We have been following this issue for a long time, so when it finally reaches a possible conclusion, I find myself obligated, with some reluctance, to write about it once again. As those of you know who have been following the story, the RCMP is now effectively losing jurisdiction, in its biggest detachment in Canada. So it is news, but it has been truly tiring to watch this fiasco unfold, led by a couple of politicians in Surrey, like MacCallum and Locke, both of whom would be perfect characters for covers on Mad Magazine.
When asked recently on a local radio show in Vancouver how I felt about the NDP and Mike Farnworth’s decision as to who was going to police Surrey, and have now decided to go forward with the new Surrey Police Service, my only answer was that I felt “relieved”. It was in my opinion, a logical, fair and proper decision, when one considers all of the circumstances and disregard those speaking who clearly had an agenda. The problem was that it took too long to make that decision, and the delays affected hundreds of police officers on both sides of the argument. We won’t mention the monetary costs of these delays. Ms. Locke should have been told from the outset to go to hell, that the process to move forward with a City force was already in motion, and she with the short term memory affliction, was in the beginning part of it ,and in favour of a city police force. Since then she has been playing revenge politics for several months, in a campaign that was both misguided and misinformed, propped up no doubt by the senior management of the RCMP, who seemed to be continually willing to feed her disinformation.
So lets do a bit of an autopsy on what happened.
The biggest issue, the Y cut at an autopsy if you will, was the ability of the RCMP to actually fulfill their policing contract in terms of staffing and resourcing. Everyone who has been a Mountie in the last thirty years, if not longer, could tell you that the Mounties have been robbing Peter to pay Paul for years. There mandate and their abilities could not meet their stated goals. They are still doing it, and they can not keep up, whether in a city, in a Province or Nationally. The numbers simply don’t add up. Everyone knew this, except apparently Ms. Locke.
Ms. Locke in a statement after the announcement said that the Province decision was “disappointing, misguided and based on inaccurate assumptions”. There are currently 1500 vacancies in the Province of British Columbia, 500 are simply un-filled positions, and there are 1000 on some form of leave. Nationally the RCMP will put about 600 officers through Depot, and E Division would get a portion of them; and there were over 800 departures from the RCMP during that same time period. Please Ms. Locke, I beg you, what don’t you understand? In their response to the Province as to how the RCMP were going to fulfill their promises, I am told that their ingenious plan was to disembowel the plainclothes sections (temporarily no doubt) and put them back in uniform and on the road. I ask you Ms. Locke, how is that not the work of the little Dutch boy putting his finger in the dyke? Did you simply accept the RCMP senior management explanation without hesitation or examination?
As we continue our pathology, we get to the vital organs, the root cause of the RCMP conundrum falls to the single fundamental justification and reason that they have managed to survive in this Province. They have always had one go-to argument. They are “cheaper”. As mentioned numerous times in previous blogs, the RCMP portrayed themselves right to the end as the Walmart, not the Gucci police department. Of course, once unionization took place that became a much harder argument, and it got even harder when the union signed the recent new contract. Now, just the negotiated back pay is killing most small town policing budgets. The other counter-argument is, you always get what you pay for.
Lets delve a little deeper. The promotion and transfer policy of the RCMP does not allow for the development of its own officers, nor provide the continuity necessary for effective and expert investigations. The RCMP has a system where if you want to advance, usually you have to move to a different section, or a different detachment. Gone is any knowledge of the particular field, and the Mounties are famous for promoting in bosses who have no idea or experience in that particular field. So the Drug corporal, goes to the Fraud Section as a Sargent, the Community Policing Sargent goes to Major Crime as a Staff Sargent, now in charge of homicide investigations. The officer who has been policing Terrace, or Anahim Lake BC for the last number of years, now finds himself standing in the atrium of Surrey detachment wondering how to get to the washrooms. This is even more true in the executive ranks, Inspector and above, who flit from station to station about every two years, all because the Federal RCMP priorities are managing “people”, “diversity” and “inclusion”, not on whether or not someone knows the job. All investigations, whether it be a break-in or a homicide depend on that in-house homegrown expertise. One simply can not seed and grow expertise in the current Mountie system.
