Surrey’s shift to municipal police force offers valuable lessons, experts say

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The years-long mess and bitter squabbles over transitioning from the RCMP to a municipal police force in Surrey, B.C., have provided lessons for communities across Canada looking to do the same, said expert observers and those at the centre of the tempest.

The precedent-setting shift, which the province’s Solicitor-General ordered to continue Wednesday after five years of slow movement and then a complete reversal, is something that a new council should not have been able to overturn within one election cycle, they said.

And better mechanisms were needed to ensure the transition moved smoothly said both the current chief of the Surrey Police Service and a Simon Fraser University professor who participated in some of the province’s early research on the shift.

There was supposed to be a joint command set up early in the process, according to an early report, but never was, allowing the RCMP to slow the transition, said Curt Griffiths, director of SFU’s police studies centre.

“That never happened and so it has been tension in the last few years over things like whether the SPS can have patrol cars. Things went off the rails,” Prof. Griffiths said.

Solicitor-General Mike Farnworth also announced Jessica McDonald, the former chief executive of BC Hydro, as a special implementation adviser, a position which Prof. Griffiths said would have helped in preventing the power struggle that erupted between the two forces.

SPS Chief Constable Norm Lipinski agreed on the benefit of having a provincial appointee in place to ensure that all three levels of government involved – the federal government that oversees the RCMP, the province that decides on policing and the city that pays the bill – worked together.

“I would recommend at the beginning of any future transition that there be one person appointed to work on this full-time.”

Chief Lipiniski is now hoping the police service can get back on track with hiring, a process that has been on hold for six months since the new council, elected in October, immediately voted in favour of staying with the RCMP.

Once the force has more than 50 per cent of the officers authorized for the city, it will become the “police of jurisdiction” instead of the RCMP.

The transition also means altering the city’s and service’s budgets, something that will be addressed at the next SPS board meeting.

Before Mayor Brenda Locke and her party gained the majority last October, Surrey had budgeted $72.5-million for the Surrey Police Service for 2022 and $96-million for the RCMP, when the transition was still moving ahead.

The new council approved a budget for 2023 that allocated only $48.7-million for 2023 for the new force and $166-million for the RCMP. The service was not allowed to hire new officers, beyond the approximately 340 already on staff.

Ms. Locke, who issued only a brief statement expressing her disappointment in the province’s decision, hasn’t said yet whether the city will sue the province on the grounds that it contravened the Police Act.

At this point, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of public support for a continued battle.

Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim issued a statement saying its “time to move forward” on policing in the Lower Mainland and pledged to work with Surrey. City of Langley Mayor Nathan Pachal expressed relief that the decision may improve his own policing situation, where he hasn’t been able to fill all the available RCMP positions in years.

Mr. Farnworth’s rationale for ordering Surrey to proceed with the transition to the new municipal force is that it would destabilize both Surrey and other cities in B.C. if the RCMP remained there.

He said the city’s plan did not meet the province’s requirement for the RCMP to show how it would hire 182 new officers – the number needed to get back to full strength – without taking people away from rural and suburban communities.

The SPS still needs to hire about 400 more officers to get to Surrey’s authorized strength of 734.

Chief Lipinski said that level of hiring won’t affect the province’s “policing ecosystem” as much as staying with the RCMP would have.

The RCMP draw officers either straight from the force’s training school in Regina, which currently doesn’t even produce enough graduates to replace those retiring or resigning, or from other B.C. communities.

But the Surrey police force can hire from a much broader pool, the chief said.

About 20 per cent of the force’s officers so far have come from out of province – many from either municipal forces in metro Toronto, where the cost of living is about the same as B.C.’s, or from RCMP on the Prairies. About 35 were hired from the Surrey RCMP detachment.

He also hopes to hire about 45 new officers a year from B.C.’s Justice Institute.

Chief Lipinski said the plan is to go back to hiring slowly – about 35 officers every two months – in order to not create too much disruption and to allow the RCMP in Surrey to redeploy its officers there in an orderly way.