t know what they thought I had on me, or why they needed to take me down in that fashion,” Cornwell said. “Like, I was in swim trunks. It doesn’t make any sense.”
Others feel security guards profiled them.
In early March, Métis elder Terry Lusty said he was surrounded by security guards and temporarily banned from Edmonton’s City Centre Mall after trying to find the owner of a credit card he discovered on the floor of the food court. What happened to Lusty echoed the 2014 case of Gary Moostoos, an Indigenous man whose ban from the mall was lifted after public outcry.
Then there’s the case of Skeete, the senior citizen visiting from Ontario. Skeete said he was approached by two security guards and accused of shoplifting within half an hour of entering West Edmonton Mall on Sept. 6.
He told the officers that he had not even been in the store in question, and that a quick visit would confirm this.
The guards refused Skeete’s request to speak with the store’s manager and ordered him to leave, he said. Skeete said he complied, but was eventually carried off the property with a guard on each arm, his toes barely scraping the ground.
Adding to his confusion, he later learned from the store’s manager that security had been dispatched to look for a suspect who was Indigenous. Skeete is black.
“I can’t say it had anything to do with race or colour,” Skeete said. “I think it’s just that they saw me as an easy target. They wanted to prove they had authority, and they could use it however they wanted.”
COMPLAINT, USE OF FORCE NUMBERS ‘NOT AVAILABLE’
People who feel they’ve been mistreated by security guards can file a complaint with Alberta Justice and Solicitor General’s security programs branch, spokesman Brendan Cox said in an email. The security company is then required to conduct an investigation and provide a written decision to both the complainant and the government within 90 days.
If the person involved is not satisfied, they can request the security programs branch conduct its own review. Police are responsible for investigating allegations of criminal misconduct, Cox said.
However, the ministry could not provide any statistics on how many complaints it receives, citing a switch to a new electronic system for tracking complaints.
Alberta also requires that licensees report use-of-force incidents, to see if there are “developing patterns involving a security worker or company,” Cox said. But the ministry could not provide statistics on how often security guards use force, either. (Edmonton police twice a year release detailed reports on how often its officers use force.)
Tyler Duggan, a manager with GardaWorld Security Services, said that for the most part Alberta’s security regulations hold guards accountable. During his time in the industry, he’s seen licences revoked and people fired due to false arrests and excessive force.
“It’s very robust, and I think if the companies are ethical and moral in their investigations it works very, very well,” he said. “We’re all in the people business, we’re all in the customer service business, and ultimately if you’ve got a complaint against you from the public about one of your guards, you want to weed that out as soon as possible.”
But David Hyde, a Torontobased security management consultant who previously worked in Alberta, said overall, regulations haven’t kept pace with the security industry’s growth.
“Use of force and inappropriate activity isn’t rampant in private security, but it happens at a pretty high clip,” he said.
When auditing security operations for clients, he often finds concerning trends. Some malls have unusually high arrest rates, with attitudes bordering on “militaristic.”
Those are trends he felt regulators should monitor and act on before something bad happens. But those regulators are often understaffed.
“It’s like ‘you know what guys, why are you making arrests in these circumstances?’” said Hyde. “And it turned out they ’d not been trained properly, and they’d just done 25 of these arrests over a three or four year period, and they’d just lucked out that one of them hadn’t gone south, and someone hadn’t got hurt.”
“The 26th one could see someone get seriously injured, and all because arrests are being made on very shaky grounds.”
Hyde added Alberta’s security sector is highly regulated relative to the rest of Canada. Some provinces have no mandatory training for security workers. And he said Alberta’s provincial regulator is an improvement over the past, when the only options for a person assaulted by a security guard was to sue them or pursue criminal charges.
In some cases, dealing with the security company does yield results. In Lusty’s case, the guard’s employer told Postmedia he would be removed from duties and required to redo his diversity, sensitivity, Indigenous awareness and customer service training. Lusty will also receive a formal apology, the company said.
Cornwell was never charged with anything following his arrest at West Edmonton Mall, he said. He talked to police officers after being released from the cell, but was frustrated with the process. A police spokeswoman said the police service reviews all useof-force incidents involving West Edmonton Mall security and that a detective was assigned to investigate on March 25. Investigators eventually told Cornwell that since there were no witnesses or video footage of what happened, there was not enough information to press charges, he said.
West Edmonton Mall did not respond to requests for comment on the cases involving its guards.
Skeete received a report from the mall’s director of security, but said it was missing information and misrepresented what happened. His formal complaint with the security programs branch was similarly disappointing: he said that while the investigator admitted there were things the guards could have done differently, the review found his complaint was unfounded. He has also filed a complaint with the provincial human rights commission.
Skeete worked as a security guard for the Pinkerton agency when he first came to Canada, and said he understands guards have a job to do. But he felt it was important to hold guards accountable.
“I don’t want any money, I have no hatred against them, I don’t really want either one of them to lose their jobs,” he said. “All I want is that they don’t operate like this with other people.”
‘QUESTIONABLE’ STANDARDS, ACCOUNTABILITY MECHANISMS
A cross-country problem Hyde found while writing a thesis on private security regulation in 2004 is that many people security guards deal with are disadvantaged — either homeless, intoxicated, or with some form of mental health issue.
“Those folks can’t really avail themselves of a meaningful public complaints process,” he said. “They can’t navigate it as easily, it’s not as accessible to them.”
He said some countries allow “public interest” complaints against security guards. Instead of having to prove they were assaulted by a security guard, a person can simply file a complaint that guards were behaving contrary to the public interest.
Complaints can even be submitted on someone else’s behalf. If someone sees a person being aggressively detained by security guards in a mall, for example, they could submit a sworn statement with as much information as possible to the solicitor general and have it investigated.
No province in Canada has that system, he said.
“To me, that’s the next vanguard of regulation — particularly in an industry that’s rampantly growing, has exceptionally high turnover, questionable standards and accountability mechanisms that perhaps need to be changed,” he said.