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The regional police chief is standing by the decision to deploy a tactical officer — also referred to as a sniper — to an unsanctioned St. Patrick’s Day street party in Waterloo, Ont., last weekend.
“We’re very deliberate and careful about every single thing that we do in our deployment,” Mark Crowell said during the question period after a police service board meeting Wednesday.
“Providing that tactical overwatch was very deliberate to mitigate any mass casualty considerations.”
The sighting of a sniper at the Saturday party was met with fear and shock by some people, with photos and video subsequently posted on social media.
A police spokesperson subsequently confirmed to CBC News that a tactical officer was deployed to the street party, and said having a tactical officer is standard protocol for all major events.
On Wednesday, Crowell said the police service has to take global incidents into consideration.
“We’ve learned from the tragedies of mass casualty incidents across the world and across North America, and they now inform the way that we need to be prepared,” he said.
“I would just highlight that this is a protective capacity. It is meant not to intimidate and not to provide any level of concern. It’s actually meant to protect and to provide our officers and our emergency services partners every opportunity and advantage should the worst circumstances happen.”
Ian McLean, chair of the WRPS police board, said he supports the decision to deploy the tactical officer.
“We have to be prepared for … everything, and that’s the responsibility of the chief,” McLean said.
“We have to live in the world in which we find ourselves and be prepared for this type of event. When you’ve got [up to] 20,000 people within an unsanctioned kind of environment, we have to be prepared with all the tools that the chief and his team deem necessary.”
Regional police say that content, which appears to show a sniper at a St. Patrick’s Day party in Waterloo, Ont. over the weekend, depicts a tactical officer who has been used ‘regularly’ at ‘planned and unsanctioned’ events.
Concern over ‘level of risk’ at unsanctioned party
Crowell said this year’s management of the unsanctioned party for St. Patrick’s Day went as planned.
“We continue to be very concerned with the total cost, the level of risk and the stress upon all of our systems related to managing this event over multiple days,” he said.
“Moving forward, we will provide an analysis based on the impact such as crowd size, the number of charges laid and also some future planning commitments that we’ll be making with our partners to stem the tide … We’re continuing to take a really firm approach to wanting to see this end and to not have such a dramatic impact upon our community.”
McLean said the St. Patrick’s event requires the same amount of planning every year regardless of crowd size.
“We can’t be dependent on whether we have bad weather or where it lands on the calendar that we have to plan for this event,” he said, reflecting on the smaller crowd sizes this year.
“We have to stop it, not just manage it. We have to stop this because it is very risky and very expensive.”
