Two people were killed in the time it took Canadian police to obtain internal approval to post a public warning on Twitter about suspects in the Nova Scotia mass shooting in 2020, a public inquiry said Wednesday.
Leah Scanlan, former director of strategic communications for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Nova Scotia, spoke at length on Wednesday, a day after testimony surfaced in which she said she was “glad” no warning had been sent for the whole province. during a 13-hour rampage, warning the public about an armed man driving a copy of a police cruiser.
If a signal was sent, many more police officers could be killed, Scanlan told commission investigators in an interview in February, which was launched this week.
The National Warning System – commonly used for weather emergencies and amber alerts – could be used to send emergency alerts to Nova Scotians’ mobile phones.
It can also be used to broadcast emergency broadcasts on radio and television.
Asked why the warning system was not used, Scanlan said in an interview: “My intestines? You will have more dead cops because this is the village police.
Instead of using the warning system, members of the communications team relied on Twitter and Facebook to spread information about the shooter, his vehicle and his whereabouts. They also sent by fax the editors, the commission heard.
On Tuesday, retired Corporal Jennifer Clark, who was in charge of Scanlan, told commissioners it took nearly half an hour on the morning of April 19, 2020, to approve a tweet providing some details about the cruiser’s replica and the suspect driving it. .
By then, the shooter had been raging for hours, stopping at the homes of various victims and killing residents.
Clark said tweeting that earlier information was an “unnecessary risk” because it could target uniformed officers.
Twenty-two people died during the villa in rural Scotland on April 18 and 19, 2020, including one police officer.
Leah Scanlan at Wednesday’s hearing. Photo: Canadian Press / Rex / Shutterstock
“If I could go back and those minutes go away, I would,” Scanlan said in tears on Wednesday, referring to the time it took to approve the tweet. Her testimony depended on delays and failures in communicating details of the shooting to the public.
Members of the communications team blamed several factors – including the 140-character limit on Twitter – for hiding certain details that could identify the shooter and his car.
Twitter increased its character limit from 140 to 280 in 2017, three years before the shooting.
Transcripts and documents show that the communications team participated in numerous meetings and emails to delete their “media messages”.
Earlier in the procedure, on May 31, RCMP sergeant Andy O’Brien told the committee that using the warning system “did not occur to me.”
He also said that there was no “magic solution” to address the communication gaps in the RCMP and rejected the idea of upgrading the infrastructure to respond to “once [in] lifetime “mass shootings – when the current system works” for the remaining 99.99% of the time “.
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