Juno News - April 26, 2020


The RCMP did a commendable job in Nova Scotia

Mentioned
Constable Heidi Stevenson Morrison Workman Gilbert Wortmann Jill Warmington
What is the government's plan to get us back to normal？ Skeptical of the lockdowns？ Prepare to be mocked

Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

144.99

Word count

952

Sentence count

57

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

On this episode of the podcast, I discuss the events that unfolded in the wake of the mass shooting that took place in Nova Scotia, Canada on Nov. 22, 2019. This was a volatile, fluid, fast-moving situation.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Like many of you, I got up last Sunday morning to the news of what was
00:00:08.240 unfolding in Nova Scotia. The RCMP there had put out a photo of a suspect and a
00:00:13.920 photo of a fake police car that they believed he was driving within about an
00:00:18.000 hour of learning about it from Gilbert Wortmann's girlfriend who herself had
00:00:22.560 been assaulted and tied up by him before he went on his rampage. She managed to
00:00:27.960 escape and hid in the woods until she was located by police. She provided the
00:00:34.980 RCMP with much-needed information which they then shared through their Twitter
00:00:39.600 feed. This was a volatile, fluid, fast-moving situation since the first call
00:00:45.840 came in around 10 30 p.m. Saturday night. The RCMP has taken a huge amount of
00:00:53.820 criticism for not using the provincial emergency alert system to alert the
00:01:00.360 public. The criticism by the armchair quarterbacks on social media and in the
00:01:05.820 mainstream media frankly has been outrageous given the totality of the
00:01:11.400 circumstances as we now know them, but more on that later. Policing is a tough
00:01:16.920 job. I have long described it as 95% routine and 5% sheer terror. In the RCMP
00:01:24.240 members work alone one member to a car. If a member is assigned a call he or she
00:01:30.240 goes there alone. In urban areas other members hearing the call may attend as
00:01:35.520 backup. In that part of rural Nova Scotia backup was miles away and many many
00:01:41.760 minutes away from the first member on the scene. The first member on the scene
00:01:45.640 found multiple structure fires, several car fires, and multiple homicides in a yard
00:01:51.420 and in that residence. What a daunting scene.
00:01:56.880 Before long they have discovered 13 victims at eight locations in that small
00:02:02.220 town and area. The cavalry was called in and the RCMP worked feverishly to
00:02:08.000 establish a large perimeter and to try and figure out what happened and who and
00:02:14.000 where the shooter was. It was also in the dark of night in a sleepy little
00:02:18.860 village. There were no bright lights. It took several hours for the RCMP to
00:02:24.440 figure out their suspect was on the move and committing more more homicides, more
00:02:31.060 murders. Through the night he traveled about a hundred and fifty kilometers, generally
00:02:37.760 moving south towards Halifax. RCMP members from all over Nova Scotia, assisted by
00:02:44.240 members from New Brunswick and members of the Halifax Regional Police Service, sped
00:02:50.000 in to help out. At 10.49 a.m. local time, Constable Chad Morrison was at the
00:02:55.880 intersection of Highway 2 and Highway 224 where he was awaiting Constable Heidi
00:03:00.980 Stevenson, who was on her way to meet him as they formed part of this of the
00:03:05.540 manhunt. Morrison saw what appeared to be a marked RCMP police vehicle coming
00:03:10.640 towards him, thinking it was Constable Stevenson. It wasn't. It was Workman.
00:03:16.460 And Morrison was shot on his vehicle. Stevenson undoubtedly heard his radio call
00:03:21.420 in distress and spotted Workman's vehicle a short distance away. She rammed his
00:03:26.500 vehicle trying to stop him and he fired several shots into her chest and neck area. 0.98
00:03:31.160 He then dragged the wounded officer out of her patrol vehicle and executed her in
00:03:37.220 cold blood as she lay on the ground. He then took her sidearm, two magazines, and
00:03:43.460 fled the scene in a hijacked car. He was located less than a half hour later at an
00:03:50.000 Irving gas station on Highway 102 in Enfield where he was engaged by ERT members
00:03:55.220 and the threat was eliminated. The courage shown by Constable Stevenson in trying to
00:04:01.580 stop the threat is remarkable. Jill Warmington of the Toronto Sun called for
00:04:07.480 her to receive the Cross of Valour posthumously. At the very least that
00:04:12.080 should happen. That or the Silver Star of Courage, our nation's highest honour.
00:04:17.020 Lastly, a few words about the criticism about the RCMP not using the Provincial
00:04:23.020 Emergency Alert System. I did an interview with CTV News this week to try and
00:04:29.480 dispel some of that misinformation. In Nova Scotia, a province with less than a
00:04:35.080 million people, the emergency centre is not staffed after hours on weekends. Even if
00:04:41.140 the RCMP had wanted to put out a provincial province-wide alert, they
00:04:45.040 couldn't. There was no one in to do it and they had precious little information to
00:04:50.680 tell people other than there was an active shooter situation. They didn't get
00:04:55.720 the information from Wurtman's girlfriend until she was interviewed
00:05:01.600 between 7 and 8 Sunday morning. They released further information shortly
00:05:07.300 after 8 and then provided the suspect photo and photo of the fake police car at
00:05:11.860 8.54. At about 10.15 a.m., the Provincial Emergency Alert people contacted the RCMP
00:05:18.820 media, said they had called in a couple of people should the RCMP want to use the
00:05:23.140 alert system. The media members did not have the authority to green light so they
00:05:28.540 called at the Incident Command who was, as you might well imagine, very, very busy. In the
00:05:35.020 interim, their media staff began crafting a message to be broadcast. As this was going on,
00:05:41.840 the ERT members located and shot the suspect. Reality may not fit the media
00:05:48.920 narrative, but that is the reality. The RCMP performed that night in
00:05:56.520 exceptionally chaotic circumstances. They aren't trained for multiple homicides
00:06:01.880 and, as we later learned, 16 different crime scenes, but they dealt with it as best
00:06:07.220 they could. And in a little over 12 hours after the first call, they had located, shot
00:06:12.920 and killed a serial killer. A great job, in my view, in exceptionally trying
00:06:19.340 circumstances. Especially after learning they lost a member of their own. Rest in
00:06:26.960 peace, Constable Heidi Stevenson. For True North, I'm Leo Knight.