One police expert said there is a dramatic difference in how the New Brunswick RCMP communicates with the public during an emergency in comparison to its counterpart in Nova Scotia.
Greg Marquis, a professor at the University of New Brunswick in Saint John, evaluated some of the differences between the communication with the public in the Portapique shooting in 2020 and the most recent shooting event in Tobique Narrows.
He said the differences are striking.
“We really have to be ready for anything, as they found it in Nova Scotia, unfortunately,” he said. “So I don’t know if the Nova Scotia RCMP can take some lessons from their colleagues. It’s odd. They are the same police force. It’s interesting … differences in the police force from province to province, and that is interesting.”
Marquis noticed that while the RCMP in Nova Scotia waited a significant amount of time to issue an alert of any kind to the public, the RCMP in New Brunswick didn’t seem to hesitate.
He added the frequency was also interesting.
The timeline in Tobique Narrows
On June 11, at 9:12 p.m., the RCMP in New Brunswick issued a tweet and made a Facebook post alerting people in the area to a shooting incident. Police asked residents to lock their doors, shelter in place, and stay away from windows.
At 9:36 p.m., the force sent a second tweet with similar information, and then at 9:37, they issued the Alert Ready message.
At 10:10, it revised the Alert Ready message and sent it out again with the suspect’s name, Stephen Perley Jr., again advising people of the same safety precautions.
There would be subsequent tweets about the search at 10:47 p.m. and 10:51 p.m. and more overnight, according to the RCMP, which later deleted them.
On June 12, RCMP sent out the Alert Ready information graphic at 10:29 a.m. It provided enormous detail about the protocol for an Alert Ready message.
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The social media activity slowed on June 12 and June 13 — some messages have since been deleted due to privacy concerns because the suspect was not charged.
On June 13, police said it had arrested someone believed to be in the car with the suspect when bullets were fired at a police vehicle.
Later that day, around 6:16 p.m., it issued a press release. Stephen Perley Jr. had been arrested by the Fredericton Police Force.
Marquis said it’s better, as in this case, to have more information than none. He said he feels confident in the strategy used by the RCMP in New Brunswick and said he feels safe knowing the force prioritizes communication as part of its policing practices.
Nova Scotia saw big gap in public alert
In Nova Scotia, the RCMP came under fire for how it handled communication with the public when a gunman shot and killed 22 people in April 2020.
It would take the RCMP more than eight hours to issue a public alert that there was an active shooter, and by that time, 13 people were dead.
In Nova Scotia, the Emergency Measures Organization (EMO) is in charge of sending out alerts about concerns to public safety.
In New Brunswick, the RCMP has first-person access to the system that sends out emergency notifications and can do so for every police force in the province.
“It was a discussion we had been having with EMO for quite some time, and it was a collaborative effort between the two organizations to make it more efficient and easier for messages to get out to the public when their safety was compromised,” said New Brunswick Insp. Andrea Gallant.
The partnership began in August 2020, four months after the shooting in Nova Scotia.
As for Nova Scotia, the control over who sends an emergency alert hasn’t changed, according to EMO.
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Cpl. Hans Oullette said using social media and the emergency notification system is key in communicating with the public.
He said it is about leveraging the tools it has to maximize the reach of its message.
“Our job is to keep people safe,” he said. “If we can communicate and we can put things out there that keep people safe, that is what we’re going to do. We’re going to continue doing that.”
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to clarify the RCMP in N.B. posted to Twitter overnight during the search, posts which were later deleted.
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