Superintendent Jennifer Hyland, officer in charge of Ridge Meadows RCMP, is the first of three deputy chief constables to be hired to the Surrey Police Service. Her first day on the job will be Jan. 25.
Chief Constable Norm Lipinski, said Surrey will be “well served” by Hyland, who got her start in policing with the Surrey RCMP more than 20 years ago.
“To say she is highly regarded is an understatement and I am looking forward to working together to build an exemplary police organization,” Lipinski said.
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Hyland told the Now-Leader she will be responsible for support services.
“Ultimately my bureau is responsible for all things recruiting, all things with respect to the workplace and culture, all things leadership and training, the strategic plan and Canadian engagement, and so basically everything that builds the foundation and the structure of the police force is going to fall under my bureau,” she said.
At Surrey council’s inaugural meeting on Nov. 5th, 2018 it served notice to the provincial and federal governments it is ending its contract with the RCMP – which has policed these parts since May 1, 1951 – to set up its own force.
“We’re not actually taking over for the Surrey RCMP, we’re just transitioning back to historically where Surrey started from,” Hyland said. “I found that a very interesting proposition for the last two years while this has been talked about as have many police officers both in the municipal world and in the RCMP.”
Her husband is a municipal deputy police chief in New Westminster, she noted, “so I am astutely connected to the municipal world and to the RCMP world.”
“The RCMP does an amazing job in their mandate of having to police communities and issues across the country,” she said, but the move to a city police force will allow the residents of Surrey and the police board to have a “much more direct conversation and engagement with their policing service, the policies, the deployment models and how that police officers are going to interact and provide the service.”
Under the RCMP model, she continued, the majority of that is set out of Ottawa “by people who are not living in the community, who some who have probably never been to Surrey, and so I was intrigued by the concept of it right away.”
More to come…
tom.zytaruk@surreynowleader.com
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