AGENT OF CHANGE
Terry Waterhouse has his work cut out For him — the Former VPD constable will oversee Surrey’s transition From the RCMP to its own municipal police Force.
Surrey will rely on a team of experts to develop a new municipal policing model and a plan to change from the RCMP to a local police department, according to the city’s new general manager of policing transition.
Last week, at its inaugural meeting, Surrey council unanimously directed staff to immediately create a Surrey Police Department and notify the federal and provincial governments that the city is ending its RCMP contract.
On Wednesday, the City of Surrey announced that it had tapped its general manager of public safety, Terry Waterhouse, to oversee the city’s transition from the Surrey RCMP to its own municipal force.
Waterhouse, who was hired in 2015 as the city’s first director of public safety strategies, spent nine years as a constable with the Vancouver Police Department, and has a background in education that includes working with school districts on youth and violenceprevention programs and teaching criminology at the University of the Fraser Valley.
Mayor Doug McCallum said in a news release that Waterhouse is “well suited” to lead the transition.
“Terry’s expertise and ability to work with government partners, the RCMP and other external partners will ensure that the transition will be made as smoothly and as quickly as possible,” said McCallum.
Waterhouse’s first order of business is to appoint a transition team, which he said will include experts in a number of areas, including finance, administration, technology and policing.
Waterhouse said he has already started the selection process.
“We’ll be focused on building the best policing model and putting the pieces in place to get us there,” he said. “We’ll be relying on the expertise of a number of people, both internally and externally.”
Waterhouse will also work closely with Solicitor General Mike Farnworth, who has final approval say over any change in policing.
On Friday, McCallum suggested there was “resistance” from the province to Surrey’s transition, contradicting his statements from earlier in the week that he’d had “a really good meeting” with Farnworth and that the minister’s staff was planning to work with Surrey to create the transition plan.
In response to McCallum’s comments on resistance, Premier John Horgan reiterated that the province would work with Surrey.
“We need to have a plan. You can’t just get in front of a microphone and say, ‘Why haven’t you fixed this?’ It takes work and he knows that full well.”
Waterhouse said the city’s relationship with the province is a good one, and they’re starting off on a positive note.
“It’s a complex endeavour and, at the end of the day, the solicitor general receives and approves the transition plan,” he said.
“We want to work with them to ensure anything that needs to be put in place is. I’m confident that we will.”
McCallum has said the transition will take two years, an estimate that Waterhouse said is “an appropriate timeline for what needs to be done.”
Although McCallum has suggested that changing to municipal policing won’t cost taxpayers much more — in the neighbourhood of a 10-per-cent increase in the budget — Waterhouse said it’s hard to come up with a number at this point.
“It’s too early to make specific estimations on what the budget impact will be, but suffice it to say we’ll look at all aspects of that and make sure we’re doing it in both a way that’s effective and efficient,” Waterhouse said.
The move to a local force isn’t about one method of policing being better than the other, but which is the best model for a growing urban centre, he said.
“I think it’s very rare for a city of this size to not have its own municipal police department,” Waterhouse said.
“Surrey has grown a lot over the years and we are a large metropolitan centre. Large metropolitan centres have their own police departments. That’s the norm in the country and that’s what we’ll move toward.”