WASHINGTON — Metropolitan Police Chief Cathy Lanier says that the police kept people informed about Monday’s downtown 10-hour standoff situation as quickly as they could.
Lanier told WTOP Thursday that police communicated as quickly as possible that the person holed up in the building was having a mental health crisis. While George Washington University authorities originally reported that the woman had fired out of the building, Lanier said, D.C. police made it known via Twitter and public alerts as soon as possible that the person had been confined, and they tried to keep the secure perimeter “as small as possible,” Lanier says.
“We were trying to put out everything we had.”
The police tweeted that the woman was contained and there was no active shooter shortly before 5 a.m.; the next tweet, announcing the woman was in custody, came shortly before 11 a.m.
Attempts by WTOP and other media outlets to contact the police for updates during that time were unsuccessful.
The situation happened on the first workday morning after the Paris terror attacks. Asked whether the department could have announced explicitly that the situation wasn’t terror-related, Lanier recounted her department’s communications and said, “If that communication wasn’t adequate … to the commuting public, then we have to try harder next time.”
Shortly after midnight Monday, the D.C. police were called to the 1900 block of K Street Northwest for a report of a woman who was threatening to harm herself and others. Police say that when they got there, the woman shot at them, then barricaded herself into the building.
Sophia Dalke, 31, of Springfield, Virginia, surrendered to the police at about 10:30 a.m. she was charged with assaulting a police officer while armed.
No one was hurt, but many blocks were cordoned off. K, L and M streets were blocked off between 18th and 21st streets for the entire morning, leaving people unable to get to their offices and stuck in gridlock for hours longer than normal along roads leading into downtown.
20th Street wasn’t reopened until midafternoon.
