I saw first-hand municipalities struggling with crime prevention and where to get their money. Most of the protective service budget for the City of Surrey goes towards police and fire services. In my dissertation, I look beyond what works to an examination of various strategies at the municipal level. While I was interviewing some of the bureaucrats and managers for the City of Surrey, I pointed out that they noticed a tremendous cut in federal funding just for the police contract services they had in the last 20 or 30 years.
But independent of all that, there was no money within those fire-police budgets at the municipal level for even a crime prevention manager. When I first started writing about the Surrey crime reduction experience and the policies that they came up with, they were fortunate enough to hire somebody named Lance Talbot, whom they later lost to BC Transit, in part because the salary was a lot higher.
So funding is an incredibly important issue at the municipal level.