One month after the development of the controversial Land Park Society Facebook group–known for following and taking photos of homeless Sacramentans on the Broadway corridor–the Upper Land Park neighborhood seeks to hire a private security firm at $25,000 per year.
Upper Land Park residents are scheduled to meet with Paladin Private Security today at 2 p.m. at Riverside United Methodist Church to discuss a deal in which the private security firm would patrol the neighborhood.
In posts in the Land Park Society page, Paladin has been cited regularly by people trying to remove homeless people from Sacramento’s Broadway corridor.
“It’s so tone deaf,” said Hannah Williams, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. “There’s no concept of shared space or a larger community outside of their wealth bubble.”
Williams wrote last week on Sacramento’s DSA website about what she viewed as Land Park’s “economic segregation.”
According to Stephanie Duncan, one of the most active members of the Land Park Society, as well as a board member of the Land Park Community Association, the residents working with Paladin are not associated with either LPS or the LPCA.
But Duncan has regularly referenced Paladin in her posts on the Land Park Society page about getting homeless people off of the Broadway corridor.
Land Park Community Association board member Stephanie Duncan posts on the Land Park Society about removing homeless people from the Broadway corridor using Paladin Security Systems.
On a Friday, Oct. 6 post in the group, Duncan uploaded photos of the homes, tents and belongings of people living on the streets around Broadway. She wrote that she approached a person wearing a Greater Broadway Partnership shirt and asked them to “have these areas cleaned up.”
When the man demurred, she said, “You can call Paladin to come and deal with them, right?”
Duncan did not respond to questions asking if Upper Land Park’s potential new Paladin patrol has to do with homeless folks in the neighborhood.
According to Paladin owner Matt Carroll, just four Sacramento neighborhoods have enlisted the company for their services, but four more have recently reached out to the group.
One of the neighborhoods using Paladin, according to an earlier email from Duncan, is South Land Park.
Duncan says Paladin’s work with South Land Park is done with a group called the Neighborhood Security Association, run by Emily Hannon and Katy Grimes. Hannon is a doctor with Kaiser Permanente and Grimes is a conservative writer with Flash Report who also runs a Breitbart-style blog.
The neighborhoods using Paladin’s services tend to be the more affluent in the region. Their first client in Sacramento was the Fab 40’s area in East Sacramento.
Neighborhoods say they use these services to reduce crime near their homes.
Carroll says that security work with neighborhoods is different than with private or gated communities. They can’t make a neighborhood member turn down music the way they might with a member of a home owners association in a gated community.
With neighborhoods, their work may involve car burglars or a “local transient that has a heroin problem.”
Stay tuned to VOICES: River City for more on today’s meeting and the Land Park Society Facebook page.
Correction: This article has been updated to use the proper name of the Upper Land Park neighborhood.
