Perhaps, if the first tweet from the RCMP had told the truth instead of maintaining the Mounties’ reputation for stiff upper lips, British understatement and always, always, being in total control.
Its a guy thing and the Mounties are still very much a boys’ gym locker.
Hate to think what would have happened if the RCMP had been in charge of the communications net during the morning attack on Pearl Harbour : “a firearms incident is reportedly underway in vicinity of the naval base” ?
But let’s move beyond that to another problem the RCMP is infamous for : wanting to keep everything , EVERYTHING, in house.
NIH, Not Invented Here, might as well be their official as well as un-official motto.
If they had told the truth, back at 1130 Pm on Saturday night, none of Sunday mornings eight deaths might have happened.
They needed to tell the truth : “it a total bloodbath down here in Portapique, already we see more more victims here in one place than in 270 years of NS history - and the mass killer is still on the loose , in a marked cop car.”
And yes, I am yelling that, in ALL CAPS : “our worst mass murders here in NS in 270 years and the killer, Gabriel Wortman, is still armed and on the loose - driving up to his unwary victims in a marked cop car !!!”
That alone would have pushed the story to the top of the NS news cycle - we won’t have needed the official Provincial Alert to go off - the media and the public would have done it themselves.
I am old enough to have lived —inside— two very scary all-out manhunts for armed repeat killers : the “Boy on a Bike” in Halifax in August 1964 and the “Al MacDonald Killings” at Christmas 1975.
We were scared stiff inside but we were also safe inside : because the police were honest and upfront about what they and we were up against.
No stiffer upper lip stuff, just the unvarnished truth : and the Truth saves lives.
Number One, if the RCMP had just told the truth, lives might have been saved.
Number Two : get everyone involved : pull all the marked cop cars in North Central Nova Scotia off the road, drive about instead in ghost cars or personal cars, stay in touch via cell phone.
Consider ordering all civilian vehicles also to pull off the road in North Central NS.
Get every possible chopper in the air over North Central NS : searching for the one cop car still on the road : ambulance, lands and forest, military choppers as well as police choppers : every chopper, even if they were “Not Invented Here, in Mountieland”.
We don’t need to highly pay and train expensively police personnel to ‘do things by the book’ in a crisis : we could pull minimum wage teenage stocking clerks to read from the book.
Or perhaps we do still need to go by the Book : but the book is big and full of lateral thinking.
To borrow a page from the military, what we needed here were leaders who were objective-driven, not rule-book driven.
Now I suspect some of this thinking is going through minds of the mounties in the lead on the ground during this rampage and I don’t doubt some of them are going to have severe mental issues over this - or worse - as the loss of those eight additional lives weighs upon their conscience.
It would help them personally if the entire Mountie world, retired as well as working mounties, admitted that just maybe their longstanding internal culture was as much at fault for this as was the woeful decisions made by a handful of mountie lead officers on the ground during that night and early morning....
No comments:
Post a Comment