Policy & Positions Manual
Policy Priority Area - Crime and Public Safety
Police Amalgamation (2011)
There has been much debate relating to the amalgamation and/or regionalization of police services in BC. At the present time, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and 11 independent municipal police organizations provide service across British Columbia. Those include independent police departments in: Abbotsford, Central Saanich, Delta, Nelson, New Westminster, Oak Bay, Port Moody, Saanich, Vancouver, Victoria, and West Vancouver.
This patchwork quilt of municipal police forces and RCMP detachments across the province is filled with departments that often manage their cases differently and lack the specialized training being provided to officers elsewhere.
A number of police forces lack the resources to do day-to-day work, let alone commit officers to work on multi-agency teams. These types of obstacles have hampered major multi-jurisdictional investigations, like the case of dozens of missing women from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Two decades after Clifford Olson began abducting and murdering children on the Lower Mainland, BC police agencies still face major roadblocks when trying to catch organized, mobile serial predators.
Such examples as the Olson case and Pickton trial have exploited the lack of guidelines covering how and when police agencies come together to form joint task forces when a predator begins crossing jurisdictions. When municipal police forces act alone, they can often miss critical information to an investigation that might have been detected under a wider coverage area. Issues of public safety are of particular concern in areas where municipal boundaries are immediately adjacent, sharing common boundaries.
Municipalities are feeling the impact of and increased costs of police service delivery. Amalgamation of police services may provide uniformity of enforcement, specialization, better coordination of resources, ongoing, in-service training, fewer infrastructures, improved efficiency and the avoidance of duplication.
Municipalities in BC of more than 5,000 persons are required to bear the expense necessary to maintain law and order. The Police Act gives such municipalities three choices: they may establish their own police force, they may contract with the provincial police agency, or they may contract with another municipal police force.
Ultimately in BC, the Attorney General is responsible for policing. Where it is evident that amalgamated, regional police services would field more effective policing than a multitude of local services, the provincial government has the power to legislate such action. The province demonstrated this power in January of 2003, when it amalgamated the Victoria and Esquimalt police departments.
Arguably the most potentially disastrous police control continues to be found in the capital region of British Columbia, an area policed by four independent police forces and three RCMP detachments. Central Saanich, Saanich, Oak Bay, and the amalgamated Victoria-Esquimalt departments all run independently of each other in Greater Victoria. Divided police resources along city borders make little sense from a practical point of view. Few criminals or policing problems confine themselves within a municipality, and increasingly prostitution, the drug trade, organized gangs and violent serial offenders have regional, national, and international patterns, which require a coordinated solution.
An example of the shortcomings of integration policy versus full amalgamation was found in 2009, when the Victoria Police Department withdrew from the regional integrated crime-fighting unit citing financial constraints and pressures on department resources. This reinforced the need for full amalgamation as regional demands continued to overly impact one municipal police force, forcing budgetary concerns to trump public safety. During the announcement, Police Chief Jamie Graham highlighted this issue, stating that, “It should be a regional force, right from that ferry terminal to Oak Bay to the Western Communities (1)."
Since 2003, successive provincial Solicitors Generals have highlighted the need for regional police amalgamation. Most strongly, Solicitor General Rich Coleman stated that if municipalities in the Greater Victoria region did not further integrate police services, the Province should force them to merge into a single agency. No substantial integration has happened between the police departments since that statement even though a 2003 poll conducted for CHEK and the Times Colonist found police amalgamation was supported by 70% of capital region residents, including a majority in every single municipality.
These results are echoed in the public’s continued concern sited in a 2008 report to the Vancouver Police Department (2), which stated, “A recent (November 10, 2007) Angus Reid survey found, for example, that 65 percent of residents surveyed in the GVR support creating a regional police service. This is a significant finding that should inform discussions of a regional police service going forward. It appears that public concern with the effectiveness of the police in responding to crime and violence in the region outweighs concerns related to the creation of a larger police service and the loss of “no call too small” policing.”
In larger urban and metropolitan areas police amalgamation would be beneficial for several reasons, including:
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Reduced policing costs - reduction in policing costs realized through integrated infrastructure and management
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Better integration and increased effectiveness – by amalgamating units such as serious crimes unit, sex crimes unit, financial crimes section, strike force, gang unit, dispatch unit, human resources, purchasing, K9, administration functions, forensic identification, and detention facilities
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Population shifts – thousands of people work and live across municipal boundaries and are exposed to multiple police forces and jurisdictions
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More equal administration of justice – each police department carries its own operational policies, leading to regional disparities in law enforcement
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Increased Quality of Life and Safety – when approached separately in the region as opposed to cohesively, it jeopardizes public safety and our quality of life
THE CHAMBER RECOMMENDS
That the Provincial government:
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establishing provincial standards for the integrated delivery of police services by police forces where municipal boundaries are immediately adjacent; and
- where necessary, legislating amalgamation of police services in areas where established standards are not being met and where uniformity would benefit service delivery and public safety.
Footnotes
