Controversy over Surrey law enforcement should spark debate over the business case for re-establishing a made-in-B.C. crime-fighting solution. City of Surrey mayoral candidate Tom Gill rekindled that controversy by advocating a third-party review of the municipality’s policing options.
Surrey, along with other B.C. municipalities that use the RCMP as their police force, signed a 20-year contract in 2012 to continue employing it as their crime-fighting organization of choice. But that renewal was far from a slam dunk six years ago, and the issue of resurrecting local law enforcement options has remained.
The business case for local policing goes beyond dollars and cents. Because the federal government covers at least 10% of its costs for municipalities, the RCMP option is usually cheaper. But its law-enforcement effectiveness is open to debate.
Surrey, with its escalating gang violence, is a prime example. Challengers to the Surrey First political organization have questioned whether the RCMP is up to the task of effective law enforcement in the fast-growing city.
The bigger issue for Surrey and the rest of Metro Vancouver, however, is the region’s patchwork of municipal and RCMP police forces, which unnecessarily complicates Lower Mainland policing co-ordination and undermines law enforcement efficiency.
A single regional police force headquartered in B.C. and fiscally accountable to the province could be more effective than Canada’s national force, which is headquartered in Ottawa and beholden to federal rather than local authorities. The RCMP’s policing expertise, after all, is national and rural, not urban.
Much of its locally deployed personnel is also drawn from other areas of the country. Homegrown talent and expertise are therefore largely missing from local RCMP detachments, as are the employment opportunities for British Columbians that would be available were a regional force to police B.C., which has not directly managed its own police force since 1950. The Surrey debate should open the door to a cost-benefit analysis of resurrecting that force.
