By Lindsay Tate
A group of Elgin Street bars and restaurants are partnering with the Ottawa police to permanently evict troublemakers from participating establishments, says Brian Karam, president of the Elgin Area Business Association.
The association’s initiative, which is still in the planning stage, would prevent unruly patrons from entering participating businesses on Elgin if the police had been involved in removing them from a single location.
If the offenders return, police can charge them with trespassing.
“If you have a rowdy customer and they’re ordered off the premises, they can just go next door, which just transfers the problem from one establishment to another,” says Karam, who owns
MacLaren’s On Elgin.
“This [proposal] delegates the power to the police to restrict people from being anywhere on Elgin Street that has opted into the project.”
While this isn’t the first solution proposed to crack down on troublesome revelers, Karam says it is one of the first examples of the Elgin businesses working together with the community to provide solutions to social issues.
Elgin Street has been the site of noise complaints in the past and is a popular destination for students and young people.
Karam says the initiative is a voluntary agreement between businesses, which will be enforced by the police, and not a city bylaw.
Currently, the police can enforce an individual business decision to bar someone from their property, but they cannot stop that person from returning later or from walking down the street to another bar unless they commit a crime, says Karam.
The association’s initiative goes further, he says, and gives the police some preventative authority.
If a person gets kicked out of one bar, the police can choose to ban them from all the bars on the street.
The ban could be indefinite because it would remain in place until it is formally withdrawn, says Karam.
Ottawa Police Central-West District Staff Sgt. Samir Bhatnagar says if Elgin Street bars and restaurants sign a form letter agreeing to ban somebody from their properties, the police can enforce that.
“It’s good to see the bar owners and the business community working together and involving the police to come up with strategies like this and it will be interesting to see how it moves forward,” says Bhatnagar.
Bhatnagar says there has been an overall decline in the number of complaints from Elgin Street recently, which he attributes to a greater police presence.
But, Bhatnagar says, this proposal could be useful in dealing with repeat troublemakers and extreme situations.
The form letter, which will be used by police in enforcing the street-wide ban was created by Karam, who is also a lawyer.
He says in preparing the letter, the association consulted Somerset Coun. Diane Holmes, and had the lawyer for the city’s police services board review and approve the form.
Karam says the initiative is slow to implement because of the number of businesses the association wants to involve.
“I’ve called certain owners and what we’re doing now is signing them up,” says Karam.
“We’ve got about 10 of them, but we need about 30.”
Jason Crew-Gee, owner of Woody’s on Elgin, has signed on to the initiative.
Crew-Gee says it’s a good idea to get “the rowdies” off the street but says he isn’t sure how it will work in practice.
“I think it will be a challenge to enforce,” says Crew-Gee.
“If a fax goes out to everybody, we’ll have the offender’s name but we would have to know what they look like,” he says, adding it could be hard to implement.
“Especially for us, since we’re not going to check everyone’s ID at the door of our little pub,” Crew-Gee says.
Still, Crew-Gee says it is a step in the right direction and that it shows business owners care about the character of the street, not just their bottom lines.
Karam says this character is what drove the initiative.
“Elgin has a particular ambience and this will help preserve it by taking the wind out of the sails of troublemakers,” he says.
Karam says if the initiative is successful, he hopes the association’s “experiment” will be adopted in other areas of the city’s downtown, such as the Byward Market or Preston Street.