There was an active shooter in Nova Scotia. Why didn't they send an emergency alert?

Dear Friends:

Almost everyone knows about the mass shooting (the biggest in Canadian history) in Nova Scotia last weekend, but some interesting questions have come up in the aftermath of this tragedy!

We got this question from the pages of Reddit and would like to pass it on to you:

Why didn’t an Alert Ready message get sent out during the active shooter situation? It’s a really good question. The answer is contained between the lines in the Premier's answer - police didn’t ask EMO to send one out.

Contained in that nugget of info is the likely source of the problem - I don’t think the police have direct access to the system. If you consider the average small town NS force like Kentville where I live, they would have two officers on duty after hours, and there isn’t someone sitting in an office to activate a checklist to interface with a separate government agency to send the alert. The system would be set up to work the same regardless of what police force was dealing with the situation, hence someone would need to make the request (an intergovernmental cross departments request at that) to EMO.

AND THAT IS THE PROBLEM.

Without a provincial duty center (Emergency Measures Office) operating fully staffed 24/7, that gets situation updates immediately and automatically from any event like this, getting these alerts out is slow. Communication between police and EMO isn’t natural and doesn’t happen every day. In Ontario, the OPP has access to the system, and the communication between municipal police forces and the OPP is natural and happens all the time.

My take on this is that someone in RCMP public relations took the initiative to get the info out thru Twitter and that it isn’t actually part of the major incident protocol, but more of a regularly used good idea tool.

In the end, there needs to be direct Police access to the system, ideally thru the 911 operations center. And authority to activate it needs to be divulged down to the right level. Given that some 911 centers in NS are private contractors and others aren’t, the situation gets complicated by contracts and red tape.

And 911 operators aren’t decision-makers, they follow specific procedures - so if the police don’t ask to activate the system, it won’t get activated. So there needs to be someone overseeing the operational situation to decide to send the Alert, and that person can’t be managing the situation at the scene. On the scene, personnel have their hands full.

Yup, it's irritating enough when the system goes off by mistake for two or three hours....., but it's even worse when it doesn't go off when it's really needed!

The way I see it anyway!