Guarding Doors: My 24 Years in Public Housing Security

Guarding

Doors

James G Davis

Guarding Doors

Copyright © 2020 by James G Davis

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Tellwell Talent

www.tellwell.ca

ISBN

978-0-2288-3469-4 (Hardcover)

978-0-2288-3468-7 (Paperback)

978-0-2288-3470-0 (eBook)

Dedication

This book is dedicated to my wife, Kathy, who sacrificed her career to stay home with our children more than thirty-four years ago. She supported my career in the security business and endured the long hours that I worked for many years.

Love you Haney.

Table of Contents

Foreword

Introduction

I. Early Education & School Years

II. Community Guardian Dispatch

III. Training – South Regent Park

IV. Edgeley Village

V. Field Support

VI. Panda

VII. Family

VIII. Christmas & New Years

IX. Fire Safety Plans

X. Metropolitan Toronto Housing Authority

XI. District Security Advisor

XII. Manager – North Zone

XIII. The Second Career

XIV. Conclusions

Appendix 1

Foreword

The stories JG Davis tells in this book reflect his experiences and shed light on how the world of security has radically changed over the last fifty years. Once thought to be a low-paying occupation with few advancement opportunities, the security business blossomed into rewarding and interesting careers for both of us, and it all started at Community Guardian Company Limited.

In the late 1960s, the Ontario Housing Corporation wanted to build a unique program to address security issues in high-risk public housing neighbourhoods. They wanted an agent to work with property management, staff, residents, community stakeholders and the Metropolitan Toronto Police Force to build security strategies that recognized these neighbourhoods were home to thousands of good people and weed out the few non-residents who were causing serious disputes that impacted the residents’ peaceful enjoyment. In November of 1970, former Deputy Chief of the Metropolitan Toronto Police Force, Joe Thurston, was asked to create this unique security firm to provide a community policing approach. That company was Community Guardian Company Limited. Initially, the company only hired ex-police officers who showed a commitment to a social policing approach. As the company grew, other hiring opportunities were created for graduates of law enforcement programs and, for a period, a cadet program that allowed young people like me to join the company. The cadet program opened access to all jobs in the company before the candidate turned twenty-one years old, at which time you could become a project officer and obtain a licence as a private investigator. As cadets, we learned a lot of different jobs, including key office roles, such as statistical analysis of the work done by the company, learning the dispatch function and job shadowing in all field roles.

Project officers were meant to be helpful agents in the community that supported the activities of property management while deploying social policing concepts with a motto of arrest as a last resort. Community Guardians were well trained to respond to everything from loitering to domestic conflicts, neighbour disputes, drug dealing, thefts, trespassing, assaults, mental illness and everything else criminal or community focused, although we mostly dealt with fights fuelled by excessive alcohol consumption, as well as glue sniffers and pot smokers who took over public spaces. By the 1980s, the explosion of crack cocaine led to crack houses in vulnerable neighbourhoods and increased gang activity. By the 1990s, we were mostly dealing with drugs, gangs and guns.

While the security risk profile has changed over time, the basic skills JG Davis talks about are core to providing a comprehensive security program. What these stories amplify is the need to fully understand all elements of security risk and the method of building trusted relationships with residents and key stakeholders that encourage their participation in creating safer spaces. The power of observation, negotiation and crisis intervention skills are basic to survival in security, and JG Davis’ experiences relate how he honed his skills working in public housing over many years.

Throughout JG Davis’ experiences you will feel the changes in the risk profile in many vulnerable neighbourhoods. The changes in strategy advanced by security assessments, identifying physical design improvements, the use of security technologies and community engagement strategies all enable the residents of the community to take back their neighbourhoods from the criminal element.

These stories also amplify where security and policing strategies are falling short today, as many policing organizations have lost sight of the importance of the social elements of policing or security programming.

We all wore the Community Guardian uniform with pride, and over these many years I have had the great privilege to work with members of Community Guardian in other organizations. We knew that someday a book would have to be written to share what we know is a workable formula for creating safer neighbourhoods, and there is no one more credible than JG Davis to tell these stories. His experiences are real. His storytelling highlights his high integrity, his calmness in the eye of a storm and his honour anchored in core honesty.

Guarding Doors is a humble reflection on his personal journey. When we worked together, we would often laugh at how hard it was to describe our work to others, as we were more than security guards, but not quite police officers. Guarding doors was one of JG Davis’ descriptors, however, after you read this book you will know it is so much more.

