“Bureaucrats with Badges”: Bylaw Enforcement and the Invisibilization of Homelessness
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Homelessness affects at least 25,000 people every day in Canada alone. Although research has documented responses to homelessness involving the police and private security, there is much less scholarship investigating municipal bylaw enforcement officers’ role in the governance of homelessness. We explore how bylaw officers regulate homelessness in Ontario, Canada. Drawing on surveys and semi-structured interviews with bylaw officers, our analysis demonstrates that bylaw officers have been called upon to manage a “crisis of complaints” related to the increasing visibility of homelessness across Ontario. To manage these complaints, bylaw officers rely on burden shuffling, first, moving people along because it is the most efficient way to manage homelessness complaints in their jurisdiction. Bylaw officers also engage in bureaucratic burden shuffling, reclassifying complaints to other agencies. We argue that, through their mechanisms of enforcing public space orders, bylaw officers engage in reluctant criminalization using invisibilization tactics. These strategies constitute another form of pervasive penality, or a punitive process of policing, through move along orders and threats of arrest, ultimately leading to the invisibilization of homelessness. Such responses increase the precarity that often characterizes unhoused people’s lives and misrepresents homelessness as a deviancy issue rather than a human rights violation.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it