Building the Evidence:
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“No Place Else to Go: Surveying the Human Rights Experiences of Encampment Residents in Ontario” is a seven-part report series.
“Building the Evidence: Survey Design, Data Collection, and Research Highlights” is the first in our series of reports. It outlines how we designed the survey and collected the data, and offers a brief overview of our research findings, which are discussed in more detail in subsequent reports.
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Introducing Pillar 1: Decentre Policing and Enforcement
This pillar emphasizes that homelessness should be understood and addressed as a social and systemic issue, rather than a criminal one (Farha and Schwan, 2020). Enforcement-led responses can create fear and uncertainty for people experiencing homelessness. Practices such as forced displacement, surveillance, and ticketing can contribute to the criminalization of homelessness (Rankin, 2021). These practices disrupt people's lives, create physical, emotional, and psychological harm, and ultimately, make it more difficult to exit homelessness.
To understand the experiences of people staying in encampments with police and bylaw, we focused on displacement because it was often the point at which municipal enforcement occurred. We also asked about police interactions, requests for identification, and ticketing, as these are common ways that people experience the criminalization of homelessness. Specifically, we asked participants about:
- Being forced to leave an encampment when they would have preferred to stay.
- Whether they were informed who was requiring them to leave and why.
- Losing personal belongings, service connections, and connections to family and friends as a result of displacement.
- Being stopped by police while staying in or near an encampment and asked to provide identification or explain what they were doing.
- Receiving, or being threatened with, a ticket while staying in an encampment.
Analyzing the Survey Findings
To connect the survey findings to the pillars of a human rights–based response, we developed a set of exploratory questions for each pillar. These questions guided our analysis by providing a framework for organizing and interpreting the survey findings.
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Survey findings from this pillar were analyzed through the following exploratory questions:
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In our analysis, we found that most people staying in encampments had experienced at least one forced displacement, with bylaw and police officers identified as the primary agents of displacement. These displacements were associated with serious harms for participants. We also found that participants frequently experienced criminalization, often for engaging in activities necessary for day-to-day survival.
About This Summary
This summary offers a very brief overview of Pillar 1: Decentre Policing and Enforcement. The full pillar report provides a more detailed analysis, using the exploratory questions as a framework for interpreting the survey findings and making recommendations. It expands on these initial findings by situating them in relation to relevant policy contexts, identifying patterns in the data, and offering more specific implications for practice and systems change.
Because there must always be music... |