Earlier this year, the Sea to Sky RCMP held a series of town hall meetings in Bowen Island, Squamish, Whistler and Pemberton—one in each community its officers serve.
The intent, as Insp. Robert Dykstra explained, was to connect with locals face-to-face to hear about their expectations for policing in their community.
A handful of questions “were specifically chosen in order to spark certain types of conversation,” said Dykstra, Officer in Charge of the Sea to Sky RCMP.
One, “How does our community want to be policed?” garnered some interesting responses, according to Dykstra. “One answer was, ‘We don’t want to be policed,’” he recalled during an interview in his Whistler Village office on Friday morning, Aug. 25. “Which is fine, because that actually generated a whole other conversation around, ‘No one wants to be policed, so what is the role of the police in the community?’ That kind of evolved into keeping people safe, making people feel safe, working with kids and youth, prevention-type activities, safe community spaces for everyone—those kinds of things.”
But the town hall meetings and the approximately 30 locals in attendance at each also served a more specific purpose: to inform the Sea to Sky RCMP’s 2023-2028 strategic plan.
The result of that community engagement officially rolled out this August, after stakeholders worked over the past several months to distil feedback gathered during the meetings—and from past consultations, surveys, and strategic plans—into what is easily the Sea to Sky RCMP’s most comprehensive, detailed strategic plan to date. The report serves as a data-driven roadmap laying out a mission, vision and three overarching focus areas for police in the corridor over the next five years, as well as a set of core values. It’s all displayed in a bright, colourful illustration designed by the same graphic recorder Dykstra enlisted to sketch live drawings during each town hall meeting, encapsulating ideas and key themes raised during the discussions.
At first glance, creating a one-size-fits-all plan is a lofty task for an agency covering such a wide surface area. Though each community within the Sea to Sky RCMP’s jurisdiction is unique, the strategic planning process proved locals from Bowen Island to Pemberton have far more in common than a shared officer in charge of their local detachments. As those graphics show, similarities include overlapping views about what those communities expect from their police, said Dykstra.
“The mission, vision, and core values become the framework for all of our decisions,” said Dykstra. “If we’re making a decision that’s not consistent with those things, then you have to ask yourself, ‘Is it the right thing to be doing?’ That’s the idea of having core values—it’s not just to put up on a piece of paper that says, ‘These are our values,’ and then go on and do whatever you want. We have to live these every single day.”
The point of strategic planning is to create a living document highlighting areas where there is room to grow, Dykstra continued. “It’s all well and good to have a strategic plan that lists a bunch of priorities that you’re really good at, and a list of objectives and activities that you’ve already achieved, but [in that case], you’re just documenting the good work you’re already doing,” he said.
In the Sea to Sky RCMP’s case, “We already do a lot of really good work, so the idea here isn’t to be a complete picture of absolutely everything that we do—we’re going to continue to do everything that we normally do on a regular basis, but what are the areas that we want to improve on and actually move ourselves forward as an organization?”
Police priorities
The Sea to Sky RCMP’s new strategic plan lists its three main priorities as “Enhance public safety,” “Employee excellence and workplace culture,” and “Accountability and governance.” Under each priority is a short list of associated objectives, and a desired outcome.
In terms of enhancing public safety, for example, the plan names four distinct goals: enhance the use of restorative justice, focus on crime prevention and reduction, make Sea to Sky roads safer, and ensure each detachment is prepared to respond to an emergency.
The ultimate desired outcome? “Safer and more secure communities where residents and visitors feel safe, and trust between the community and the police is strengthened.”
Though Dykstra had a fairly accurate idea of what the Sea to Sky RCMP’s priorities might look like prior to the first town hall meeting, some aspects of the final plan—valuing a commitment to “foster wellness,” both in-house and in the community, for example—stemmed directly from unexpected conversations that arose during the public meetings.
“I was really interested and surprised to hear the concern for our members’ mental health,’” Dykstra said. “People in the community were like, ‘We want you to be well, we understand that there’s a lot of work that you’re doing, we understand that you’re understaffed, we understand that you’re dealing with all these negative issues—you have to be healthy as well, because if you’re not healthy, then you can’t do your job properly, which means community safety is at risk.’”
How will Sea to Sky RCMP achieve those outcomes?
The answer is a detailed list of specific initiatives and actions each local detachment will carry out to meet its community’s needs, while helping the Sea to Sky RCMP achieve its broader goals. Operations commanders from all four detachments and the Sea to Sky’s general investigation team will lay out those initiatives in business plans, due to arrive on Dykstra’s desk by September.
“The strategic plan is for the Sea to Sky as a whole, just like for the RCMP as a whole, we have a national plan,” Dykstra said. “But that national plan can’t apply to every aspect of every activity the RCMP does across the country—the mandate is way too broad. There’s way too many different types of activities, priorities, types of service that we provide.”
With the Sea to Sky RCMP now functioning as a “hybrid-integrated” police agency, covering four provincial police service contracts and two municipal police contracts with the Resort Municipality of Whistler (RMOW) and the District of Squamish, working within four detachments all reporting to the same officer in charge, it’s the “same thing for Sea to Sky, just smaller,” Dykstra explained.
Actions “could be simple things, like targeting excessive speed, or winter tire checks, or getting into schools and working with the kids,” said Dykstra, turning one of the two computer monitors on his desk around to point out a list of initiatives the Bowen Island detachment proposed in its draft business plan.
In line with the corridor-wide objective of enhancing restorative justice, for example, Bowen Island RCMP’s operations commander suggested an initiative to maintain relations with the North Shore Restorative Justice Society. Obtaining a digital speed sign to ultimately help improve road safety is another idea.
While initiatives will vary by community, all should be SMART—specific, measurable, achievable, relevant to regional priorities, and time-bound, said Dykstra. Once business plans are complete, the initiatives will be entered into an RCMP reporting system the agency will use to track its progress and performance.
Quoting Einstein, Dykstra acknowledged “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted,” even in terms of the Sea to Sky RCMP’s strategic plan.
When it comes to the perception of safety, or increased trust between the community and the police, “How do you measure that? There are ways—you can do surveys, and you can do meetings—but how do you ensure that you’re actually getting to the core of what that looks like? Some of those things will be hard, but we’ve got to at least try,” Dykstra said.
“Otherwise, we can’t really know if we’re improving or not.”
‘We are your RCMP, not just the RCMP’
Dykstra plans to use that data internally to influence decision-making and assess whether initiatives are making their intended impact, but also plans to release the information to the public, likely in the form of an annual report.
“We talk about trust, we talk about accountability, and we talk about governance, and part of that means we need to be open with the people that we serve, who are spending their tax dollars on our service, [about] how we’re doing,” he said. “We can talk anecdotally all day long about different stories, but I know people want to know the data; they want to see where we’re performing well.”
RCMP regulations mean the strategic plan needs to be translated to French before it can be posted to the agency’s official channel, but it should soon be available to view on the RMOW’s website. Dykstra said he also hopes to have the plan translated into Squamish and Ucwalmícwts, Lil’wat Nation’s traditional language.
Reflecting on the strategic-planning process, “I’m really proud of the work that was done,” said Dykstra. “I’m really proud of the team, in terms of the effort that was put into putting it together. I’m really proud of the citizens and our stakeholders that came forward to express their points of view. I think this is a really solid step forward in terms of not only what we’re going to be doing in the Sea to Sky going forward, but how we want to interact with the public, and how I want us to be accountable and show that we are your RCMP, not just the RCMP.
“I’m really committed to that community policing element—it’s huge for me,” he added. “We’re no different than Delta or Vancouver or Calgary or Edmonton—we are the local police force.”
