Council-hired security guards waging local war on poor
On 1 September, the Maribyrnong City Council in Melbourne’s west initiated a six-month “security” program in central Footscray. The program involves two private security guards patrolling local streets for 24 hours a week at a total cost of $100,000.
The program was initiated at a council meeting on 22 July, at which councillors (including Labor Party and Greens members and one independent) voted to hire the guards. In the lead-up to the meeting, twenty businesses in Footscray lobbied the council to have an ongoing security presence after they trialled hiring guards for themselves. Maribyrnong Council argues that having private guards in Footscray will “shape a CBD that is safe, welcoming and reflective of Footscray's growing community”. Recently, the council also declared that CCTV systems in the area have been upgraded so they link directly to Victoria Police for faster police responses.
Maribyrnong isn’t the only council hiring its own security force. It took its lead from the City of Melbourne and its “Melbourne Model” of security. This was recently made permanent by Lord Mayor Nicholas Reece after an initial three-month trial. It involves eleven hired guards patrolling the streets of Melbourne’s CBD at a cost of $2 million a year. In June, Wyndham City Council in Melbourne’s outer west also hired guards for a 12-month trial at a cost of $372,000. As in Footscray, these measures have been justified on the basis of protecting community safety.
Why do local councils see it as necessary to build up their own private armies of security guards in a context where police funding in Victoria has increased by 88 percent in the past ten years (from $2.4 billion in 2014-15 to $4.5 billion in 2025-26)? If that increase of more than $2 billion (along with more restrictive bail laws and other boosts to police powers) hasn’t been enough to combat so-called “anti-social behaviour” and petty crime in places like Footscray, why would anyone think an extra $100,000 on security guards will make the crucial difference?
It appears, in fact, that no-one much does. The police have used councils’ hiring of private security guards to push for yet more funding from the government. Police Association of Victoria chief executive Wayne Gatt recently told the Age, “[A]reas of high crime or where large groups of people commonly gather, were once areas of high police visibility via patrols, but due to capacity issues for Victoria Police, they’ve become areas where crime now flourishes”.
The reality is that neither more private security nor more police will address crime and its underlying causes, the main ones in a place like Footscray are poverty and homelessness. Not only does the beefing up of the state’s punitive functions on a local level do nothing to address these issues, but by targeting the most vulnerable people in the community, they are likely to make things worse.
Take the homeless. According to Australian Bureau of Statistics data from 2023, on any given night there are 694 people in Footscray without a home. These people will be among the first victims of the council’s security blitz. Council-hired guards will work with police to enforce local laws, including fining people for begging, “offensive behaviour”, having an open container of alcohol, drug use or sleeping rough in a way that interferes with local businesses or pedestrians.
In the absence of measures focused on broader issues of social welfare, fining and harassing the homeless and other vulnerable people will only contribute to entrenching them as a permanent underclass. Councils may prefer this to the status quo to the extent that it could temporarily push the homeless away from high-traffic areas, but it’s dubious to claim this will have any real impact on crime. The most common type of crimes occurring in Footscray, according to recent data, are theft and burglary. This isn’t something that a couple of security guards walking the streets handing out fines for begging or drinking alcohol are likely to do anything much about.
To see where the logic of constantly pouring more money into policing and security leads, we need only look at the US. US police are among the best funded and well armed in the world, and it’s the world leader in locking people away in prison. Spending on private security is also high and rapidly increasing.
Despite that, signs of extreme poverty, homelessness, mental illness and addiction are visible almost everywhere in major US cities, along with the kinds of petty crime and “antisocial behaviour” that can go with that. And, of course, instead of thinking a change of course might be necessary, US politicians only ever use the scenes of destitution as an excuse to advocate more violent police repression and more prisons.
The ever present threat of state-sponsored violence in the US only helps create a more violent society overall, and it’s Black Americans and other oppressed groups that are the main victims. To the extent we go down that path, it will be the same here. We’ll see more incidents like the murder of Somali Australian man Abdifatah Ahmed, who was shot by police in Footscray on 17 April. And—just as in the US—the knee-jerk response to such incidents by those in power will be racism and repression rather than policies that might help those in need.
What places like Footscray need is investment in community spaces, more public housing, a rise in social welfare and wages, and caps on food prices. For a fraction of the extra $2 billion that’s been poured into the Victoria Police budget over the past ten years, the people experiencing homelessness in Footscray and across Melbourne’s west could have been given permanent shelter. That’s the kind of solution we need—not more police and prisons, or councils spending money hiring private guards.
