Police fail to attend armed robbery in Coventry after 999 system crashed

[dutchman]

The control and command system was down for eight hours and call handlers made handwritten notes of incidents



Police failed to respond to an attempted armed robbery in Coventry after their command and control system crashed for nearly EIGHT hours.

Emergency call takers were forced to make handwritten notes of more than 2,500 incidents due to a “major technical fault” on Friday, October 6.

Dispatchers could not input incident details taken from 999 and 101 calls directly into the command system, meaning officers were unable to respond to three incidents, including the attempted armed robbery.

The force said although the command system was fixed, it was still not clear what caused the crash.

Engineers were not alerted to the fault for almost eight hours after it was identified because officers thought the system would “reset and sort itself out”.

The system was out of action from 4.35pm on Friday, October 6 2016 until 12.22am the following day.

A police source said: “The fault may be the result of going from five call centres to three to cover the whole force.

“Police officers were retained on duty the next day and had to listen to hours and hours of all the two-and-a-half thousand 999 and emergency calls again to retrieve the information.

“They then had to check it against the handwritten notes before finally re-inputting the incident information into the Oasis Command Control system.

“It meant extra officers had to be called in and all the information has not yet been fully recovered.”

A West Midlands Police spokesman said: “Contact was made with the three callers to ensure their call was responded to and an explanation offered about why there had been a service delay.”

A full review has been launched but it was still not known how and why the crash to the much-vaunted Oasis hardware happened.

The command and control system is provided by Northgate Solutions, which had a near £4.7million contract for its upkeep.

[rebbonk]

I find this a touch unnerving.

With software driven systems, things can be very difficult to track down, if they ever are. For this reason, I'm rather cautious about driver-less cars.