Last 10 days have seen a spur in crimes in the city and nearby areas. It’s a worrying trend. What’s going on in our city? No one knows. No one is able to pinpoint the problem.

Every city goes through the pain of growing up. Right now our city is behaving as a teenager; it has so many moods, it has numerous aspirations and it is excited about growing into a good ‘old city and making a place  of pride for itself on the map of Canada for  decades to come.

Crime is part of every growing city’s story, while writing this piece it was discovered that there is an ongoing debate  in different part of the world on whether crime and economy have any relation and can an index be drawn on rise of crime in particular economic phase.

Experts studying the demographics of a particular city often observe that  relation between crime and economy cannot be put in black and white. Changing demographics of a growing city means lots of people moving in the city to live and work and it also means many criminals moving into the vicinity. Studies have shown that it’s not always organized criminals but  low skilled individuals who are not able to survive in competitive work force of  highly skilled individuals take to crime.

Surrey is a growing city, we are delighted to become home of approximately 1200 people  every  month but rising crime is not a good branding. Assimilation of immigrants in the new community is as it a difficult task and incidents of  assaults, robberies and homicides are no confidence builders. We do live in west but we cannot be known as wild wild west of Canada  not at least like the western Canada of 19th and early 20th century.

Last week a man tried to kidnap a four year old girl from Holland park; a place that is in the centre of town, stone’s throw away from the Surrey downtown core area which is witnessing unprecedented development and real estate boom. Incidents like this do not represent a secure environment, not for a young city like us that wants to flourish.

The government both at provincial and municipal level and RCMP need to come up with a comprehensive strategy to tackle rising crime in Surrey. Residents, old and new deserve to live in fear free environment. RCMP is visible, seems they are cracking down on crime, but we just had 7th homicide of  the year. It is only June, the sixth month of the year. Something is very wrong with our city, we need to find out what and how we can reduce the crime rate effectively, Surrey needs to act now.