Sending out a public alert about a killer driving a replica police car and wearing a Mountie uniform would have overwhelmed the dispatch system when people started calling 911 and caused officers to miss more key information in their hunt for Gabriel Wortman, says an RCMP dispatch expert from Prince Edward Island.
The RCMP’s failure to employ the Alert Ready system that can send warnings to mobile phones has been a bone of contention since the murder of 22 people two years ago, with many believing it might have offered a lifesaving warning to nine souls killed on the second day of the April 18-19, 2020, shootings. Mounties learned the details about what the killer was driving and wearing early on in the mass shootings, but only shared them on Twitter shortly before the Dartmouth denturist was killed by a Mountie dog handler at the Enfield Big Stop.
“To throw into that mix a broadcast alert that is going to make everybody aware of a situation, as general as somebody described as a police officer in a police car, wow. You know, the expectation there is great. And I know there’s a lot of pressure from the families and I feel for them, but I … think we would have missed more key information coming to us had that gone (on) there, to be honest with you, because I think the (operational communications centre) would have been completely overwhelmed, not just us, but the 9-1-1 system,” Darryl Macdonald, the RCMP’s operational communications centre commander in Prince Edward Island, said in an interview with the Mass Casualty Commission released this week.
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