'Temporary fix' gets L.A. County sheriff’s computer dispatch system back online

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Division carried out a “short-term repair” Friday to get its laptop dispatch system again on-line after it crashed on New Yr’s Eve, authorities stated.

Issues had been first reported with the 38-year-old computer-aided dispatch system — often called CAD — round 8 p.m. Tuesday when deputies at a number of stations reported bother logging onto their patrol automotive computer systems, officers advised The Instances 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. In the course of the CAD crash, deputies had been unable to run license plates or folks’s backgrounds by their automotive computer systems.

These issues have now been resolved due to the short-term repair for the programming problem the CAD system encountered, based on 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The crash prompted criticism of the division’s outdated laptop system and calls to deal with the difficulty.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 publish on X.

“It isn’t a matter of ‘if’ there can 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 big hazard to the residents of Los Angeles County, which may be averted by the quick modernization and alternative 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“The division has lengthy struggled with outdated know-how, and since taking workplace, the Sheriff has pressured the vital significance of upgrading and enhancing our inner techniques,” the division stated in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 tools alternative 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 stated. Testing of 1 potential system will start subsequent week in choose patrol stations, based on the Sheriff’s Division.