Carol Osler

Senior Vice President

Financial Crimes and Fraud Management

TD Bank Group (Retired)

Introduction

There were many times when my peers and I said, We should write a book about our experiences. Then we would all agree we couldn’t do that because nobody would believe the stories; they couldn’t be true because they are too far-fetched or exaggerated.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, I seemed to have more time on my hands than usual, as many of us did. I started making notes on some of my experiences during my twenty-four years working in public housing security. I was amazed that the events came flowing back to me the way they did. Some of them seemed like they had just occurred yesterday, and others were a little fuzzy. This is my attempt to record some of the events that happened during that part of my life as straightforwardly and accurately as possible.

Community Guardian Company Limited was a specialized security company that provided services exclusively to the Ontario Housing Corporation (run by the provincial government), who owned more than 33,000 subsidized housing units in Toronto. They promoted social policing, which meant patrol officers on foot in the public housing communities helping the residents. Community Guardian handled over 100,000 calls per year that would have gone to Toronto Police. Many of these incidents were minor, and the police appreciated us taking these types of calls. In addition to the minor calls, we were also called to or happened upon very serious crimes. Some of those crimes included Homicides, Assaults, Break and Enters in progress, Attempted Auto Theft, Robbery, weapons offences — including guns and knives — and drug-related activity and offences.

Working at Community Guardian for the first twelve years of my security career was quite an education. I grew up north of the city in lower middle class Thornhill, and I had a lot to learn. Luckily, I worked with a group of experienced ex-police officers who knew their stuff and would take a young guy under their wing. It was a dangerous job, and several of our guys were hurt doing it. I was assaulted several times, but I was never injured to the point of being off injured on duty (IOD).

We worked in multicultural communities, and our peers were just as diverse as the neighbourhoods. They hailed from Jamaica, Scotland, England, Ireland, South Africa, Austria, Holland, Antigua — well, you get the picture. The men and women I worked with during this time were some of the finest people that I worked with during my career. They really cared for the communities they worked in and did their best to keep the peace in the Projects. If you called for a back up you knew they would bust their butt to get to you.

Most residents didn’t make enough money to live in private housing. Some were seniors or suffered from severe medical conditions. Some were single mother-led families, and some were new Canadians who just wanted to make their lives better in their new home. Many of them helped me several times while I was working in their communities, sometimes even the ex-convicts. More than 95% of them were fine people. The other 5% gave public housing a bad name and kept us busy. These are the ones that many of the stories in this book are about.

I

Early Education & School Years

1958 – 1971

I really wasn’t a very good student. My marks in public school were on the lower side of average all the way through. I scraped by Grade 8 and into high school at Thornhill Secondary. Then I promptly failed Grade 9. My repeat year wasn’t much better, neither were Grades 10 or 11. I wasn’t really interested in school except for physical education and football, and I often wondered how I was going to use the little that I learned there. My mother wouldn’t let me play football in Grades 9 or 10 because she was worried that I would get seriously hurt. I insisted that I play in Grades 11 and 12, and she went along with it.

Peter Hiscott was my senior football coach and he made quite an impression on me. Even though football is a physical game, Peter stressed the mental aspect and prepared us to be tougher mentally than our opponents. It worked, and we won the Georgian Bay Secondary School Senior Football Championship in 1970. We went undefeated, scoring 350 points for and only 8 points scored against. His tough coaching was a key element in my career in public housing security because mental toughness was critical in that job. I’ve always held a lot of gratitude towards Peter because of the positive impact he had on my life.

During high school, I worked for several summers at a swimming pool in Thornhill. As a lifeguard, I rescued three drowning swimmers during one summer. I was able to use the training I had completed during the previous seasons and felt a sense of accomplishment. A Vaughan Township police officer was dating one of the pool staff at the time. We all had a lot of contact with this officer. He was honest, and it was easy to tell that he genuinely wanted to help people. He very much impressed me as the type of person that made a very good police officer. I am quite certain these events helped to turn me towards a career in the law enforcement field.

By Grade 12, I had decided I wasn’t going to university. I found a course at Seneca College in law and security — that would be IT! I wanted to become a cop. The only catch was my marks through Grade 11 were not good enough to get me into the program, so I decided to apply myself and work for it. I now had a goal. My marks improved dramatically, and I was accepted into the Seneca College fall semester in 1971.

On my first day at Seneca, the law prof walked in and said, Look to your left, now look to your right. Half of the people you see won’t be here after Christmas. He was right. Fifty percent were gone at the end of the first semester. It was the toughest semester of my two years in law and security, and I loved it. At the beginning of the second semester, we received the same speech, that 50% would not make it to second year. They were right again.

We were required to take two law classes, psychology or sociology, and two optional courses per semester. One of the optional English courses I took was called Business and Technical Writing. Other than my law courses, it