Police and politicians in Surrey have been very effective at driving crime panics and fear politics in the city. This has played a strong part in the push to create a new police force in the city at a staggering cost of hundreds of millions of dollars in transition costs alone.
Yet, once again recently released crime numbers for the city
show large decreases in crime, including violent crime, in 2020—something which
is true of the last decade plus.
In 2020, police-reported crime in Surrey dropped by 14 per
cent. Violent crime was down 19 percent. There were nine fewer murders in
Surrey in 2020, a 43 percent decrease from 2019. In 2020 there were 12
homicides in Surrey. In 2019, there were 21 and in 2018, there were 15.
Police have made a great deal of calls for shots fired,
something picked up on by media, but, in fact, calls for shots fired declined
by 24 percent, from 45 in 2019 to 34 in 2020.
The number of police-reported sexual offences was down six
per cent, with the number of sexual assaults decreasing by 12 per cent, though
many are, of course, never reported for fear or distrust of police.
Property crime was down 16 per cent from 2019 to 2020 (down 25
per cent in the fourth quarter). This was the case for all types of property
crime, with break-and-enters down 17 per cent, auto theft down 14 percent, and
theft from vehicles down 19 per cent.
With crime down overall, RCMP made new opportunities for
themselves in the COVID-19 Compliance and Enforcement Team, with Surrey bylaw
officers, which did thousands of compliance checks and managed to hand out 48
tickets. Only two per cent of their thousands of compliance checks in 2020 were
found to be, in fact, non-compliant.
Despite this, crime panics and fear politics still rule in
Surrey. And they are driving massive expenditures on policing, funds that could
and should be used to sustain community-based resources for health and
wellbeing.
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