Millennium Library safety incidents spike in first quarter of 2025

CBC

4 hours ago

The number of concerning incidents at Winnipeg's downtown Millennium Library increased sharply in the first few months of this year.
From January to March, there were 309 incidents, compared with 183 during the same period the year before, a 68.9 per cent increase, according to a report to be discussed at the community services committee meeting on June 13.
That increase occurred despite a 7.5 per cent drop in attendance, which the report attributes to City of Winnipeg's decision to cut opening times on Sundays and Monday evenings and to close Community Connections, the service hub which had operated in the library since 2022.
Across the entire library system, there were 498 safety issues, compared with 361 last year, an increase of 38 per cent, while attendance rose marginally by 0.9 per cent.
Funding for the Community Connections space, which provided low-barrier information services and crisis intervention inside the lobby of the Millennium Library, ended after Dec. 31, 2024.
The space had library staff, community safety hosts and crisis workers who could help de-escalate people and refer them to outside agencies and resources.
Kirsten Wurmann, a librarian and program co-ordinator with the Manitoba Library Association, isn't surprised to see the increased number of safety incidents.
"This coincides exactly with the closure of Community Connections," she said.
"I said this in my last delegation to members of council back in January, and not just me, but many, many other people said that staffing is really important to make a safer space in which to work and to visit."
About half of the incidents at Millennium Library from January to March this year related to inappropriate behaviour, with 156 incidents, a 110 per cent increase from the year before.
There were 32 incidents involving intoxication, 433 per cent higher than last year.
Since the closure of Community Connnections, the number of referrals to outside agencies has plummeted. Workers in the space made 5,886 referrals from January to March last year.
Since the closure, library staff at all other service desks in the library began tracking the same referral data, recording a total of 812 this year.
"This decrease … implies that, since the closure of Community Connections, people may not be entering the library, past the metal detector gates, for their information requests," the report states.
Despite that decrease, the workload of library staff at the service desks has increased substantially.
"When Community Connections closed, we knew that incidents were going to increase, because now there's nobody serving the community," said Mary Burton, executive director of Zoongizi Ode Inc., a non-profit which trains community safety hosts to work inside the library.
After closing Community Connections, the Downtown Community Safety Partnership announced plans to set up an office in the space. But Burton said that office is not open as much as Community Connections was, and doesn't offer the same services.
Referrals made by community crisis workers in Millennium Library rose 245 per cent in the three-month period, according to the report.
"That is because there is nobody at the front line being the go-between between the community and the crisis workers," Burton said.
Mayor Scott Gillingham and other council members have said the front lobby of the library was not the appropriate space for the Community Connections hub, and argued the provincial government should help fund it, since it mostly referred people to provincial services.