What worked, what didn’t, during the Happy Valley standoff

Streets near downtown Iqaluit were barricaded for nearly 42 hours during an armed standoff that spanned three days in Iqaluit from April 28 to April 30. (PHOTO BY THOMAS ROHNER)

Having successfully dealt with two armed stand-offs within days of each other last week with neither disaster nor loss of life, Iqaluit seems to have passed a crucial test of its emergency preparedness plan.

And the consultant who helped the city examine that plan three years ago says it appears municipal officials, with perhaps a few unforeseen glitches, handled the situations well.

“In a way, they got to test their set-up in case something really nasty happened,” said Richard Kinchlea, chair of the Emergency Management and Public Safety School at Centennial College in Toronto.

Iqaluit experienced two armed standoffs last week.

The first, beginning late afternoon April 28 at a home in Happy Valley, lasted about 42 hours.

The second, which occurred in the Creekside Village rowhouses, began late at night on May 2 and lasted until the following morning. Both incidents ended peacefully.

Kinchlea travelled to Iqaluit, Rankin Inlet and Cambridge Bay in 2012 to help the three regional hubs update their emergency preparedness plans. He returned to Iqaluit after that to monitor a mock disaster exercise in late 2012.

But though social and conventional media had already reported the Happy Valley incident was underway and the presence of police officers and barricades in the neighbourhood clearly confirmed it, neither the city nor Nunavut RCMP issued an official news release until the following day.

In the case of the city, their brief release came out April 29 at around 11 a.m., nearly 20 hours after the incident started.

A police release didn’t follow until 6:30 p.m. on April 29, about 27 hours later, though a police officer did call the Nunatsiaq News office the night of the standoff asking that we not publish photos of the house in question.

It’s unfortunate no news releases went out, but not surprising, since, “the first thing to fail in an emergency is communications,” Kinchlea said.

“I’m not there. I don’t know what happened,” he added, “but yeah, there probably should have been some more public notification about what was going on, even if it’s just to say there’s a police incident happening in this area, please avoid it.”

It’s possible the city figured it was the job of RCMP, who were handling the situation, to handle communications as well, he added.

The truth about media and public relations during an emergency is that if official sources don’t provide facts and information, unofficial sources will pour in, from social media and elsewhere, and sometimes that information is false or misleading.

Phil Semple, a 30-year veteran of the Toronto Police Service and now a professor at Centennial College, agreed that more information is always better than less.

“Communication is extremely important. Media have a function to provide as well and that’s to communicate with the outside world,” Semple said.

“If you don’t give them something, they’re going to find something — somehow, somewhere — because nature abhors a vacuum. So you should give them as much as you can without compromising the investigation.”

That’s the kicker there: police have to assume that the person who is armed and dangerous inside a barricaded house is also monitoring online and broadcast media, so they have to be careful what kind of information they share, Semple added.

The city, in conjunction with the Red Cross, set up an emergency shelter for Happy Valley residents who found themselves outside the barricades on the first and second night of the April 28 standoff, which wound up lasting more than 40 hours.

But that information was distributed on Twitter and later disseminated through other media since the city did not actually announce it until the next day.

Another issue that irked some Iqaluit residents during the Happy Valley standoff was how elementary school students were bused to Joamie School the morning after the standoff began, only to be told that they had to be picked up, returned home and the school closed because of its proximity to the barricaded home.

Kinchlea said that oversight was understandable in the circumstances. Since the standoff began after school ended on April 28, it’s likely officials weren’t thinking about school the next morning, but the residents who were being inconvenienced by the lockdown zone.

“It’s something that was perhaps forgotten, but it’s nobody’s fault because no one’s written this before. It’s not in anyone’s experience to say, ‘OK, the last time this happened…’ right? It’s uncharted territory,” he said.

“In an ideal world, you’d like to think it would have occurred to somebody and I’m not surprised it didn’t.” The important thing is to learn from the situation, he added.

Ultimately, the public should consider the Happy Valley standoff the way Nunavut Chief Supt. Michael Jeffrey did, that it ended peacefully, with no loss of life and with due process in the courts, Semple said.

Part of that is thanks to police expertise in dealing with people who are distraught or mentally ill, he added.

But as research and awareness around mental health evolves, individual police forces need to provide opportunities for their officers to learn the latest findings and techniques regarding the treatment of people with mental illness, and do so on an on-going basis, Semple said, to understand what works and what doesn’t.

In other words, what they learn in basic training should be only the beginning. But that costs money, he added, and the first things to get cut when money is tight are extras like training.

Jamie Mikijuk, 26, has been charged with five firearm-related offences in connection with the Happy Valley incident. Tommy Josephee appeared in court May 4 for the second standoff on May 2 and May 3. He faces three charges.