BURST
Police forces are splitting apart in B.C. despite more than two decades of recommendations and discussion on amalgamating municipal police agencies into larger regional forces.
In Metro Vancouver, Pitt Meadows is establishing its own RCMP detachment, separate from Maple Ridge. A new $21.7-million building for the RCMP is under construction.
Langley Township also plans to establish its own RCMP detachment, separate from the City of Langley, making the breakup official last month .
In each case, the communities had shared RCMP detachments, but now want more control over their own detachments.
The B.C. government did not respond to Postmedia’s questions put to it last week on why it’s giving the OK to fragment policing, creating more, smaller police forces. The moves by Pitt Meadows and Langley township require provincial approval.
Kash Heed, a former B.C. solicitor general and longtime advocate of amalgamating smaller forces into regional forces, called the moves a step backward.
He also pointed to Kelowna, which is considering creating its own municipal force , and said it is a concern because what is needed is a regional force in the Okanagan, not separate independent RCMP detachments in several communities.
The City of Surrey is in the midst of a controversial transition to its own municipal force from the RCMP.
“There are endless examples on the balkanization of our police services in British Columbia,” said Heed, now a city councillor in Richmond.
Heed supports the 2022 recommendations of an all-party legislative committee on policing reform that said B.C. should replace the RCMP with a provincial police force and examine several areas for regionalization, including southern Vancouver Island and parts of the Lower Mainland and Okanagan.
“We need to come together and have a unified police service that’s going to deliver the accountability, that’s going to deliver the efficiencies and certainly deliver the effectiveness,” says Heed.
The all-party legislative committee noted that having police services structured according to municipal boundaries has led to gaps in communication and administration, as well as fragmented services. Amalgamating police forces by region can increase efficiency and effectiveness of services that are highly technical, capital-intensive and specialized without sacrificing policing that is informed and responsive to the community, the committee said in its report.
However, Craig Hodge, a Coquitlam city councillor and co-chairman of the local government roundtable on modernizing the B.C. Police Act, says communities should have the ability to choose the policing model best suited for them.
That’s particularly important given that policing can represent as much as 40 per cent of some local governments’ budgets, he said.
“I think we’re seeing communities with integrated detachments de-integrating because they want to be able to deliver a different level of service than their neighbour. It really goes against this whole idea that one size is going to fit all,” said Hodge.
He noted it does make sense for economies of scale and for operational efficiency, and because criminals don’t respect borders, to have certain parts of police services amalgamated, such as for homicide and organized crime. That is something that does take place to some extent under operations such as the Integrated Homicide Investigation Team.
The debate over regionalizing police forces also comes against the backdrop of questions about whether the RCMP should become solely a federal force and focus on areas such as cross-border, organized and financial crime, and stop providing contract policing to municipalities and provinces like B.C. because it drains their staffing resources.
The history of calls to examine regionalizing policing stretch as far back as 1990.
That year, the B.C. government launched an inquiry into policing, where police executives and other experts favoured regionalization, while most mayors and police board members were opposed.
In 2007, then B.C.’s Solicitor General John Les said he was ready to talk about a regional police force for Metro Vancouver, an idea that had been raised by Heed, who was then the police chief for West Vancouver. Heed became solicitor general in 2009 and again advocated a regional force.
In 2012, former judge and B.C. attorney general Wally Oppal, who headed an inquiry into the response of law enforcement into missing women and serial-killer Robert Pickton’s case, recommended that Metro Vancouver form a regional police force.
So far, the B.C. government response to the recommendations, including to those from the all-legislative committee, has been muted.
Mike Farnworth, a recent B.C. solicitor general, said in 2023 the idea is not on the front burner.
The province’s current solicitor general, Garry Begg, who sat on the all-party legislative committee and is a former RCMP officer, has not said what are the government’s plans, if any, for a provincial police force or combining numerous police forces into regional forces in Metro Vancouver and Greater Victoria.
The B.C. government did not make Begg or someone else available for an interview for this article.
In Pitt Meadows, the council believes having its own force will better serve the needs of the community, with a population of 19,000, than a combined force with Maple Ridge, with a population of 102,000.
In a recent council meeting that provided a transition update on its new force, Pitt Meadows councillor Bob Meachen said now the city gets to manage the resources for which it is paying. “That’s a fundamental reason for doing what we are doing,” he said.
Meachen noted that increased costs from areas such as body-worn cameras that the RCMP is bringing in would have to have been paid under the old model as well.
Mayor Nicole MacDonald noted the transition is on time and on budget.
“There are lots of questions from other areas that are seeing what Pitt Meadows is doing,” she said.