Did Surrey RCMP Kill Two People? Still No Answers

It has now been three weeks since RCMP in Surrey were involved in a shooting in which two people were left dead and few details have been released publicly. It has been reported that police fired shots during what has been called an alleged hostage taking (by the man who was killed) on March 29, 2019. The Independent Investigations Office (IIO), the agency that examines cases of police harm to civilians in British Columbia, has stated that the victims were a man and a woman who knew each other. Friends and family of the woman who was killed have identified her as Nona McEwan. The man has been identified as Randy Crosson. It has been reported too that they had a child together.


What is not known after nearly a month is what role police played in the killings. There has been some speculation that police killed both people in a discharge of gunfire.


An information bulletin put out by the Independent Investigations Office (IIO) reports that the man was pronounced dead at the scene and the woman died at hospital (with neither named in the bulletin). At the scene, the IIO also said that shots were fired by members of the Emergency Response Team. According to the IIO, as reported in the Surrey Now-Leader:


“The cause of the injuries to both persons are yet to be confirmed. We’re not sure if the female was killed by shots, we’re still trying to determine what caused her injuries and what led to her death. We do know that police took shots but we don’t know if they’re the ones that caused the injuries to the male.”



When asked if he could say conclusively that a police bullet did not hit Nona McEwan, the Now-Leader reports that Integrated Homicide Investigation Team spokesperson Corporal Frank Jang replied:


“No, I mean that’s all part of the investigation that’s happening now. There will be updates coming forth from the IIO but all those details, the exact mechanism, entries, where the shots came from, that’s all going to be part of the investigation. I can’t comment further because it’s still ongoing.”



Surrey deserves better than this. Families, friends, and community members deserve better than this when police commit acts of violence in our communities.


Unfortunately, there are no mechanisms to compel police to provide information publicly or even participate in investigations. The IIO relies on police for training and uses former officers in investigations, so they are in no way truly independent.

Anti-Police Power Surrey Event: Organizing Against Policing in Surrey (April 7, 2019)

Anti-Police Power Surrey (APPS) is holding a community discussion on organizing against policing in Surrey. APPS is a group of people living and working in Surrey who oppose the domination of police, police violence and repression, and the wasteful, and wildly disproportionate, expenditure of public resources on policing in Surrey. APPS calls for social resources for communities not cops, for people not police and aims for the development of non-repressive social supports and care.



Details of the event are as follows.



“Community Discussion: Organizing Against Policing in Surrey”

Where: City Centre Library

10350 University Dr, Surrey

Room 418 - Dr. Ambedkar Room

When: Sunday, April 7, 2:00-4:00 pm



Light refreshments will be served

Wheelchair accessible

Families and children welcome



Join us for a community gathering where we'll share some of our experiences and open up a conversation about organizing against police power in Surrey. This is a chance to get to know each other and talk about how we can work together to build a movement that contests the often overwhelming presence of police in our lives and communities.

“The Trailer Park Clearances: Police, Panic, and the State Production of Homelessness”

Jeff Shantz

Policing produces homelessness. An overlooked aspect of homelessness in Metro Vancouver has been the closure of trailer parks (manufactured home parks) and evictions of their residents in Surrey. In the last few years, at least 5 trailer parks have been evicted on King George Boulevard between Whalley and Newton alone—hundreds of people made homeless. Police and bylaw enforcement have propelled these closures and evictions—demonizing and criminalizing residents (for drug use, sex work, etc.), imposing fines to create the grounds for eviction.

Police and bylaw start by harassing people living in the parks, and also harassing some of the park owners. The issues used are staples of police stigmatization and criminalization—they say “well there’s drug trade happening in that park” or “there’s sex work happening in that park” or “sex workers are living in the park.” They use those excuses to ticket people who are then faced with eviction. Owners are pushed to close the parks. The result is gentrification as the former parks become development sites for higher end condos and town houses that the evicted cannot afford to move into.

Ahead of the eviction of the Town and Country RV Park on King George Boulevard Jas Rehal, manager of bylaw and licensing in Surrey, was open about the targeting of residents for activities like drug use and sex work. He stated: “The primary concern is … the hotbed of crime that’s happening in that trailer park, illegal activity and the complete refusal to work with us. Rehal named that so-called “criminal activity as a “combination of drugs and prostitution.” He also said the RV park repeatedly stands in violation of a number of bylaws and fire codes, and hosts “a lot of junk on the property they refuse to clean up.”

