RCMP’s inability to track officers during N.S. killings questioned at inquiry
HALIFAX — Lawyers at the public inquiry into Canada’s worst mass shooting are asking why — in an era when teens use apps to locate each other — the RCMP lacked technology to track their officers on foot.
The topic has arisen repeatedly in the inquiry’s first two months, and a senior RCMP manager is acknowledging the absence of global positioning systems on police radios as officers responded to the 2020 rampage in Nova Scotia was unacceptable.
Darryl Macdonald, the commander of the RCMP’s operational communication centre in Prince Edward Island, said in a Feb. 8 interview with the inquiry that the need for a GPS tracking system should have been addressed before 2020.
Macdonald — who has also worked as a computer-aided dispatch system co-ordinator in Nova Scotia — said the 2014 police shootings in Moncton, N.B., clarified that “when members dismount from their units (patrol cars), there is no GPS tracking of the member.”