Surrey-ites and Farnworth, pay attention to benefits of municipal police force from Alberta’s Grande Prairie City Council’s research!

8 March 2023

ALBERTA’S Grande Prairie City Council that approved the establishment of a municipal police service and transition away from the RCMP, following a years-long assessment of policing in the city that included a public consultation process, a review of existing policing methods, and the creation of a transition plan, led by the consultant MNP, has highlighted the benefits of such a move.

Surrey’s Mayor Brenda Locke and her Surrey Connect councillors – as well as Public Safety Minister and Solicitor General Mike Farnworth – would be well advised to pay heed to these. In an era in which there is a movement towards policing with local and regional accountability as opposed to the outmoded and cumbersome paramilitary RCMP, it is scandalous that Surrey remains the ONLY major city in Canada without its own municipal police force and that there actually exist politicians that want to cling to the RCMP apparently for personal reasons.

One Surrey councillor has actually been EMBARRASSED to share with Surrey-ites that this former Mountie’s son is a Surrey RCMP officer. Locke and his fellow Surrey Connect councillors who promised TRANSPARENCY besides ethical behaviour and so on, have tightly zipped up their lips on this.

Surrey City Council voted to retain the RCMP in the City 5-4 — the motion passed because of the vote of the Surrey Connect councillor whose son is a Surrey Mountie!

How absurd and unethical is that!

Here are the benefits that the Grande Prairie City Council mentioned in its press statement this week:

Research and review undertaken by the City, including the Police Services Model Review and the Police Transition Report recognized several benefits associated with a municipal police service model for Grande Prairie, including:

* increased local oversight, accountability and efficiency offered through a local police commission and local decision-making autonomy.

* improved officer recruitment based on local candidate development and in-community police recruit training offered through a partnership with a leading academic provider.

* increased officer retention based on officers having stronger community ties.

* increased City control over cost elements and ability to more readily direct costs with increased detail than is available today.

* reduced community policing costs, estimated to be less than what is expected under continued RCMP contract policing

* enhanced public safety infrastructure through local development of:

– An Integrated Public Safety Communications Centre (Dispatch)

– A public safety Real Time Operations Centre (24-hour staffing)

– New specialized policing capability in the form of a local Emergency Response Team (Tactical)

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