According to Cpl. Scotty Schuman of the RCMP, police have identified the property as a “high-risk location.”

In his view, “That’s somewhere where public safety is constantly an issue,” adding that drug-trafficking—allegedly involving methamphetamine, cocaine, and marijuana is a problem for the cops and that “several warrants” were executed at the property over the course of year. That simply confirms that the RCMP have repeatedly targeted the park

Adds Rehal: “We cannot support keeping this business operating—it’s causing too much of a negative situation in the neighbourhood. The owner is not doing what the owner needs to do to make it safe…we were left with no other option.” But closing the parks does not hurt the owners who sell the lands.

The people who really have no other option are the residents who have been evicted. This is policing created homelessness. It is another example of police serving the interests of businesses and developers, not the public safety of poor, working class people.

The police and bylaw work to evict people from lower cost housing that is then gentrified making huge profits for developers, landowners, and even the former park owners who make millions on the sales. And police and bylaw can use the “work” they have done against the parks to justify a need for increased budgets. The only ones who lose out are the residents. Even those who are “re-housed” lose their connection to home, community, friends, and lose their autonomy and independence.

More Sex Workers and Fewer Bigoted Cops: Real Public Safety

When talking about public safety it is important to define what we mean by safety and safety for whom. The interests, and “safety,” of some (businesses, boards of trade, police, for example) are not the same as the interests and safety of others (street involved people, poor people, the working classes, for example). Yet those distinct interests are rarely laid out openly and honestly and the particular preferences and priorities of powerholders (posed as stakeholders) are presented as, taken for granted as, the legitimate interests of all.

Sometimes, when speaking to an audience they assume to be uniformly made up of powerholders (businesses, board of trade members, police) will put their assumptions and priorities—their biases—on display. Such a moment happened at a recent Surrey Board of Trade public discussion, “Hot Topic Dialogue: RCMP or Municipal Force in Surrey” on January 29, 2019. During the question and answer period, a high ranking RCMP officer Fraser MacCrae, Assistant Commissioner (rtd.) and Former Officer in Charge of the Surrey Detachment, made an incredibly stigmatizing remark about how Surrey Centre (the area in Whalley around Central City Mall) has gotten better because there used to be street level sex workers there, and now they are all gone.

“All gone.” We can think about those words in a context of the murders and disappearances of sex workers locally and across Canada. We can think about this is Surrey where sex workers have been beaten and killed over the last few years. RCMP Assistant Commissioner MacCrae (think about that position of authority) said casually and comfortably the sort of demonizing, stigmatizing, disparaging comment that gets sex workers hurt and killed. This, coming from a top ranking cop tells us plenty about how cops view specific, less privileged, members of our communities. It shows too why police do not contribute to public safety, but rather to the safety of specific, more privileged. Interests. He said this, remember, to a Surrey Board of Trade audience, and none of them called him out on it. It is taken for granted by that crowd. It underlies their assumptions about value, and valuable life, in our society.

If this is the RCMP’s view of public safety and what represents a safer community (the literal disappearance of sex workers)—spoiler alert, it is—then they can keep it (take it with them when they get out of our communities. This should tell us a lot about RCMP violence against women (externally and internally) and about their notorious actions in relation to cases of missing and murdered woman, many of whom are or have been sex workers.

We need to say loudly and clearly that Surrey is better off with more sex workers, working class members of our community, and fewer bigoted and stigmatizing cops. Supporting sex workers, and defending them against stigmatizers and abusers, like the RCMP, would be real contribution to public (not business and police) safety in Surrey.

Oppose the Surrey Board of Trade’s Promotion of Policing in Surrey. Jan. 29.

Anti-Police Power Surrey calls on people to come out to challenge the Surrey Board to Trade’s framing of policing options in Surrey as either RCMP or a municipal force. Meet at 7: 00 AM at Civic Plaza, outside the Civic Hotel, 13475 Central Avenue, Surrey.

We do not need more or different police in Surrey. We need more community resources, supports, and services. And not police.

