Surrey Police Service is now BC's third largest municipal police department

Surrey Police Service

Over the span of just 18 months, Surrey Police Service (SPS) has grown from one employee to a total of 275 employees.

This includes 235 police officers and 40 civilians, as of the end of May 2022, according to a newly released SPS annual report.

The makeup of officers includes 152 constables, 47 sergeants, 19 staff sergeants and 10 inspectors, three superintendents, three deputy chief constables, and the chief constable.

With these numbers, SPS is now the third largest municipal-governed police department in British Columbia — behind the Vancouver Police Department (VPD) and Victoria Police Department. It is also the sixth largest police department in the province when both municipal and RCMP forces are accounted for.

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The vast majority of the SPS officers to date are highly trained and experienced, with only 7% being newly trained recruits. In its latest application intake for new recruits, the SPS received over 400 applications.

The average years of experience for constables is 8.8 years, while sergeants and other higher-ranking officers have an average of over 20 years of experience.

Over half (55%) of the hired officers are from other municipal police departments, and 38% are from an RCMP detachment. The SPS has hired officers from 20 different police agencies across the country, with most coming from various forces in the Lower Mainland.

The attrition of highly trained and experienced VPD officers to the SPS was an expressed concern of a Vancouver city councillor in late 2021, given that the VPD has been struggling to hire new recruits to not only meet the growing demand for services and complex urban issues, but also to cover the rate of 50 officers retiring annually. The competition for officers required police departments across BC to place upward pressure on increasing compensation and benefits in recruitment efforts.

The VPD is particularly at risk of losing even more officers to the SPS, given that about 41% of their staff already live in Surrey and its neighbouring suburban communities, as of early 2020.

SPS is now targeting to have 295 officers deployed by May 2023, about 2.5 years after the hiring of its first staff person.

As the Surrey RCMP are still the police department of the jurisdiction, officers with the SPS are integrated into the Surrey RCMP detachment every two months. As of late July 2022, 120 SPS officers have been deployed — assigned to work under the command of the Surrey RCMP.

The timeline for the handover of the Surrey RCMP’s jurisdiction to the SPS has not been determined. The SPS still needs to further develop its policies, procedures, equipment, and technology for taking over Surrey’s policing needs.

The establishment of a municipally-controlled police department for Surrey was one of the key platform promises of Mayor Doug McCallum in the 2018 civic election, but the move has seen some criticism for its higher than anticipated costs and perceived lack of public consultation.

Some opponents of McCallum running in the 2022 civic election have indicated they will make it a priority to stage a referendum on further proceeding with the SPS and/or terminating the SPS, but it remains to be seen whether it is feasible to rewind on the new municipal police force given its highly advanced stage of implementation.

Late last year, Elections BC declared the failure of a community-led petition to pursue a binding referendum on the SPS. The petition did not gather signatures from at least 10% of the registered voters in each of BC’s 87 electoral districts in order to be successful. The initiative reported it collected 42,942 signatures from Surrey residents, which exceeds the 10% threshold of Surrey’s eligible voters, which Election BC indicates as 35,056 signatures.

About $25 million in operating, capital, and transition costs were expended by the SPS in 2021, and a further $79 million is budgeted for 2022.

The actual one-time policing transition has a budgeted 2020 to 2024 cost of $63.7 million, with $4.6 million spent in 2020, $15.6 million spent in 2021, and $43.5 million remaining for 2022 to 2024. To date, the vast majority of the one-time transition costs relate to developing the information technology infrastructure for SPS.

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