Police Radios Fail (Philadelphia, PA)
PHILADELPHIA-May 20, 2004 — Officials say more than half of Philadelphia's police radio frequencies crashed when dispatchers used a command to speak to all officers at once.
Bob Eddis, the president of Philadelphia's lodge of the Fraternal Order of Police, says the cops' "worst nightmare" occurred Tuesday night. The radio system, he says, "went completely dead."
The radios were out for between 20 and 40 minutes and experienced glitches for another two hours. Eddis had been reserved in his criticism of the police administration until yesterda
y, but he said angrily that there was no viable backup. Deputy Police Commissioner Charles Brennan, who is in charge of police radio, says the breakdown began because police cars from all over the city were dispatched to the Germantown neighborhood, where an officer had been attacked.
In order to talk to all officers in the city, police dispatchers used a special command, Brennan says, but invoking that command caused a series of glitches that prevented officers from speaking to dispatchers and vice versa. Brennan says officials still don't know why it happened Link to Article