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.