This is an executive summary of our full platform. Please click here to download the full document

Proudly Surrey shares the view of the majority of Surrey residents that crime is a crucially important issue in this election and that the Surrey First civic administration has not succeeded in reducing crime and violence, especially amongst young adults and adolescents. Surrey First has enjoyed a sweeping majority on our city council for ten years and has little to show for that lost decade.

We offer a clear, coherent, comprehensive vision of how to make our community safer. It begins with an understanding that we are in a competition with gangs 1for the minds, hearts, and bodies of our youth. We intend to win that competition by any and all means at our disposal. There are three main approaches to succeeding at this competition:

1. Delivering Better Services and Opportunities: Currently, it is embarrassing to admit that sometimes we are losing out to gangs because they can do a better job, in the short term, of providing services and opportunities adolescents and young adults want or need. We must do better.
2. A Bigger, Smarter, More Connected Police Force: Right now, our police force is too small and not connected enough to our local community. We need to change the whole way it is organized to get the kind of police force that can make our community safer.
3. Redesigning Our Communities to Increase Safety and Reduce Crime: Surrey’s crime problems cannot just be fixed through government services and are not just caused by a lack of these things. We need to fix some problems in our community design to discourage crime and help regular citizens keep their communities safe.

When it comes to better services and opportunities, we need to look at what young people get out of gang membership. Some of those things are things we cannot compete with. Many young people join organized crime because organized crime is the family business. We can’t compete with that. But many young people also join gangs because gangs do a better job of providing things we should. That’s why our plan includes

• Martial arts and self-defence classes in our community centres afternoons, evenings, and weekends
• Better nighttime bus service and more low-barrier spaces for young people to hang out, something we can only achieve by pulling out of TransLink
• A busing and equipment bank program to eliminate barriers to kids playing sports
• A Surrey Youth Hiring Program to employ more youth in government employment, especially for half-shift work and incentives for local business to follow suit

When it comes to a bigger, smarter, more connected force, we need to do the following

• End the RCMP contract and phase-in a South Fraser Police Department
• Increase our policing budget to pay for a 30% higher officer presence
• Change our recruitment program for police to include
  • Moving training to BC’s polytechnic universities and competing aggressively for graduates in criminology, social work and other intervention professions
  • Increasing funds to subsidize training, including a loan/grant program to cover living expenses and residential accommodation, to be paid back through payroll deductions
• Supplement our police education and retention programs to include
  • Increasing resources for second-language training in the languages spoken in our city
  • More and broader social scientific approaches to crime reduction
• Increase community policing approaches, including assigning a portion of the force to a regular “beat cop” presence and a caseload approach to file management common in other intervention professions
• Focus organized crime enforcement on turf rather than gang leadership

When it comes to redesigning communities, we bring an “eyes on the street” approach not just to policing but to community crime reduction. Our streets will become safer when they are better-illuminated, more frequently walked and frequently observed by neighbours. This means

• New bylaws setting maximum hedge and fence heights and deadlines to reduce heights that compromise street safety
• Rerouting sidewalks and moving bus stops to maximize pedestrian visibility, illumination and safety
• Constructing sidewalks on all residential streets without them
• Permit low-cost subdivision and rezoning of residential property into a new neighbourhood corner store zoning
• Waiving permitting and variance fees for the expansion or addition of front porches, patios, and decks as part of our Stoop Culture package of incentives
• Increasing park maintenance and staffing budgets to maintain parks as usable by all community members and inspected and observed more often by the city

Of course, we cannot do everything as a municipal government. That is why we will lend our support to social movements, reformers and health professionals calling for some key policy changes at the national level like ending the War on Drugs and replacing it with a medical strategy to fight addiction and substance abuse.

Our public safety policy is available here and it is a body of policy to which we will continue to add as we unveil more parts of the most integrated and comprehensive platform Surrey has seen from any municipal political party.

Call our office
(604) 543-4032