The Surrey Police Fiasco Cost You $400 Million. Nobody Has Been Held Accountable.
Surrey built a police force from scratch, spent hundreds of millions of public dollars, then a new council voted to dismantle it. The people who made these decisions still have their jobs. You still have the bill.
Let us be precise about what happened, because the magnitude of it tends to get lost in the political back-and-forth. The City of Surrey spent over four hundred million dollars — public money, your money — on a policing transition that was ultimately reversed before it was ever completed. A force was built. Officers were hired. A bureaucracy was constructed. And then a new council, elected on a platform of going back to the RCMP, began the process of unwinding it all.
The number four hundred million dollars deserves to sit on the page by itself for a moment. Four hundred million dollars.
That is not a rounding error in a municipal budget. That is money that could have funded a decade of parks, libraries, roads, and social services for a city that has been screaming for infrastructure investment since before most of its current residents arrived. It is gone. And the people who made the decisions that led to it being gone are, by and large, still collecting salaries funded by the same taxpayers who absorbed the loss.
The original decision to transition away from the RCMP was not irrational. Surrey's contract policing arrangement had real limitations. Local control over policing is a legitimate governance goal. The arguments for a municipal force were made in good faith by people who believed in them.
But the execution was a disaster, and the reversal was worse.
What the Surrey policing saga exposed — beyond the specific failures of planning and political will — is something deeper about how this city makes decisions. Large commitments are made in election cycles. The costs of those commitments land in the next election cycle. The politicians who made the original call are no longer accountable. The politicians who inherited the mess are incentivized to make their own large commitment — reversal — without fully reckoning with its cost. And the cycle repeats.
Meanwhile, the residents of South Surrey and White Rock, who have no municipal police force, who have always been served by the RCMP detachment regardless of what was happening in the political theatre downtown, watched hundreds of millions of dollars evaporate on a fight that had nothing to do with the quality of policing in their neighbourhood.
Someone needs to conduct a full, public, independent audit of every dollar spent on the SPS transition and the reversal. Not a report that gets buried in a committee. A real accounting, with names attached to decisions and a clear explanation of where the money went and whether any of it can be recovered.
The residents of this city deserve that at a minimum. What they will probably get is a press release.
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