When your phone 'blows up' in N.B.: Who decides to hit send on alerts
So police asked to use the Alert Ready system to urge residents to lock their doors, shelter in place and be on the lookout for three suspects last seen on King Street East.
"What we did know at the time of the alert was that at least one individual was armed with a firearm, had already used it on someone, and the location of where they went after the incident was unknown," Det. Sgt. Matt Weir explained in an email to CBC News.
When the alarm did sound over cellphones, radio and TV at 12:39 p.m., it got the public's attention, and it had a wide impact.
Elliott Kim said he got the warning and then called his parents to make sure they were aware. Bill Sharkey chose to stay at home on the west side, and Pamela Kendall closed her shop on Germain Street for most of the day.
Some Saint John residents, including Kim and Kendall also took note that the city and the Saint John police notified the public earlier in the day. In fact, police put out their first Facebook post at 10:50 a.m.
WATCH | N.B. RCMP say decision to 'blow up' phones isn't made lightly:
"I know there is a certain procedure they have to go through to do those alerts," Kendall said of the delay.
CBC News decided to trace the path of how an alert gets issued, who decides, and why.
Canada's Alert Ready emergency alert system was built by Pelmorex, a private company that operates the system as a condition of its broadcasting licence.
"Pelmorex is known commonly as the Weather Network," said Mandy Maier, who wrote a research paper on Canada's public alert system as a graduate student in the Department of Communication Studies at Mount Saint Vincent University.
The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission gives Pelmorex a "must-carry" cable-TV licence, guaranteeing the company's weather channel a place in basic cable packages and revenue from subscribers.
But how and when to issue the alerts is decided in New Brunswick by the RCMP.
RCMP spokesperson Cpl. Hans Ouellette said those decisions are made by the most senior officers at the operations communications centre in Fredericton.
He says the following criteria must be met:
There is an active threat to the public
The incident could cause the public serious bodily harm or death
There is sufficient descriptive detail to provide to the public
Issuing the Alert could assist in minimizing potential victims
Issuing the Alert could assist in obtaining more information
Each message must contain equivalent information in French and English, so no language group is informed ahead of the other Ouellette said.
Audio messages should aim for less than a minute, and text messages should be limited to about 120 words. There's currently no capacity to carry photos.
Evaluating the threat and composing the right message does take time, Ouellette said.
A targeted shooting may not qualify for an alert.
"If it's a targeted event, as in, you know, a person knows another person and they go out to specifically harm that individual, that is what we call a targeted event. There's no further threat to the general public. There was a threat to that individual, but there's no further threat to the public."
Maier said the message has to be carefully considered so it doesn't put anyone at further risk of harm, "whether that's an officer in a precarious position or another member of the public."
The message shouldn't compromise the investigation, she said, but it should give the public enough information to know what they should do or what they should look out for.
"For example," Ouellette said, "if we're looking for a person or a car, we need to have a description of that car, maybe a plate, maybe a colour, maybe a type of vehicle.
"We need to have a description hopefully of the individual who caused the situation. What do they look like? What were they wearing?"
RCMP can also control who gets the alert, whether it's spread across the province or confined to a single cell tower.
The alert will then activate for anybody who comes within what he calls the "geofence" or "hot zone."
For example, a Quebec tourist driving into Saint-Léonard, while an alert is active, would get the alert on their phone as soon as they crossed into the affected area, Ouellette said.
"As soon as they get into the hot zone, their phone will blow up in a sense, not blow up physically, but you know what I mean," he said. "The sounds will come, everything will happen, and they will understand what they need to do to stay safe within that zone."
Canada's alert ready system is relatively new.
Maier said it officially launched in 2010 and since then, its use has greatly increased.
By 2022, she said there were more broadcast and wireless immediate alerts distributed than in the previous three years combined.
In 2022, of the 843 alerts distributed across Canada, 720 were weather-related, including tornado, wildfire, thunderstorm, flash flood, air quality and hurricane alerts.
According to Pelmorex, the system was used in New Brunswick 13 times last year, including six tornado alerts.
Maier said more research is needed to better understand whether the public develops alert fatigue.
Saint John police Chief Robert Bruce says that does weigh on his mind.
"If you put out a ready alert every time we have something like this, people will get numb to it, " Bruce said the day after the Saint John shooting. "It has to mean something."
Bruce said it's a question of finding the right balance.
"You're criticized if you put it out too early and if you put it out too late and if you don't put it out at all."
The City of Saint John operates its own emergency alert notification system, but users have to sign up to receive them by email, text or voice message.
After the fatal shooting, the city continued to issue updates online and so did the police. By 4:40 pm, the next day, the pubic was notified that all three suspects had been arrested.
The Alert Ready system is not optional because it is considered to be an essential life-saving service.
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