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BLACK-SHEEP COMMENTARIES by LOTUS LAND LACKING LEADERS October 1, 2008 LEADERSHIP is the ability to organize things and people and take action in times of crisis. It is something that is sorely lacking in our part of the world Two weeks ago, Surrey held a Regional Economic Summit – a grand name for an all-day talk session. Keynote speaker Rudolph W. Giuliani, two-term mayor of New York City, encouraged participants to follow hid city’s example. The first thing he did as Mayor was to bring crime under control. In his 2002 book Leadership, Giuliani said “that a city government’s primary mission is to protect its citizens …” and he explained how he went about doing this. “After Sept. 11 (2001), people would tell me that it was brave to go to the scene of the attacks. It was actually just carrying out my usual practice for any significant emergency,” wrote Giuliani. “Two of the lessons in this book involve the importance of seeing things with your own eyes and of setting an example. These lessons didn’t appear out of thin air, nor were they the product of a book.” After coming to power, Giuliani moved quickly to force a merger between the NYPD and two smaller independent forces, the Transit Police, and the Housing Police. This resulted in a single command structure, the economy of scale, and –using the Compstat information system – total flexibility in deployment of 40,000 police officers wherever urgently needed among eight million New Yorkers. Having read Leadership and listened intently to Giuliani’s every word. I am convinced he never considered maintaining three separate police forces with three independent command structures – forces linked in British Columbia fashion using integrated squads of officers all too likely to become squabble squads. I fear what Giuliani said in Surrey fell on deaf ears. Commenting about the Summit, Mayor Dianne Watts said “I have no choice but to take action now to prepare for the city’s future as Metro Vancouver’s economic engine.” Yet Watts did not announce that Surrey is firmly committed to the RCMP, and together they stand predominate over policing in the Lower Mainland. Nor did she mention the rush by the federal government and Surrey to construct an $80-million, 68,800-square-metre RCMP E Division headquarters compound designed to consolidate and accommodate over 1,800 RCMP employees, construction to begin in October 2009. Moving E Division headquarters to Surrey will place it alongside the largest urban RCMP detachment in Canada. This masterful act of inveiglement will virtually guarantee E Division a 20-year contract renewal in 2012 as British Columbia’s provincial police force. Contract renewal will eliminate the alternative of a metropolitan police department akin to Giuliani’s NYPD. Contract renewal of E Division has even greater national implications for the RCMP. Consider this brief excerpt from the December 17, 2007 Report of the Task Force on Governance and Cultural Change in the RCMP titled Rebuilding the Trust: “The Task Force has heard repeatedly that the RCMP does not have the capacity to satisfy its obligations. “Notwithstanding its contractual commitments to the provinces, municipalities and territories and its federal policing obligations, the RCMP never operates at full capacity. In every detachment we visited, there were unacceptable vacancy rates (often in the order of the magnitude of 25- 30%). “Still, the Force seems to accept every new request – whether or not it has the financial or human resources to follow through. The Force seems incapable of saying no. Members and employees are expected to cover their own work, the work not done by others due to vacancies and the work required to fill ever-increasing administrative demand. …the creation of a new position today will in reality not be filled for two years.” Let’s go back to the facts of the Lower Mainland: Twenty-one independent municipalities with an overburden of 21 mayors, dozens and dozens of councillors, and nearly as many chiefs of police/detachment commanders and white-shirted senior officers. Attorney General Oppal, Solicitor General Van Dongen and Premier Gordon Campbell have done nothing to resolve this police crisis other than to maintain the status quo. It is their constitutional duty to administer justice within the province and maintain public safety. In the very least that means creating a provincially controlled Lower Mainland metropolitan police force. To contract out of that duty is deplorable. Year in and year out they come from Victoria, see a Lower Mainland policing crisis, do nothing, and scuttle away. They’re not men with a strong sense of duty and a bias for action. They are mice! * * * Published by the North Shore News on Wednesday, October 1, 2008.
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Gadfly at:
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