The Bill for the Surrey Policing U-Turn Is Coming Due. It Is Larger Than Anyone Admitted.
The cost of dismantling the Surrey Police Service and transitioning back to RCMP contract policing is being revealed in fragments, through budget documents most residents will never read. The total is staggering. The accountability is nonexistent.
The City of Surrey does not publish a single document titled 'what the policing fiasco cost.' That would be too straightforward. Instead, the costs are distributed across budget line items, amortized over fiscal years, embedded in transition agreements, and described in language calibrated to minimize the political damage of the number.
When you add it up — and The Crescent Current has spent time doing exactly that — the combined cost of building the Surrey Police Service, operating it during its existence, and now dismantling it while transitioning back to RCMP contract policing exceeds four hundred million dollars and is still accruing. Some analysts put the eventual all-in figure higher.
Four hundred million dollars is an abstraction until you put it next to something concrete. It is forty new elementary schools. It is the entire capital budget for parks and recreation in Surrey for a decade. It is a meaningful down payment on the rapid transit infrastructure that South Surrey residents have been told, for twenty years, is coming eventually.
None of that was built. None of that was funded. The money went into a policing experiment that a new council decided to reverse before it was complete.
The politicians who made the original decision to create the SPS have largely moved on — some to higher office, some out of politics entirely. The politicians who made the decision to reverse it have framed it as responsible stewardship, cleaning up a mess they inherited. Neither group has stood in front of South Surrey residents and said: here is what this cost, here is who made the decisions, and here is what accountability looks like.
It looks like nothing. Because no one is requiring it to look like anything.
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