Introduction

Community safety officers (CSOs) have emerged as local security providers in a dozen Canadian cities since 2001. First developed in the UK, the CSO model has been since transferred to Australia too (Cherney and Sutton, 2004). CSOs are not private security agents, since they are public employees of municipalities and other levels of government. Despite being publicly funded, CSOs are not public police either, because they lack key police powers and don dissimilar uniforms. CSOs conduct active patrols in downtown areas and other neighbourhoods as a form of reassurance policing (Barker and Crawford, 2013) and community policing (Brogden and Nijhar, 2005; Fielding and Innes, 2006; Lambert et al, 2012). They tend to operate according to the ‘broken windows’ thesis (Wilson and Kelling, 1982; Harcourt, 2005) that seeks to remove visible signs of disorder. As a result, CSOs in Canada have also become responsible for multiple practices, including regulation of nuisance and anti-graffiti campaigns.

CSOs operate in Western Canadian cities that lack a public police department or receive minimal Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) service. They are also expanding where local public police are said to require additional support. No scholarship has examined why these CSOs have emerged in Canada, how local policing and security provision are impacted, or the international policy connections that CSOs may have in Canada. In the UK, CSOs were first introduced via New Labour legislation (Crawford and Lister, 2004; Hughes and Gilling, 2004). In 1998, local governments were mandated by the Home Office ‘to develop local partnerships with strategies for reducing crime and disorder’ (Gilling and Hughes, 2002: 5). For Canadian CSOs, the principal knowledge transfer stimulus has been CSOs in England. Some Canadian CSOs have emerged independently of public police, but the RCMP also has created a CSO programme to enhance visible presence in towns where regular RCMP officers cannot conduct high-cost patrols. Whether CSOs in Canada differ from CSOs elsewhere has not been examined.

Like the conservation officers and ambassadors we reflect on in other chapters, in many ways CSOs are being called upon to manage conduct at the frontier of crime that is merely disruptive or out of place.