14 HOURS OF ALERT DRAFTS
RCMP criticized for not sending phone warning
The RCMP says it was still drafting an emergency alert message to be broadcast on mobile devices and televisions provincewide when police officers shot down the suspected gunman after he went on a more than 13-hour rampage through Nova Scotia that saw at least 22 victims murdered.
RCMP officials said Tuesday that some of the delay was the result of lags in communications between government and police.
It was around 10:26 p.m. on Saturday evening local time that Nova Scotia RCMP responded to a first call for a “possible shooting” in the rural community of Portapique, N.S., that led them to the first of the weekend’s murders.
Fourteen hours later, the police were still working on drafts for an emergency alert message intended to be transmitted to all cellular phones and on all television stations through the province’s Ready Alert system, after a request from the government’s Emergency Management Office on Sunday morning.
The provincial government said it had made multiple requests for an emergency alert message and the RCMP had already posted multiple warnings to Nova Scotians on Twitter and Facebook.
No emergency alert was ever issued on cellphones or on television.
“(The province’s Emergency Management Office) had reached out a number of times throughout the morning to the RCMP” asking for a message to be sent out as an alert, Nova Scotia Premier Stephen Mcneil revealed on Wednesday.
“We were in the process of preparing an alert when the gunman was shot and killed by the RCMP,” Nova Scotia RCMP Chief Supt. Chris Leather explained later.
He also confirmed that the province’s Emergency Management Office (EMO) had reached out around 10:15 a.m. on Sunday asking if they wanted an emergency alert sent out to all cellphones and TVS in the province. At 11:40 a.m., the suspect, Gabriel Wortman, was shot and killed by RCMP officers at a gas station in Enfield, 92 km south of Portapique.
According to Leather’s response, it was only when the request came in at a quarter past 10 that morning that the police force starting working through the chain of command to see if an alert should be put out and what it should read.
“The original call to the RCMP was to one of our members at headquarters. There was then a series of phone calls that had to be made to find the officer in charge, then speak to the incident commander, have a conversation about the issuing of a message. So a lot of the delay was based on communications between the EMO and the various officers,” Leather described.
“And then a discussion about how the message would be constructed and what it would say. In that hour and a bit of consultation, the subject (Wortman) was killed,” he continued.
A growing chorus of voices, ranging from experts to family and friends of victims, are harshly criticizing the RCMP for not having used the province’s Ready Alert system to warn Nova Scotians about a killer on the loose.
The province had used the system a little more than a week earlier to warn Nova Scotians to avoid gathering during the long Easter weekend because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
But as the killer moved through different communities, RCMP relied on Twitter and Facebook to issue warnings about the gunman and his fake RCMP vehicle, as well as posting advisories telling people to stay inside.
But Internet access is spotty in some remote areas and the local RCMP’S Twitter account has less than 100,000 followers in a province of nearly one million.
“I feel strongly about that. I do feel if we had received an alert, an Amber Alert, we’ve had COVID-19 alerts ... then many people might have been spared,” Heather Matthews told CBC News on Tuesday. Matthews is a longtime friend of Lillian Hyslop, who was killed by Wortman while she was out for a walk.
As a justification for the delay in drafting the alert, RCMP officials said their response was “dynamic and fluid” throughout the manhunt, and normal procedure is to relay information on Twitter.
A report published by the Truro Daily on Wednesday claims that two RCMP officers showed up to a firehall being used as a registration centre for evacuees, failed to identify themselves, and fired shots on the building.
“We can confirm that around 10:30 a.m. there was gunfire at our hall and the gunfire caused considerable damage to our property, including taking one of our trucks out of service,” reads a since-deleted Facebook post by the Onslow Belmont Fire Brigade hall, as quoted by the Truro Daily.