Surrey Mayor Brenda Locke sang the praises of the Surrey RCMP on Monday night after viewing the city’s first-quarter crime statistics for 2024.
“It will come as no surprise to many that crime continues in Surrey to trend down under the RCMP’s watch,” Locke said.
“As I’ve said many times, crime in Surrey has been dropping for the past decade with the RCMP as the police of jurisdiction. These latest stats continue to reinforce this positive trend which makes me wonder why the Province and some members of this council are so eager to burden the people of Surrey with a prohibitively more expensive police force.”
Surrey Mounties received 44,406 calls for service in the first quarter of 2024 compared to 44,897 in the first quarter of 2023, dropping by nine per cent. Of those, 1,585 were calls related to mental health.
Police responded to 168 drug overdoses and administered Naloxone 34 times between January and March of this year. Of those overdoses, 44 were fatal, representing a decrease of eight per cent compared to the first quarter of 2023. According to these most recent stats, there were 727 missing persons file in the first three months of 2024 compared to 851 in that same period last year.
The Integrated Homicide Investigation Team “assumed conduct” of one homicide investigation so far this years compared to four in the first quarter of 2023 and there was one attempted murder so far in 2024, down from two during the same period in 2023.
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The number of bylaws-related calls jumped by 55 per cent to 1,223 while the total number of Criminal Code offences decreased by 21 per cent. Violent crime dropped by three per cent, the number of sexual offences increased by 15 per cent, and there were 69 reported sextortions, up from 62 in last year’s first quarter. There were 14 cases involving forcible confinement, kidnapping and abduction so far this year compared to the same period last year, 68 robberies compared to 72, and 13 confirmed “shots fired incidents” compared to eight. Of the 13, six involved at least one person being shot.
Meantime, the Surrey Gang Enforcement Team so far this year has done 258 establishment checks related to the Inadmissible Patrons Program, 162 outlaw motorcycle gang clubhouse checks, 122 curfew checks of known gang members and their associates in Surrey, 48 vehicle seizures and impoundments, and the team also did 73 anti-gang presentations to 2,495 Surrey youth.
All told, property crimes dropped by 13 per cent compared to the first quarter of 2023, business break-ins were down by five per cent, residential break-ins decreased by 19 per cent, and auto theft dropped by 23 per cent with 31 per cent of those vehicles stolen in Surrey being recovered in other cities.
Thefts from vehicles decreased by 41 per cent, catalytic converter thefts dropped by 56 per cent, and police dealt with seven reports of “hate crime/bias.”