Jeff Shantz: Surrey 'fiasco' worth considering in Sask. RCMP debate
A criminology teacher from Surrey, B.C. points to the rising costs of that city's move to replace the RCMP with a municipal force.
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Debates over policing in Saskatchewan are heating up, as dissatisfaction with the RCMP, and heightened scrutiny of the force have some calling for a transition to a new provincial force.
These debates can be productive, but only if they take a broadened view of public safety, health, and wellbeing, and are not confined to a choice between police forces.
As a resident of Surrey, British Columbia, and a criminologist, I have experienced firsthand, and analysed, the disastrous impacts of a transition from the RCMP to a municipal force, the Surrey Police Service (SPS).
This transition has been nothing short of a fiasco, costing our city hundreds of millions of dollars that could have funded and supported essential social resources that would have benefitted overall community safety and well-being.
The costs of a full provincial transition will be immense, and they will grow well beyond initial estimates. The base expense of the Surrey transition capital costs alone quickly ballooned from $45 million, in estimates made in June 2019, to $63.7 million a year later.
The following year, it went up by another $17 million. Those expenses only cover the move from one uniform to another. They do not count additional pay costs, new technology and infrastructure costs, IT services, etc.
A draft report this year projects that from 2023 to 2027 it would cost an estimated $235.4 million to continue the transition.
These expenses had social costs. Projects halted or delayed to cover the transition included an Indigenous gathering place, an ice rink complex, two community centres and libraries, land acquisition for a performing arts space, as well as a child-care centre.
People need to ask, “Are you getting the change you are paying for?” A key issue involves the makeup of a new force. In Surrey, most of the leadership of the SPS was drawn from the RCMP, the very force the city was supposed to be replacing.
Many officers, too, came from the RCMP. Are you really changing policing cultures if you are relying substantially on those trained in the previous culture to lead the way?
There are significant reasons for many to seek a change from the RCMP. Kevin Lynch and Jim Mitchell do a fine job of outlining these in their StarPhoenix opinion piece. It is entirely understandable that people want something better.
We must remember, though, that the problems of the RCMP are also problems of policing itself. Provincial and municipal forces have their own disturbing cases of misogyny within their ranks. They also disproportionately harm racialized, especially Indigenous and Black, people and communities.
The debates over policing should provide the opportunity for a thoughtful and well-considered deliberation on social well-being.
An opportunity exists for seriously addressing structural conditions — housing costs, poverty, youth unemployment, toxic drug supplies, racism — that seriously impact well-being.
It is well established that police do not stop crime, and more policing does not reduce crime rates. Underlying issues must be addressed.
This did not happen in Surrey. Instead, the policing question became a morass of hostility, captured within an unhelpful dichotomy of either the RCMP or the SPS, something like a team sport.
This dichotomy marginalized considerations of other social resources that contribute to public safety and how they are negatively impacted by a further expenditure of public resources into more policing — hundreds of millions spent, and now apparently wasted, on a failed police transition.
Given the enormous costs involved it behooves all residents to think about how the money could be best spent on the range of resources that contribute to healthy and safe communities.
Failing to do so will simply reproduce the very problems that a police transition is seeking to overcome — problems of a policing-centric view of public safety but with new uniforms.
Jeff Shantz teaches criminology at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Surrey.
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With Files from the Edmonton Journal and the Montreal Gazette
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