Unfair Billing: Community Cuts to Pay for Cops

The bill for Surrey’s proposed municipal police force has come due early and with awful social costs attached. In a 5-4 vote on December 12, 2018, Surrey council approved the financial plan’s capital program which includes massive cuts to community services and infrastructures either previously approved or already underway. But which paves the way for transition to a municipal force, freeing up some of the associated funds.

As announced earlier the proposed budget for 2019 includes cuts to a range of social resources including an Indigenous gathering place, an ice rink in Cloverdale, plans for community center and library expansions, a child-care project, a proposed cultural corridor, and parks. Significantly, the cuts total about $136 million—which is almost exactly the estimated cost of a transition to the new municipal force favored by Mayor Doug McCallum and his Safe Surrey government. The budget will be moved forward at the regular Surrey council meeting of December 17.

In addition to the programs targeted, it is very telling which funds have been preserved in an austerity budget geared toward expanded policing functions and costs. The proposed budget will keep the RCMP at its currently bloated level of 843. However, the city, which McCallum says needs to lives within its means when it comes to community resource spending is committed to an additional $4.81 million in policing funds for costs including the annualization of the 12 RCMP positions added in 2018, salary increases, operations and maintenance costs, and increased funding for integrated teams. Another $1.38 million in costs is planned for RCMP support services.

The budget austerity (for all but police) also proposes spending an extra $330,000 per year on the bylaw department, a key mechanism in the criminalization of homeless people and poor tenants in Surrey. This includes the bylaw department’s four-year-old Community Patrol Officer Program, a cornerstone of poor bashing enforcement.

On the whole, there is an additional funding commitment of $9.27 million for public safety. This as important social resources, infrastructures, and services that actually support longer term and more effective public safety (which police cannot provide) are gutted to prepare a move to a municipal force. All of which shows that stated concerns about safety from politicians are hollow and really about an ideological commitment to cops.

As Surrey residents are told that we have to tighten our belts. There is always plenty for police even as austerity is pushed on communities. Unfair billing indeed.

Bar Watch is Straight Up Racial and Class Profiling

Bar Watch, a dubious program that allows cops to arbitrarily harass people and chase them out of bars and restaurants—deeming them inadmissible patrons because a cop does not like their look—is an instrument of racial and class profiling, straight no chaser. It adds more power to the discretion that police already have to target people on the basis of superficial characteristics, stereotypes and prejudices—on the basis of an officer’s assumptions about someone’s appearance.

Cops actually tell students in classrooms in Surrey that one of the things they look for is Crooks and Castles gear. Seriously. This is the level that this nonsense is carried out at. And cops and politicians buy it.

Sadly, the City of Surrey has fallen hook, line, and sinker for this scam of targeted policing initiating its own Inadmissible Patrons Program on December 6, 2018. The program is a partnership of Surrey RCMP, the City of Surrey and BC Restaurant and Food Services Association. It makes police private security for businesses that want to manage their customers.

The RCMP are pretty straightforward about the flimsy basis for targeting someone (“lifestyle”) and the power it will give individual officers:

“An inadmissible patron is defined as a person whose lifestyle, associations and/or activities pose a risk to public safety, either directly or from third parties. This includes people who are involved with or associated to organized crime, gangs, and the drug trade. Police officers will assess each situation and individual separately.”

Surrey mayor Doug McCallum blustered meaninglessly in an RCMP press release:

“The Inadmissible Patrons Program will not only identify gang members and individuals associated with violent crime, but the program will also allow for police to remove them immediately from the premises. As seen in other jurisdictions, this program will make it tough for criminals to do business in our city.”

Of course, because gang members would have nowhere else possibly to meet if not in a specific bar or restaurant. And they would not have their own regular place where ownership is not friendly to them. OK.

Bar Watch does nothing to stop gang activity—its ostensible purpose. It does give police and bar and restaurant owners a means to manage clientele (something that can be put to use in, say, gentrifying). It does make it easier for cops to label and stigmatize people and bring them within reach of the criminal justice system—to make them “known to police” and therefore vulnerable to further police action.   

Given that police maintain structures of racialized and social class inequalities, Bar Watch is carried out along those lines reinforces those structures. All the while giving cops more control over day to day life in our communities and yet another claim on more public resources (and cop pay)—while making more members of our community subject to marginalization and criminalization on a cop’s whim. These concerns have been raised in other jurisdictions where Bar Watch programs have been implemented.

In committing to Bar Watch the City of Surrey is openly committing to—publicly endorsing—racial and class profiling.  

About Surrey What?!?

Live and work in Surrey, British Columbia. Unceded traditional territories of the Kwantlen, Katzie, Semiahmoo, Kwikwetlem, Qayqayt, and Tsawwassen First Nations.

Committed to a city where the future can truly live, not the dystopian landscape of police. surveillance, gentrification, unplanned development, and moral panics spun by politicians and the Surrey Board of Trade.

This site is a place for alternative social visions based in the needs of our diverse working class not the interests of developers, businesses, and the cops who protect them.

In solidarity with Anti-Police Power Surrey and all of those who are trying to end police control in our communities in Surrey and working to build real, lasting, community-based solutions for public safety and wellbeing.