Maple Ridge's RCMP Detachment Is Short-Staffed. Residents Are Noticing the Difference.

Response times are longer. Non-emergency calls go longer without follow-up. The RCMP detachment serving Maple Ridge and Pitt Meadows is operating below its authorized strength. The implications for public safety are real.

The Ridge Meadows RCMP detachment has an authorized strength — the number of officers it is funded and structured to deploy. Like most RCMP detachments in British Columbia, it is operating below that strength. The gap is not large enough to be a crisis in every sense, but it is large enough to be felt by residents and businesses who interact with the detachment.

Response times to non-emergency calls have lengthened. Follow-up on property crime files — the break-ins, the vehicle thefts, the commercial burglaries that don't rise to the level of immediate response but matter enormously to the people they happen to — has become less consistent.

RCMP recruitment and retention is a national issue that Maple Ridge cannot solve locally. The national shortage of officers willing to serve in non-urban detachments at RCMP compensation levels is a structural problem that requires federal action.

What Maple Ridge can do is be specific and public about how the staffing gap is affecting service delivery in this community, and insist — in its formal communications with E Division and with the federal government — on a timeline for filling the gap and a plan for what happens in the interim.

A community that is dealing with the visible public safety pressures Maple Ridge is dealing with needs its policing resources to be fully deployed. Right now they are not.

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