Langley Township looks to split RCMP from city

There’s another potential police transition brewing south of the Fraser, and this time it’s not in Surrey. The Township of Langley has voted to split its RCMP detachment from Langley City.

Township Mayor Eric Woodward says the move will improve public safety in his municipality.

“This is about Township of Langley council really wanting to take leadership on the issue, and doing its best to focus on serving the taxpayers in the Township of Langley to make sure they’re getting the resources they’re paying for,” he told CityNews.

Woodward says the Township pays for a larger portion of policing costs than the City of Langley, but claims the city is using up more than its share of resources.

Langley Township has nearly 150,000 residents spread over 316 square kilometres, whereas the City of Langley has a population under 30,000 over only 10 square kilometres.

“We’re looking to really improve policing resources within our community to a much greater degree than the City of Langley is prepared to do,” Woodward said. “That’s their decision to make — we support their right to make their own decisions. In order for us to see more police officers here in the Township, we need to make sure they’re not responding to increased crime in the City of Langley — especially when Skytrain arrives.”

“We need to plan for the future here and ensure we provide the best policing we can for our residents,” he added.

Woodward says  if the Township is able to get to full staffing levels, it would have approximately 160 officers. However, he acknowledges that’ll be a challenge.

“We have about 20 chronic vacancies. So when we try to fund more RCMP officers and create those positions, we need to make sure those resources we do have are concentrating on serving the residents that pay for it,” he explained.

Langley City refutes claims it doesn’t pay fair share of policing costs

Langley City Mayor Nathan Pachal says the insinuation that the City doesn’t pay its fair share isn’t true. He says the City pays for what it’s required to under the service agreement based on its population.

“We are fully in compliance with the agreement we have with the Township of Langley. A quicker approach is if we wanted to adjust those ratios on what the crime stats are and what the population is, that’s something that’s easily addressed in a contract and then we move forward from there,” he said.

Pachal explains the City is more focused on addressing the underlying causes of crime rather than putting resources toward more police officers.

“When we look at community safety in Langley City, a lot of the issues we see are around social challenges,” he told CityNews.

“We’ve actually started a process where we’re looking at a citizen’s assembly on community safety. Police are a part of the safety equation, but really, we know we need to move beyond that as well. That’s why we hear a lot of talk about mental health, social workers, and things we can do in schools that really help upstream to prevent a police response.”

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Pachal says both communities are now in the studying phase to figure out what splitting the RCMP into two detachments would mean for them. Ultimately, Pachal doesn’t think it’ll be a significant change.

“At the end of the day it’s probably like shifting from Coca-Cola to Pepsi. It’s still cola — it’s just going to be a little bit different,” he said.

Neither mayor would get into specifics around how much the transition would cost, or where the RCMP officers would come from. However, both said it will likely be a long process that will play out over the coming years. They note any finalized plan on the future of policing in Langley will need to be approved by the province.

The current RCMP detachment is physically based in Langley Township. Should the decision be made to split the force into two, the City of Langley would have to build its own infrastructure before a transition can happen.

CityNews has reached out to the Langley RCMP for comment.