Surrey council takes next steps in scrapping municipal force in favour of RCMP

Surrey’s new mayor and council have taken the next step in their plan to scrap the Surrey Police Service and maintain the RCMP as the city’s police force.

Assistant Commissioner Brian Edwards, commanding officer of the Surrey RCMP, appeared at Monday night’s council meeting to lay out the plan for keeping the national force.

"My job is to lead policing for this city, it is the job of others to decide who polices the city,” Edwards said as he made a presentation that council would ultimately vote to accept.

He also presented a chart purporting to show crime in the city trending down over the last decade.

“Certainly we know, by looking at the crime stats that were provided to us last night, we know that Surrey is doing very well on the crime stats,” said Mayor Brenda Locke at a Tuesday morning news conference.

The Surrey Police Union – which represents officers hired by the municipal Surrey Police Service – has a very different take on where things stand when it comes to crime in the city.

“What is important is the crime index. And right now, Surrey is the most dangerous community in Canada,” said Const. Ryan Buhrig, the union’s spokesperson.

“And I think that just shows the work that needs to be done and the work that Surrey Police Service is ready for.”

The union put out a news release Monday morning claiming the city is not being policed with acceptable numbers of officers in the community.

It claims that of 14 shifts over the last week, 50 per cent of them failed to meet the RCMP’s own requirements for minimum staffing levels.

In his own statement sent later in the day, the RCMP’s Edwards fired back, saying the information provided by the union was not accurate.

“It is not common practice for police to release exact breakdowns of operational resources on any given shift. What I can say is that the statistics and numbers provided by the SPU are inaccurate, and in my view, are deliberately intended to mislead the public,” Edwards said. “I call on the Surrey Police Service Executive to expend all efforts to discontinue this harmful rhetoric from the Surrey Police Union.”

At the council meeting, Edwards said the RCMP needs to hire more than 160 new officers to work in Surrey.

That could be a challenge, given that policing in the city appears to be a political football, subject to the whims of a new mayor and council every four years.

“I think it is something that we have to talk to the solicitor general about,” said Locke. “The process in changing your police department has to be much more rigid than it was in the beginning.”

The city expects to have a report on the process of retaining the RCMP on Solicitor General Mike Farnworth’s desk by mid-December.

In the meantime, Locke said she has asked the SPS to curtail its spending, but the force has refused.

“It is obvious that the City of Surrey has absolutely no control over what the Surrey Police Service does,” she said.

That remarkable admission by the city’s mayor – and the chair of its police board – is another sign of just how sour the relationship has become.