“If you’re here on the weekend and driving north on Dufferin Street people are coming out of the subway flocking towards Dufferin Mall,” says Penney. “We have 12 million people walking through this mall every year.” It’s been quite a turnaround for the shopping centre that some used to refer to as the “ghetto mall.”

In fact the management has taken to marketing the mall with a sharp, candid approach. The mall’s new slogan is “Dufferin Mall: Really.”

Dufferin Mall is a 567,000 sq. ft. centre with 120 shops and services located in Toronto’s west end, west of the Annex, a block south of the Bloor subway line. It is the second urban mall in Toronto — the first being the Eaton Centre at Yonge and Dundas. For the last year the mall has been focused on a public relations campaign to make it appear more upscale, but at the heart it is still a gathering place for the surrounding community. In with the new H&M and Winners stores are offices for the Catholic Children’s Aid, Costi-Immigrant Services and Abrigo Centre for youth services. The mall has been in the community since 1956 and many of the residents have been life-long customers.

“Even though it is a mall, I look at this as a giant community centre. People come here and shop and a lot of people live around here and walk or come by subway,” says Mary Alkerton, general manager of the mall.

Every day Mitch Boyle and his staff meet people who have lived in the neighbourhood all their life. The role of the mall in these people’s lives plays into how Boyle, supervisor of security at Dufferin Mall, part of the Oxford Properties Group, and his team deal with customers if there is an incident.

And the security department has dealt with some major issues including fatalities, fires, floods, power failures and medical responses, not to mention a high crime rate.

“We’ve had situations where we’ve had to ban people and they say, ”˜you can’t ban me I grew up in this mall”¦’, or they’ve had their prescription on file in the mall for 20 years. That has to be taken into account when we’re having a negative interaction with somebody,” says Boyle.

To get resources to help battle the issues of crime, Boyle started keeping stats during his first six months on the job going back to 2003-2004. He discovered quickly that in just under 50 per cent of cases of violence at the mall the security team had become involved. That led to an investment in the department for training, equipment and staff selection criteria.

His statistical analysis also revealed where and when 80 per cent of all vehicle theft was happening on the property.

“It allowed us to sweep the problem off the property through dedicated security details and we modified our patrol program to keep the problem away,” says Boyle.

When Dufferin Mall began its $11 million physical redevelopment in 2006-2007 the mall embarked on a facelift, in part a response to the gentrification happening in the community. Housing prices and household income were on the rise. 

The management team also saw it as an opportunity to change the way the security department operated and the mandate it would have within the community.

“In shopping centres today we have to look at ourselves as small towns. If you think of that 12 million in foot traffic it’s important that security have a high profile so that the customer feels safe and secure,” says Alkerton. “One of things that was so important was getting the right security person in place and the programs that go a long way to making sure the customer and the tenant feel safe and secure. That makes it a true success story for Dufferin.”

“If we don’t have a safe and secure environment people will not come and shop. I think any kind of incident that would have happened before — whether it was shoplifting or car theft — those things all contributed to the perception and image of the property and keep people away.”

Behind the scenes, the security department had already been undergoing a transformation of its own.

“We started the redevelopment of the security team prior to the mall redevelopment,” says Boyle. “It was really early 2004 and the mandate started coming from management for security to take on a bigger role in the centre than it had in the past.” 

Management saw the potential in the shopping centre and knew security had to be a focus. 

“Oxford said they wanted their malls to be the safest and the cleanest, so that really put the security department in the spotlight,” says Boyle.