On January 29, 2019, the SBT is holding a “Dialogue” event on “RCMP or Municipal Force.” The event description says:

“Participate in the Surrey Hot Topic Dialogue to learn more about:

What would have better outcomes regarding public safety

The costs and benefits of a municipal police force

The costs and benefits of keeping the RCMP

Business impacts on such a change”

This is framed entirely within a policing, and business, framework rather than a framework of community supports, funding, and services. We know that in Surrey funds for police mean cuts and/or underfunding of needed community resources and services, as the recent cuts to community centers, art spaces, and an Indigenous gathering place in the new budget show.

The pro-police bias is evident in the list of panelists. They include an Assistant Commissioner of the RCMP and two Chief Constables (Vancouver and West Vancouver forces) long with a police friendly instructor from KPU. From the SBT event page:

Panelists for the January 29 RCMP dialogue are:

Fraser MacRae, former Assistant Commissioner of the Surrey RCMP

Kash Heed, former MLA and Chief Constable of West Vancouver P.D.

Bob Rolls, former Deputy Chief Constable of Vancouver Police Department

Mike Larsen, Kwantlen Polytechnic University Criminology Department Chair

Show up and let them know that we need more community resources, not more cops and cop funding.

“Challenging Police Power in Surrey: A Discussion”

Jeff Shantz

On Saturday, January 26, 2019, Anti-Police Power Surrey (APPS) held a roundtable discussion on police domination in Surrey and community organizing to challenge police power in our communities. The event, “Challenging Police Power,” took place at the Progressive Education Center in Newton on the invitation of the East Indian Defence Committee. About 60 people turned out to discuss impacts of policing, how police uphold systems of racism, oppression, and exploitation, and ways to create alternatives to policing that actually develop and sustain community care and service.

Speakers highlighted a range of issues, including the infiltration of police into postsecondary campuses in Surrey, including their using Kwantlen Polytechnic University as a recruitment center for police and for intelligence gathering (snitch networks) against our communities; cops in schools and gang panics; the criminalization of youth and blaming of parents for structural inequalities; the targeting of homeless people on behalf of business interests; and the involvement of police in community groups as means to gain new resources and further surveil populations.

Almost everyone in the room spoke up to discuss their negative experiences with police in Surrey and to give detail to the oppressive and exploitative nature of policing in Surrey, and in class divided societies more broadly.

Many ideas were put forward for alternatives, including but not limited to community spaces for youth free from cops, health care resources free from police, real supports for parents that do not guilt trip them into becoming snitches on the children to cops while still addressing concerns they might have about their activities, supportive programs for youth after school, and making schools available during non-school hours for youth to use with mentorship.

Jeff Shantz is a full-time faculty member in the Department of Criminology at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Surrey. He is a Surrey resident.

Anti-Police Power Surrey Event: Challenging Police Power in Surrey (Jan. 26, 2019)

Anti-Police Power Surrey (APPS) is holding a roundtable discussion on policing in Surrey, on the need to defund police, and on ways to develop alternatives to police in Surrey. APPS is a group of people living and working in Surrey who oppose the domination of police, police violence and repression, and the wasteful, and wildly disproportionate, expenditure of public resources on policing in Surrey. APPS calls for social resources for communities not cops, for people not police and aims for the development of non-repressive social supports and care.

Details of the event are as follows.

“Challenging Police Power in Surrey”

What: Anti-Police Power Surrey event

When: 2:30-4:30 pm, Saturday, January 26, 2019

Where: Progressive Cultural Centre, #126 – 7536 130th Street, Surrey

In past municipal elections, there has been a lot of attention given to issues of public safety. Focus on shootings, drug operations, and youth involvement in gangs has generated consistent calls for greater public safety, predominantly through more police. The most recent election saw the idea of a municipal police force gain popular support and the new mayor and council moved immediately to start the transition. But police can’t address the root causes of the violence and social tensions that exist; police only uphold through force the social order that produces the violence.

In this political context, Anti-Police Power Surrey (APPS) formed to counter the dominant pro-police narrative and challenge the constantly expanding power of the police in Surrey. At this round table, we will share some of our work and open up a conversation about policing in Surrey. We want to talk together about how we might contest the persistent and often overwhelming presence of police in our communities, explore the sources of social conflicts that are used to justify increasing police resources, and imagine together strategies of community safety without resorting to police.

This event will be held in Surrey, on the traditional territory of the Kwantlen, Qayqayt, Katzie, Kwikwetlem, Semiahmoo and Tsawwassen nations.