Surrey Police Service “front-line” uniformed officers will patrol Whalley and Newton while their RCMP counterparts cover South Surrey, Cloverdale, Fleetwood and Guildford after the city's policing landscape changes over on Nov. 29.
That's when the SPS takes over from the Surrey RCMP as the city's police of jurisdiction. The SPS’s front-line patrols will then progressively expand into the other parts of Surrey as the RCMP's presence diminishes and the SPS ranks grow from currently 446 officers to a full complement of 785. Right now the SPS has 30 vehicles deployed.
"From front-line resourcing there will be concentrations of SPS officers in District 1 and District 3 and there will be concentrations of RCMP officers in the other three districts on the front lines," SPS spokesman Ian MacDonald confirmed for the Now-Leader. "And then both agencies will have other policing responsibilities that will be city-wide.
"More and more of the services that are being temporarily supported by the RCMP will be steadily replaced by the SPS. Is that the snapshot for Nov. 29? Entirely correct. Front-line in two districts for SPS, front-line in three districts for the RCMP. But my emphasis would be it isn't a static picture. It absolutely will be what Nov. 29 looks like but in the months that follow after that, incrementally SPS will be taking over more of both the city-wide and the district front-line policing."
The Mounties won't be working 'red under blue,' but assisting the SPS as a provincial policing support unit that's supplied by the provincial government. "Obviously you can't have two police of jurisdictions so at that point, whether you want to call it the Surrey RCMP or you want to call it BC RCMP, a component of the RCMP then becomes a provincial support unit," MacDonald explained.
Asked for the rationale for SPS front-line patrols initially being assigned specifically to Newton and Whalley, MacDonald noted that Newton is where the headquarters for policing is located as well as the dispatch centre. "If we are the POJ and responsible for Surrey, I would think our headquarters and the district in which the headquarters resides would be an important component," he said.
As for Whalley, he explained, if District 3 is where HQ is and "where the day will start for most front-line police officers, we were kind of looking for a contiguous connection to another district" and therefore it makes sense to "connect through" to a busy neighbouring district. "If we can say District 3 was the given, because of the location of HQ, based on our resources it made a lot more sense that we would go to where the bulk of the calls are coming from, given the resourcing we have on the front line."
Former Surrey mayor Bob Bose suggested that "the bottom line is we are being balkanized, no question about it" and added "the dynamic that's being set up here is highly corrosive. It's tough enough to maintain social cohesion without this kind of stuff.
"It's ridiculous that Surrey's being policed by a provincial police force."
MacDonald stressed that aside of the front-line patrolling, other policing services will be done by the SPS and RCMP throughout Surrey. "You will always have that crossover. It's not going to be one of those occasional things. My point is simply we're not going to be looking at a map and going okay, that thing's happening, whose district is it? The dispatchers, who are a very professional crew, will send police resources from wherever they need to send them. And the response, whether it's the provincial, the temporary support from the RCMP or whether it's SPS, we're going to deal with the issue, we're going to respond and we want there to be no impact. We want this to be a seamless transition.
"Here you have have two distinct and different agencies and the baton needs to be passed," MacDonald said, "and so there are a lot of considerations but paramount in everybody's mind is public safety."
Meantime, a Surrey Police Board meeting on Oct. 29 heard results from a 2024 City of Surrey public opinion survey conducted by Leger Inc. of 808 participants in July found that 18 per cent of Surrey residents indicated they were a victim of crime, 61 per cent reported the crime while 36 per cent did not, and that 39 per cent of residents fear walking alone at night in their community.
And as for police operations, the survey results indicate, 66 per cent of the public prefers a mix of foots patrols and vehicle patrols, 57 per cent of respondents placed a high/very high rating on community consultation, 84 per cent agreed/strongly agreed that Surrey Police Service officers should wear body cameras, 60 per cent think its somewhat/very important that police officers are fluent in "other-than-English," and 43 per cent think there should be an equal number of male and female police officers.
