'No idea what was going on': Whitehorse residents raise concerns about RCMP communication after break-in

When Jamie Fendrick looks out the back windows of her home, she can see the block of houses in Whitehorse's Whistle Bend neighbourhood where an apparent armed break-in happened earlier this week.

On Wednesday, she saw several armed police officers going around the area. 

But no one knocked at her door to warn her about the situation, Fendrick says.

"I had no idea what was going on," she told CBC News. 

"I have a small child. I've got dogs. I didn't even want to open the door so that my dogs aren't running down the street.… I panicked a bit," she said.

"When you don't know what's going on you just like obviously think the worst.… 'Am I going to get shot if I walk outside,' right?"

RCMP were called to the Whistle Bend area after receiving a report of an armed person trying to break into a home. Police said the person had fled by the time officers arrived and no one has been arrested.

They confirmed on Friday that more than one home had been broken into. 

Many residents say they learned about the incident through social media, where a video taken from a home surveillance camera showed a man walking through a back alley behind a house with what appeared to be a gun and breaking a window. 

They are now decrying the fact that the footage was circulating online before the RCMP released a statement. Opposition MLAs in the Yukon Legislature also brought the issue forward the day after the incident.  

According to a news release from police, the initial call about the break-in came around 2:30 p.m. The release was issued at about 6 p.m.

"We actually heard it on Facebook … instead of hearing it from [the police] when we live a block away from where it actually happened," Madison Gard, a Whistle Bend resident, said in a recent interview.  

Gard says the fact she got information from social media, rather than the RCMP, makes her feel "extremely unsafe" — especially given the fact the incident took place on a residential street when children were returning from school.

Some parents, including Gard, are questioning why some residents were told by police to stay away from the area on Wednesday afternoon or blocked from entering the neighbourhood, while school buses were still dropping off children in the area.

One of them is Rashmi Sharma, who lives one street away from where the break-in happened. She says she panicked at work, thinking about her nine-year-old daughter.

"It would have been great if the buses or the school would have been informed, and we would have picked the kids [up] rather than they've been dropped," Sharma said, adding that a friend picked up her daughter at the bus stop. 

"I know RCMP took action really fast. But ... you never know, right? It just comes to my mind ... what if [my daughter] had walked to home that day?"

RCMP response

Even with that criticism, everyone who spoke with CBC said they understand why the RCMP need to withhold some information during operations. All said they were pleased with how fast police came to the scene.

Some residents said police came around later in the afternoon, looking for home surveillance cameras that might provide better evidence.

RCMP Staff Sgt. Kent Langley says police considered issuing an alert, but with most officers in Whitehorse at the scene, it felt like the situation was contained. 

"There is a difference between people kind of wanting to know what's going on and what information needs to get out for public safety," Langley told CBC.

"If we put out an alert saying 'the suspect has left the area,' if he hasn't left the area, he's like 'OK, they're not looking for me anymore.' So we have to be very careful with the information that we put out."

Langley says the footage of the suspect was shared online at an unprecedented speed — with the potential to have a negative impact on the work police were doing at the time.

"In my five years and plus in the Yukon, I've never seen anything spread on social media so quickly," he said. 

"We always ask people to not share information about the police response, the location of officers, because … you have no control over who can see that information. And that could very much include the person that we're looking for."