Editor:
In its reporting on the city of Surrey’s 2020 to 2025 annual budgets planning, Black Press Media newspapers should be including statistics on the city’s almost daily occurrence of gun and illegal-drug crimes.
The last two decades of appalling evidence plainly indicate that the RCMP’s “big city” model of policing has failed Surrey – and the entire South of Fraser sub-region – miserably during this time.
This evidence urgently demands that something different is tried – namely, replace the failed RCMP with a Surrey municipal police force.
Rather than – through unbalanced reporting – providing a public forum for unethical, politically motivated persons to mindlessly and dangerously advocate for the failed RCMP model of policing to remain, Black Press Media reporters should be asking these persons how – other than replacing the Surrey RCMP with a municipal police force – do they believe the city’s decades-old guns and illegal-drugs scourge should be remedied.
Establishment of a Surrey municipal police force is a legitimate, long-overdue strategy for remedying these problems, and their hugely damaging effects on the city’s economic development and community building.
Additionally, future Black Press Media reporting should focus on the other main cause of Surrey’s (and the South of Fraser’s) decades-old guns and illegal-drugs crimes problems: outrageous lack of leadership by the B.C. and federal governments, and their unconscionable neglect of Surrey and its neighbours during the last 20 years.
Instead of advocating retention of the Surrey RCMP, interest groups should be demanding that the B.C. and federal governments end their decades of neglect of the SOF region and its problems, and immediately commit to providing whatever (temporary) funding and logistical assistance is required to facilitate the establishment and operations of a Surrey municipal police force for at least the next five years.
Roderick V. Louis, White Rock