The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) must improve the way it communicates both internally and with the public, admitted its commissioner Brenda Lucki during her testimony before the commission of inquiry responsible for shedding light on the massacre of April 2020 mass in Nova Scotia.
“We need to be able to communicate better, both internally and externally,” Ms. Lucki admitted during an inquest hearing which looks into the circumstances surrounding the April 18-19 massacre. 2020 in which a gunman driving a replica police car committed 22 murders in 13 hours.
Ms. Lucki said the local RCMP in Nova Scotia took too long to publicly release details of the killings. She also mentioned that the police remained too vague in the information they divulged, according to her, especially in the days following the murders.
Reporters and residents had to wait until April 28 for police to provide details of how the killings took place.
“If local RCMP personnel had been continuously providing information as it came in, they might not have needed to have a big press conference,” Lucki said, adding that she realizes, in hindsight, that it would have been useful to send more communications staff on site to help.
Following the April 28, 2020 press conference, Ms Lucki criticized local officers for their decision not to release detailed information about the semi-automatic weapons used by the killer.
Her reaction drew accusations of political interference: some RCMP officers — and federal opposition parties — implying that she had come under direct political pressure from the federal Minister of Public Safety to report details. be published. She has repeatedly denied being politically pressured.
On Tuesday, Ms Lucki testified that she was assured before the April 28, 2020 meeting that details of the weapons would be released.
She had not been informed, however, of an email that had been sent that day to Deputy Commissioner Brian Brennan, who was informed that RCMP investigators did not want these details released.
“With all the information going around, I was not aware,” she testified.
Ms. Lucki also said that it was not until June of this year that she saw the “wellness report” that had been prepared for the RCMP regarding its Nova Scotia division. The report by Ottawa-based consulting group Quintet Consulting was completed in September 2021.
“I was surprised that he had been out for months, like six to eight months, and that I was not informed of it,” said the commissioner.
The report included comments from personnel who said there were “dysfunctions” at H Division before the mass shooting and that they felt abandoned by their superiors following the killings.
The summary, made public this week by the inquiry, also included confidential interviews describing top regional leaders as ‘a small clique of officers’ who support each other in the group, but whose others are ‘treated like outsiders’. .
Commission counsel Rachel Young asked Commissioner Lucki why the report had not been shared with commanding officers in Nova Scotia and why senior management in Ottawa had not acted on it.
“I just think someone failed or fell through the cracks among 100 other things,” she pointed out.
Ms. Lucki said that in July an action plan was being prepared to respond to the report’s findings.
Regrets
Also on Tuesday, the inquest released a transcript of an August 4 interview between Ms. Lucki and inquest lawyers. During the interview, the Commissioner stated that the RCMP needs to become a more transparent organization.
The 131-page transcript of the interview includes his regrets about an April 28, 2020 meeting with regional staff, nine days after the killings. Commissioner Lucki had chastised staff for their decision not to release detailed information about the semi-automatic weapons used by the killer.
She has repeatedly denied allegations that she wanted the details known due to political pressure from federal Liberals, who were working on gun control legislation.
Ms Lucki said her push to lift the lid on information about the killer’s weapons was tied to her desire to be more transparent with the public.
“When you talk about culture, our culture is to be less transparent. We hold things back because we can,” she told inquest lawyers.
Commissioner Lucki said in her interview that she went too far in criticizing her exhausted subordinates, during the call on April 28, 2020. “When I think about it before I go to bed, honestly, I can’t sleep,” she said.
“We always felt that because things were under investigation, we couldn’t release things. This is no longer the case. There are things that can be disclosed even in the course of an investigation. We just have to make sure that what is disclosed does not compromise (the investigation)”, she argued.