Radio glitch cuts off officers

By Vicki Viotti
Advertiser Staff Writer

Patrol officers ran into problems using the Honolulu Police Department's digital radio system Wednesday night that kept them from communicating with dispatchers.

That forced the police department to switch back to the old analog system for about three hours.

The snag, officials said yesterday, is not the digital radio network but a data clog on the mobile-computer system that shares some of the same equipment.

Karl Godsey, the assistant chief of police who supervises the department's communications networks, said the digital radios were back up yesterday and that officers today will have back the capability of checking warrants, licenses and arrest records with the mobile computers in their cars.

However, he said, a pilot program to expand the mobile computing capability has been put on hold while technicians figure out how to prevent the snag from occurring again, Godsey said.

That pilot program, launched April 11 in the East Honolulu police district, enabled patrols there to receive some communications by computer instead of through radio voice transmissions, he said. Patrol officers were able to send messages from car to car and from car to dispatch, Godsey added, removing some of the chatter from the voice frequencies.

But at about 7 Wednesday night, patrol officers in different areas found they were able to talk with each other via digital radio but had problems communicating with dispatchers, Godsey said.

The department technicians discovered a backup of text data from mobile computing had started accumulating on the system's main computers, interfering with the digital voice data transmitted via the new radio network, Godsey said.

The technicians first switched the digital voice transmissions to the backup, Internet-linked network and then, after about 20 minutes, switched back to the old analog system. Shortly before 11 p.m., the computers had been rebooted and the digital radios came back on, he said.

Godsey couldn't say for certain whether the data that had backed up on the computers was all old messages already sent or data that never got through to police or dispatchers.

The temporary shutdown was the latest development in a long history of complications with police use of the city's digital communications system, which, after various hardware and software improvements were made, cost about $60 million.

Police wanted a complete digital switchover when the city acquired the system in 1998, but gaps in the radio coverage, along with time required for improvements, forced the postponement of the full conversion while the patrol division kept using the analog system.