As anger simmers over police actions at Texas school shooting, RCMP in Nova Scotia set to face scrutiny over its response to a different mass shooting

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This article was published 29/05/2022 (843 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

HALIFAX—As gunshots rang out inside an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, and a gunman prowled the corridors, parents outside pleaded with a static police tactical squad to go inside and do something.

“Go in there! Go in there!” a women shouted at the officers soon after the attack began, according to eyewitness reports.

“You all need to go in there. You all need to do your jobs,” other parents told them.

Eventually, the tactical squad entered the school and — 40 minutes to an hour after shots were first fired — killed the shooter in the classroom in which he’d barricaded himself.

He had by then killed 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School.

A full picture of what transpired at the school is still emerging, but it has become the latest high-profile case to raise questions around when police decide to immediately confront an active shooter, and when — and why — they may decide to wait. Amid a growing history of mass shootings and school shootings, experts say police have come by some hard-learned lessons, even as the conversation of what can be expected of officers in such crises continues.

The questions are some of the same ones that will likely be raised in a different context this week in Truro, N.S., at the public inquiry into the 2020 mass shooting in northern Nova Scotia.

The commission investigating the events around the East Coast massacre will hear from RCMP Staff Sgt. Brian Rehill and Sgt. Andy O’Brien.

Rehill was the officer in charge of RCMP response during the first few hours of the shooting, when three officers — constables Stuart Beselt, Aaron Patton and Adam Merchant — formed an Immediate Action Rapid Deployment (IARD) team and entered Portapique on foot hunting for the gunman.

“It means that you basically have an active shooter situation, where … your main concern is stopping the threat,” Beselt has told the inquiry. “Everything else is irrelevant at that point in time.”

When more RCMP officers arrived at the scene, O’Brien was the officer who gave the order for them to hold fast at the top of Portapique Beach Road.

“Hold off on the second team, I only want one team in there if we can avoid having anybody else in the crossfire,” said O’Brien that night over the radio to Const. Chris Grund when the latter indicated that another team of officers could be sent into Portapique.

It would be more than 90 minutes before any other RCMP officers joined the initial IARD team searching Portapique for the man who killed 13 people there that night.

Among the many questions that have hung over the police response to the Portapique massacre is whether sending more officers in might have allowed the RCMP to save some lives in Portapique, or contain the gunman sooner.

As it was, the gunman would slip away, driving down a remote dirt road to the highway and east away from police. The next morning, he would kill nine more people before being spotted and shot by police at a gas station almost 100 kilometres away.

There are obvious and important differences between Portapique and the U.S. school shootings.

Unlike the American police dealing with a shooter in the confined quarters of a school, officers responding first to Portapique faced a hunt at night for a gunman in a large, unfamiliar, partially wooded, unrestricted area.

The shooter disguised himself as a police officer.

Further adding to the confusion were multiple house fires and loud noises that sounded like gunshots, likely the result of ammunition exploding in the fires. IARD teams are trained to head toward the sound of gunshots.

It turns out that had the RCMP been aware of the technology at its disposal, there would have been minimal concern over police officers shooting at each other — “blue-on-blue” — and more officers might have been able to enter Portapique and join the hunt.

The radios the IARD team were carrying had a GPS system that would have allowed supervisors to track them. That system had not been activated, and, in fact, the team members themselves were not even aware it existed.

“You will agree with me that had GPS technology been individualized to members and those members were communicating with (the Operational Communications Centre) OCC, that a team would have been able to be on scene, and a blue-on-blue threat would have been minimized?” asked lawyer Rob Pineo of the three officers during a March 28 panel testimony at the public inquiry.

All three officers agreed.

The IARD team that entered Portapique that night was the type of team that has become the legacy of the 1999 Columbine High School shooting in Littleton, Colorado. After that incident, says John Torres, police protocols on active shooters went through a massive change.

Torres is the president of Security and Technology Consulting at Guidepost Solutions, a global security consulting company. Prior to that, he spent 27 years with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security including stints with the Joint Terrorism Task Force.

At Columbine, he said, police prioritized securing a perimeter, and waited outside the school for about four hours, while inside, two gunmen — students at the school — were killing 12 of their classmates and one teacher and injuring 21 more.

“Columbine was really a paradigm shift on how to respond to the school shootings,” said Torres.

“The reality is that people ended up dying in that time frame, while they did not make entry into the school.”

“And the training since then is to make entry as soon as possible because every second counts because children are going to be getting shot for the time that you are … sitting outside.”

It was the Columbine shooting that paved the way for the continent’s police forces to adopt the concept of the IARD teams, the protocol that Beselt, Patton and Merchant followed when they armed up and went into the darkness of Portapique as soon as they arrived on scene.

But though it has remained an overarching principle in dealing with active shooters, the IARD approach is not a one-size fits all solution to shooting crises.

Each police department develops its own protocol on dealing with those situations. What goes into that protocol depends on the particular police department’s resources, its training and how current that training is.

A smaller police force, lacking the resources, might have to depend on a larger federal agency in dealing with an active shooter situation. In fact, in Uvalde — a town of 16,000 about 120 kilometres from the Mexican border — in was a Border Patrol tactical team that eventually entered the school.

What actually happens on the ground, however, while it has much to do with local training and protocol, also has a lot to do with the information to which police on the scene have access.

But it also has to do with the mindset of the responding police officers, he said. The best laid plans cannot predict how individual officers react when faced with a real shooting situation, nor what mistakes they might make.

In Parkland, Fla., four years ago, Broward Sheriff’s Office deputy Scot Peterson, the school’s Student Resource Officer, was captured on surveillance video with gun drawn, waiting outside Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School for 48 minutes, while inside a shooter was killing 17 students and injuring 17 more before escaping on foot.

Three other Broward deputies waited behind their vehicles also with pistols drawn, reportedly on orders from their captain, and contrary to their training regarding active shooters, which was to immediately confront the shooter. Peterson retired immediately after the shooting, and today faces multiple felony charges of child neglect.

An inevitable part of the conversations about police response — when to charge ahead and when to wait — is the question of how much responsibility police officers have to do their job in the face of potential danger.

That particular question Torres has no problem answering.

“As a public safety officer or police officer, federal agent, you’re there to serve and protect,” said Torres.

“There is a definitely a greater burden. That’s why you have all that training through your entire career, so that when those situations arise, the school, the community, the students, they’re all going to put their lives in your hands to get them out of there safely as best you can.”

Steve McKinley is a Halifax-based reporter for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @smckinley1