Yesterday I listened to a radio interview with someone with expertise on RCMP history who was discussing how the RCMP handled the April 18-19 shootings. Unfortunately I did not catch the name of the person being interviewed but he seemed to know what he was talking about. He discussed problems the RCMP has within its organization and how that may have impacted policing of the incident negatively. A lot of people here believe that too many victims lost their lives because the RCMP used Twitter to broadcast warnings about the killer on the loose, and hardly a single person in the area regularly tunes in to Twitter. This is not a Twittering culture here.
It is bad enough to have such a horrible thing going on at such a horrible time, but to add lives lost due to bungling is just too much to bear. Yesterday at the RCMP news conference about their ongoing analysis of the incident, when asked about why Twitter was used, Chief Superintendent Leather said he was satisfied with how the RCMP conducted communications with the public. He said they were preparing to use the national Alert Ready system when the killer was shot dead and there was no further need to communicate. I don't know how he can feel satisfied with the police communication with the public when hardly any of the affected public got the message. He said that the RCMP use Twitter because that is the best way to communicate with "the media" who can share the information. As if getting the message out to residents to stay inside was the responsibility of the media, not the police.
According to the interviewed person yesterday (oh how I wish I'd caught his name!) the RCMP have a lot of internal problems to deal with, low morale and understaffing being among them. He said he had no criticism of the officers involved who were doing their best to cope with a dysfunctional organization and to actually "serve and protect" the communities they were assigned to, but they were seriously hampered by lack of resources and bungling at higher levels of the hierarchy of power. Corporals Stevenson and Morrison should never have had to face the killer without backup. Communication was most definitely not "satisfactory".
2 comments:
My first thought on it was no police organization should sell their cars to the public. I know they do it for raising funds but it's too dangerous to have someone able to look like a police officer.
Down here, they have amber alerts that go to people's cell phones, but that only works where there is cell coverage.
Hi Rain, yes that is definitely a problem and in theory police are not allowed to sell uniforms to the public. The vehicle the killer used was actually homemade, he was a cop aficionado who collected and made all things cop. Our Alert Ready system is the official name here for the system that puts out Amber Alerts. It not only goes to cell phones--there is very poor coverage in the Portapique area--but also to radios and televisions if they are turned on. About as comprehensive as you can get.
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