KEEPING AN EYE OUT

Robocam And Quartier Latin Cleanup

It its satirical heyday Spy Magazine imagined what New York City's Harlem might look like if Disney's Michael Eisner tackled social problems.  The neighbourhood would become an amusement park with the down-and-out serving as actors in a Broadway show.

We're not seeing such far-fetched thinking in Montreal.  But community groups working with homeless people wonder where two summer initiatives in the Saint-Jacques section of Ville-Marie borough are taking us.

Last week the city announced Projet Robocam, a pilot project involving the placement of police-monitored surveillance cameras around the Quartier Latin ostensibly to stop drug dealing.  The city is spending $3.2-million on "revitalizing" Ste-Catherine between St-Laurent Boulevard and Sanguinet Street, with $100,000 of that money earmarked to hire workers to dissuade homeless youth from committing petty crimes - for instance, breaking storefront glass or verbally abusing passersby.

Already community groups are dubbing Robocam "Hobocam" and predicting police will use the cameras to track petty crimes and marginalize the homeless.

Over a three-year period, members of the 19-strong Table de concertation jeunesse-itinerance du centre-ville collected about 700 tickets Montreal police issued to homeless people for "petty crimes." Examples? Putting out a cigarette on a sidewalk, crossing a street on a red light and sitting on a concrete block instead of a park bench.  Tickets are often $130 or more and homeless people serve jail time if they don't pay them, says Table spokesperson Josee Boisvert.

Nonsense, says Robert Laramee, the city councillor behind both projects.  "[Robocam is] about drug dealers, organized crime," Laramee says.  "We're not going after the young person who's walking down the street."

Citing a lack of consultation, the community groups aren't co-operating.  "We refuse to work with the city, to have anything to do with the $100,000," says Boivert.  Urban renewal hardly has mass support since only about 200 residents and sympathetic businesspeople lobbied for it, Boisvert argues.

"I don't want to chase young people out of the city," insists Laramee.  The residents and merchants he represents are "exceptionally tolerant" of homeless youth and simply want to reduce the petty crimes and lack of respect they're seeing, he says.