Sgt. Sebastien Lemay used to call his job the punching bag of the Ottawa Police Service. But, after seven years patrolling the Byward Market, he’s getting optimistic.
Once a gem in the centre of the nation’s capital, the ByWard Market is losing its place in Ottawans’ hearts. Longstanding businesses have closed. A rash of high-profile violent crimes — including a brazen daytime shooting — and rampant opioid abuse have increased calls from locals for help. The attempts to revitalize the area — from the addition of a $50 million neighbourhood police station to installing an undersized fake-ice rink — vary widely. But what say the people who are still there? We interviewed folks who live, work and play in the ByWard Market. These are their stories, in their own words.
Sergeant Sebastien Lemay, of Ottawa Police Service’s Community Policing Central District Team, has patrolled the ByWard Market and surrounding area for the past seven years.
I was initially describing my job as being the punching bag of the police service. Because if people had a complaint against the Ottawa Police Service, well, guess what, they had a community officer at their community meeting. And they would just vent, right? And I’ve accepted that when it’s within respect. I’ve always done my best to receive the criticism, bring it back when it was constructive for the police service to receive, and also validate or educate what the criticism was about.
As community officers, we try to spend as much time as we can on the bicycles, foot patrol, and again just making those contacts with tourists, businesses, doing follow-up for some chronic issues we might have been made aware of.
I don’t live in Ottawa, which, that’s up for debate if police officers should live in the neighbourhood they serve or not. I’ll always tell everyone I meet with: my empathy is genuine. I’ve received complaints from parents saying, “my child picked up a syringe in a schoolyard.” That’s unacceptable. I’m a father of two, and I would also find that more than unacceptable. I don’t know how I’d react, to be honest. The neighbourhood where I live is different, we don’t have those challenges. I feel very lucky to not worry about that when I have to go play in the park. I always scan for cigarettes and broken glass, but having syringes in a park is totally unacceptable.
Evening Update
There are frequent social disorder problems we get calls for: people experiencing homelessness with nowhere to go. They find a secluded alcove, but that alcove happens to be someone’s business that they need to open in the morning. So we are very sensitive to the reality of those people. We try to come up with a supportive approach, also making them understand they’re impeding business operations, possibly by their posture or situation, making some people feel uncomfortable.
This was the situation we had this morning, unfortunately. Two individuals had slept on the street. A business was trying to open. It was causing a bit of an issue. I approached the individuals like, “Hey, time to wake up, do you need anything?” We can connect them to services like outreach, community engagement teams, block leaders. They’re like, “Nope, we’re good, can we have a garbage bag to clean up after ourselves?” Which they did, and right now the spot looks great.
When I started seven years ago, I felt like I had to do everything. I kind of had the impression as well that people believed police were the solution to everything. The reality is, if someone is experiencing homelessness and they don’t have anywhere to go, we’re not going to bring them to jail for that. So there’s that education piece that I’ve had to have with a few residents who were demanding enforcement. And I was like, “There’s nothing to enforce here.” Yes, we will move the person along, if we have the enforcement capacity to do it, but there’s no bringing people to jail for, say, trespassing, or many social disorder issues.
On a bigger scale, I’ve been hearing the people I’m asking to move along, saying, “we have nowhere to go.” I bring it up to the city, and we have different partners involved. There’s the knowledge that they need somewhere to go. There’s a lack of space right now. Through the work we’re doing with our partners, there are different ideas, and things are in motion. Without any timeline or guarantees, we do appreciate as people interacting with people experiencing homelessness that they need somewhere to go and that is lacking right now, at least in this neighbourhood.
What might be the hardest is, sometimes, finding people in situations where I feel helpless, as an individual. I know there’s a community engagement team. I know there are block leaders. I have phone numbers for housing.
Like somebody is experiencing homelessness, right, and they confide to us that they don’t feel safe for whatever reason in a shelter. And they’re sleeping rough on the sidewalk, and as winter approaches, it makes me think, “OK, do they have a plan for when it’s -30 outside?” Or are they going to be a part of our Ottawa Public Health statistics, either a fatality or whatever can happen, which I hate to think about.
In those situations, I think, “How as a city can we do better to support these people, and offer them services?” I cannot identify a location where I can say, this is an ideal spot. Trying to think and not being able to come up with a solution of where they can go, that’s also upsetting to me.
The people I had to displace this morning, they were sleeping on the sidewalk. Were they causing anyone any particular harm? There was a bit of a mess around them, so I’ll agree, that might lead to some people feeling unsafe. But they weren’t violent, they weren’t aggressive, they were just sleeping because they had nowhere else to go, right? We refer to the shelters but they might have had negative experiences in there.
I came across a couple sleeping in the park. As a couple, they can’t share a bed in the shelter. Their jump needs to be to housing. If, for whatever reason, they are challenged and have issues keeping housing, how can they be better supported? I know it’s not simple, everyone is strapped for resources and funding, but that would probably be what has gotten to me the most in the past seven years. That feeling of being powerless in some of these situations.
I’ve had my rollercoaster of emotions and motivation while doing this job. I’ve reached lows sometimes where I’ve been feeling so hopeless that I’m like “I’ll show up, I’ll put a smile on, I’ll help the people, but at the end of the day, I’ll see this as a punch-in, punch-out kind of job. There’s nothing more I can do.”
There was one person experiencing homelessness, they were very well-known in the Market, a very colorful individual. They weren’t causing any issues, but you knew when they were on a certain block. They were on the housing registry for like seven or eight years. And one community leader, who I have developed a relationship with that I will preserve until I retire or maybe beyond, she told me we really need to help this person. She was trying to get away from the Market, and all the shady characters, negative influences that might affect her, her mental health, physical health. I joined this community leader and we visited this person, who is now housed. I had extra curtains in my basement that we were able to set up. And for her, it changed everything. Now she could sleep in the morning. That community leader was great, she went above and beyond, finding her furniture. You have so many interactions with so many people experiencing homelessness. And you see them, day in, day out, and you’re like “what’s the plan?”
But right now, with new leadership at a city politics level and in terms of our executive, and the social agencies, new leaders, new energy, the dynamic of what’s going on right now, I feel very optimistic.
Again, it’ll never be perfect. I’ll retire and it still won’t be perfect. But I do see a great potential for improvement.
As told to Marlo Glass. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
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