Victoria business owner Rachelle Keeley has had enough and six weeks ago was the tipping point.
“I got assaulted right here on Johnson Street,” she told Global News.
“A man came up behind me, wanted to know what was on my phone, grabbed my wrist, I put my back up against this government building and luckily the security guard came out.”
Keeley said the police have not been able to identify the man because he was wearing a bandana and she couldn’t see his face.
“Last Tuesday there was two (men) in front of my office,” she said.
“Separate incidents, but the same day, one with his shirt off, the other one threatening to hurt me really bad. We called it into 911, but apparently that’s not an emergency in downtown Victoria when a woman’s being threatened by someone who’s out of their mind, stoned.”
Keely owns Victoria Suites, a boutique hotel, which is next to the supportive housing building at 844 Johnson Street.
The hotel has been at that location for about 13 years.
“We host the doctor’s programme, so we have young female doctors coming into the neighbourhood late at night to pick up keys for their hospital rotation,” Keely said.
But she said the street disorder and crime has become worse and worse.
“It’s just an influx of drug dealers taking advantage of these people,” she said.
“I don’t think these people are going to have any opportunity to move forward with their lives until we can separate them from the drug dealers. So I’m really pro-mandatory care for these people, where they can get clean, they can get nutrition, they can get counselling, and they can be safe.”
In June, the City of Victoria unveiled a draft plan aimed at boosting public safety.
The 79-page plan includes dozens of recommendations for all three levels of government, broken into categories including housing, health care, service delivery and policing.
In July, the city unveiled a $10-million plan to boost public safety in the city’s downtown core.
The money was earmarked primarily for hiring new police and bylaw officers, temporary housing, and public works to ensure “the cleanliness, hygiene, look, feel, atmosphere of the whole city.”
But Keely said there has not been enough change.
“It’s devastating,” she said.
“The mental health of my staff is always in jeopardy, always in jeopardy. One of my staff had a man covered in blood approach her, demanding she buy him a cappuccino, an ice cap.
“Another one had her daughter hit in the head by a homeless person. It wasn’t hard, but still, he doesn’t have the right to touch her.”
Keely said Tuesday was the last straw.
“I asked a guy to move along because he’s stripped down half naked in front of our business,” she said.
“I asked him to move along. I got told to ‘F’ off. Paladin security couldn’t do anything because he is technically on city property… Then the second fellow wanted to use his crack pipe right in front of my business. And when I asked them to move, he said basically, I need to use my pipe. And I said, ‘That’s my point, that you’re going to use your pipe in front of my business’.
“Then he told me I was going to get hurt really, really bad. I asked my staff to call 911 when that threat came out. And the 911 operator didn’t feel that it was an emergency, a woman being threatened in downtown Victoria by a person clearly out of their mind on drugs.”
Keely said that is when she decided she had to move her business out of the downtown area.
“Our mental health is at risk every single day and our safety as well,” she added.
Victoria Mayor Marianne Alto said Keely’s situation is heartbreaking.
“I know that every day feels like a lifetime and I’ve huge empathy for that,” she said.
“This is actually one of the many examples of why it is that the city has run headlong into community safety and well-being and as you’ll remember in July we made some significant announcements about millions of dollars going into this type of work to respond, but also to intervene in these types of issues.”
Alto acknowledged that the work is not happening as quickly as she would like but the first extensive public update on their progress will be announced in a few weeks.
“All I can say is that the actions that we laid out in July are underway,” she said.
“The amount of money that we’re pouring into even the first six months of this plan is significant. As you know, it’s almost more than $13 million, actually, and that is coming at the expense of a number of other municipal programmes that are important.
“It’s not that they’re not, but we’ve made the decision very proactively that this is the absolute paramount issue of the moment, and it is examples like yours today that have pushed us into making decisions which a municipality would not usually be forced to make.”