Reluctant Criminalization: How the Municipal Bylaw Enforcement of Homelessness Perpetuates Pervasive Penality

• In Event: Policing Homelessness and Quality of Life Issues: The Impetus for Improvement

Abstract

Homelessness is a social problem, impacting at least 25,000 people every day in Canada alone. Although research has documented criminalizing responses to homelessness involving the police and private security, there is much less scholarship that investigates municipal bylaw enforcement officers’ role in the governance of homelessness. In this paper, we explore how municipal bylaw officers regulate homelessness complaints in Ontario, Canada. Drawing on surveys and semi-structured interviews with municipal bylaw enforcement officers, our analysis demonstrates that bylaw officers have been called upon to manage a ‘crisis of complaints’ related to the increasing visibility of homelessness across Ontario. To manage these complaints, bylaw officers rely on spatial and bureaucratic burden shuffling. Spatial burden shuffling refers to the physical displacement of people experiencing homelessness, while bureaucratic burden shuffling refers to the reclassification of complaints to other organizations (i.e., police and social service organizations). We argue that these responses constitute a form of pervasive penality, or a punitive process of policing through move along orders and threats of arrest, with the goal of making homelessness invisible. Such responses increase the precarity that often characterizes unhoused people’s lives and misrepresents homelessness as a deviancy issue rather than a human rights violation.

Authors

• Natasha Martino, McMaster University

• Erin Dej, Wilfrid Laurier University

• Carrie Sanders, Wilfrid Laurier University