There is a single reason why the RCMP Surrey body is laying on this theoretical stainless steel gurney. The managers and executive officers of the RCMP are the root cause of their now unceremonious departure from Surrey. The uniform contingents of the RCMP, who make up the majority presence of the RCMP in Canada, have been at the very lowest priority in terms of management attention for decades. Ottawa, Ontario and Quebec may be the central head of the organization, but the head is not attached to the body. The current and past executives have been consumed and hypnotized by such things as writing “Mission statements”, self-advancement, and thus the advancing the size of the bureaucracy. The rank structure is completely determined on the number of bodies one is supervising. So if I have 25 officers under supervision, but I can grow it to 32, I will go from a Staff Sargent to an Inspector. The exams for that promotion have nothing to do with direct knowledge of the job, but claim to be testing how you “manage people.” There are no questions as to knowledge of any given job or ones that test the level of any given expertise. If one were able to examine the internal growth of rank and structure in the RCMP, Surrey Detachment with its current bloated rank structure, would be the perfect case study. When that is the driving force in any organization, suffice to say that the Peter Principle can and will be found in the nooks and crannies of every RCMP office.
Finally, there is one issue which rarely gets talked about. The RCMP has since I have been around displayed an arrogance as to their capabilities and expertise. It seems to permeate their dealings with other organizations and it often carries over into the investigational and administrative fields. Where it started, or how it originated has never been clear to me. You were not on the “job”, as the City cops used to say, in the Mounties you were a “member” implying some elite club. They seemed to interpret the Red Serge as a symbol of some level of implied superiority –and they would continuously point out they are the “national” police force, and got to hang with the Queen and hold the door for the Prime Minister. They were the self-appointed experts in all manner of policing, whether it was in the middle of Alberta, or Quebec, or Prince Edward Island, in a small northern outpost or in the city.
There is a significant push in the Ottawa cognoscenti to make the RCMP like an FBI, this too implies some level of arrogance. (the FBI has many issues as well by the way). All of this is to suggest that maybe the de-throning from Surrey will help in some ways to bring the Mounties down to earth, to re-discover that in policing it is how you perform the job, which is and should always be the measurement, not who you are or who you represent. The arrogance needs to go away.
One has to conclude by saying that I personally enjoyed a very good career in the RCMP, they treated me well. I have no complaints. I made great and continuing friendships, got to do what I wanted to do, and worked on some interesting and challenging investigations. It wasn’t the colour of the uniform that I remember the most.
But during my service, the cracks were beginning to show, we were seeing some poor results with the often ridiculous policy and administrative decisions, most times originating in a reaction to some political thrust. When faced with legitimate push back the managers and the executives did not wish to listen to the troops on the ground, in fact they would ignore them. To voice an opinion was often met with retribution, and that arrogance would creep into administrative and investigational discussions, the newly promoted Inspector knowing better than all those that had gone before them.
Change is they say the only inevitable constant, but the RCMP are one of the worst at adapting to change. The ominous and imposing multiple levels of bureaucratic nonsense stymies all attempts to reform or simplify. Quite frankly the current executives of the RCMP should now retire or resign, they have failed, and they have gloriously failed the uniform contingents which even they referred to as the “backbone” of the organization. They talked the talk, they just couldn’t bring themselves to walk the walk. They bought into and espoused a system of aggrandizement and self-promotion leaving the true core of the organization to drift in the wind. They also became political when they should have stayed neutral and silent. They spoke of polices and agreed to policies, in which they personally did not believe, such as “systemic racism”, in order to be political and continue their chance to advance. Every press conference if called to speak to a job well done, was flooded by the executives, all rushing the stage, and squeezing in to be part of the press photo. The junior officers who solved the file, or worked the file, always pushed to the background and out of sight. They long ago decided to “spin” the press rather than be informative. They even began to lie.
I believe that you are now witnessing a ground swell in the country which in a number of years most of what we now recognize in policing will be transformed, altered– some for the good, some for the bad. The golden age of the RCMP in British Columbia seems over, they are facing inevitable change. One can not celebrate, in fact it is sad to some degree, but one can only be “relieved” that the individual officers involved can now get on with it.
The autopsy of the Surrey RCMP is complete, my alma mater has met the end, the conclusion as to cause of death– is that the patient died of internal bleeding and constant executive mal-practice.
Photo provided by finalwitness courtesy of Flickr Commons – Some Rights Reserved
Behind the Yellow Tape 