The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Division applied a “non permanent repair” Friday to get its laptop dispatch system again on-line after it crashed on New 12 months’s Eve, authorities mentioned.
Issues have been first reported with the 38-year-old computer-aided dispatch system — referred to as CAD — round 8 p.m. Tuesday when deputies at a number of stations reported bother logging onto their patrol automobile computer systems, officers informed The Occasions in an announcement.
This glitch compelled the division to resort to old-school strategies for managing calls, with dispatchers writing down name info by hand after which relaying particulars to deputies through radio. Throughout the CAD crash, deputies have been unable to run license plates or folks’s backgrounds by way of their automobile computer systems.
These issues have now been resolved because of the non permanent repair for the programming problem the CAD system encountered, in keeping with the Sheriff’s Division.
The crash prompted criticism of the division’s outdated laptop system and calls to deal with the difficulty.
Ex-Sheriff Alex Villanueva weighed in on-line, pointing to a letter he wrote to the L.A. County Board of Supervisors in 2022 in a put up on X.
“It’s not a matter of ‘if’ there will likely be a catastrophic and unrecoverable failure of the RMS [records management system] or CAD system, however a query of ‘when,’” he wrote within the 2022 letter. “This failure will produce a major hazard to the residents of Los Angeles County, which may be averted by way of the rapid modernization and substitute of the CAD and RMS techniques.”
Division officers don’t deny that the system is in dire want of an improve and say Sheriff Robert Luna is working to deal with the difficulty.
“The division has lengthy struggled with outdated know-how, and since taking workplace, the Sheriff has pressured the crucial significance of upgrading and enhancing our inside techniques,” the division mentioned in an announcement Friday. “In his first six months of his administration, the Sheriff addressed the necessity to change the archaic CAD, amongst different techniques, and additional develop a multi-year gear substitute plan.”
The division issued a request for proposals for a brand new CAD system in mid-2023 and is at the moment evaluating potential choices, the assertion mentioned. Testing of 1 potential system will start subsequent week in choose patrol stations, in keeping with the Sheriff’s Division.