City of Ottawa officials have noted a 30 per cent drop in security incidents at city hall since the installation of secure screening gates nearly a year ago.
The city installed enhanced security measures in May 2025 that require visitors to pass through metal detectors and have their bags screened at the Laurier Avenue and Lisgar Street entrances before entering the building.
The move drew some criticism in the community , with advocates calling the security measures “invasive” and a barrier for people trying to make their voices heard in council chambers.
Tom Ledgley of Horizon Ottawa said it sent “a bad message at a particularly bad time.
“It’s telling folks that they’re not welcome and discouraging people from showing up to city hall in person to do things like deliver delegations,” Ledgley said at the time.
Beth Gooding, director of the city’s Public Safety Service, said in a statement the city is “committed to ensuring that City Hall remains a safe, welcoming, and accessible space for people to visit and work.”
City staff provided a month-by-month breakdown of security incidents in the 12 months prior to installing the security measures , which shows a decline in incidents during the 11 full months since the gates were activated.
There were 242 security incidents, or 20.2 incidents per month between June 2024 and May 2025, according to city data, and that dropped to 148 incidents, or 13.5 incidents per month since the gates were installed.
Notably, that data no longer includes “demonstrations” as a sub-category.
The city’s Public Safety Service had been tracking demonstrations among its data for security incidents at city-owned facilities, which includes categories like break and enter, causing a disturbance, theft, trespassing and vandalism.
Knoxdale-Merivale Coun. Sean Devine raised an objection to the practice of listing demonstrations among those security incidents, arguing demonstrations were largely peaceful and did not belong in the same category as those offences.
“We appreciate all of the feedback and we took that into consideration,” Gooding told emergency preparedness and protective services committee in April.
“The reason we were tracking demonstrations as a security incident is because it does require our guards and our staff to monitor the situation in case of escalation,” Gooding said. “But we had also discussed last year at council that the vast majority of demonstrations that take place at city facilities are very peaceful.”
Gooding acknowledged there was an “unintentional” effect of including demonstrations among the catalogued security incidents.
“We were giving the impression that all demonstrations may be perceived negatively, and we took that to heart,” Gooding said. “And so we decided that our guards are still going to have to monitor when there’s a demonstration at a city facility and make sure that it doesn’t escalate, but we don’t have to track that as a security incident in our statistics.”
Gooding said the initial review of total security incidents, which included demonstrations, found a reduction of about 10 incidents per month at city hall since the security screening measures were activated.
With the data adjusted to exclude demonstrations from those metrics, staff found a decline of seven incidents per month at city hall, which represents a 30 per cent decrease over the same 12-month period prior to installing the screening measures.
Gooding said in a statement that demonstrations “are no longer tracked as security incidents, as the majority are peaceful in nature.”
The city does not publicly release a detailed breakdown of incidents by sub-category for each facility.
“However, there has been a consistent decline in certain types of occurrences at city hall, including incidents related to drug and alcohol use on city property, and those related to disturbances,” Gooding said.
Corporate security reported 2,106 total incidents across all city facilities in 2025, which includes recreation and community centres, libraries, arenas and other city-owned properties.
That total is down slightly from the 2,176 incidents reported in 2024. Corporate security had reported a steady rise in total incidents over the past several years, with 783 incidents in 2021, 1,245 incidents in 2022 and 1,846 in 2023.
Gooding said the total incidents decreased in 2025, but there was a concerning rise in the “personal incidents” category.
That category includes serious offences like assaults against staff, Gooding said.
“We continue to see some very aggressive behaviours at our public-facing buildings, and, in some cases, very serious situations involving assault, which we never want to have happen at a city facility,” Gooding said.
There were 265 personal incidents in 2025 and 241 in 2024.
Related
Our website is your destination for up-to-the-minute news, so make sure to bookmark our homepage and sign up for our newsletters so we can keep you informed.
