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.

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.