Very different tragedies share common element
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.
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 team and entered Portapique on foot hunting for the gunman. 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.
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. “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.”
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.
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