Free Republic

Defendants Alleged to Have Rigged Police Chief Exam, Misappropriated City’s Confidential Information Audrey Strauss, Acting United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Acting Under Authority Conferred by 28 U.S.C. § 515, and David Sundberg, Special Agent-in-Charge, New Haven Division, Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”), announced the arrest of ARMANDO J. PEREZ, the Chief of Police of the City of Bridgeport, Connecticut (the “City”), and DAVID DUNN, the City’s acting personnel director, for defrauding the City by rigging the 2018 police chief examination, mandated by the City’s Charter, to ensure PEREZ would be selected for the position. ...

Law enforcement agencies across the country reported brief outages of their 911 systems Monday night, and it was not immediately clear if there was a connection with a major Microsoft system outage. Law enforcement agencies around the country, from Nevada to Pennsylvania and Arizona to Minnesota, tweeted that their 911 systems were down beginning sometime after 7 p.m. ET. Multiple reports indicated outages throughout Delaware and Ohio as well. By 8:15 p.m., many of those departments reported that their services had come back online. Others were still recommending that people call local department numbers instead of the emergency line. The...

PITTSBURGH – With her boyfriend in severe abdominal pain, Sharon Edge called 911 for an ambulance in the early morning hours of Feb. 6. Heavy snow was falling — so heavy it would all but bring the city to a standstill — and Curtis Mitchell needed to go to a hospital. "Help is on the way," the operator said. It never arrived. Nearly 30 hours later — and 10 calls from the couple to 911, four 911 calls to them and at least a dozen calls between 911 and paramedics — Curtis Mitchell died at his home. His electricity knocked...

Instapundit points to a Wired article about fixing the 911 system: HERE'S AN INTERESTING ARTICLE FROM WIRED on efforts to reinvent the 911 emergency-call system to take advantage of more modern technologies. The conclusion seems right: If national safety - the ability to respond to hurricanes, terrorist attacks, earthquakes - depends on the execution of explicit plans, on soldierly obedience, and on showy security drills, then a decentralized security scheme is useless. But if it depends on improvised reactions to unknown threats, that's a different story. A deeply textured, unmapped system is hard to bring down. A system that encourages...