Police Radio

Police Radio Communication Failures

COMM112

Police Radio Communication Failures

There have been several incidents of radio communication failures reported by police officers and radio room dispatchers. There are constant occurrences of overriding, dead air, missed transmissions, loud static, and faulty emergency buttons. Therefore, the lives of Philadelphia police officers are at a higher risk in performing their duties to protect and serve the citizens of Philadelphia. It is a known fact that the Philadelphia Police Department is in desperate need of a new radio communication system. There is just a matter of time before something tragic happens as a result of these failures that are occurring during transmissions.

The Philadelphia Police Radio system has been in effect since 1914. The system was created to get emergency calls from the public to the police officers in a timely manner. A brief timeline below will show you how the system has improved over the years:

1914 The first police communication system was manned through call boxes to station houses. Officers would call in from the streets for assignments.

1922- The first radio receiver was installed into police vehicles.

1937-42 The Philadelphia Police Radio room was created in City Hall. The transmissions went over a regular AM radio frequency. Police vehicles could not transmit yet.

1963-66 The radio dispatch room moved to the Police Administration Building. A card system was introduced to create a two-part dispatch system. A 911 call would come in, the call taker would write the information on an emergency card, and finally a conveyor belt would deliver the card to dispatchers to give to the officers.

1967 Two-way hand held radio was invented.

1978 The Computerized Assistant Dispatch (C.A.D.) replaced the card system.

1987 The new E-911 C.A.D. system replaced the original C.A.D. system. It offered more radio frequencies and better air quality.

2004 An 800 Mhz trunked radio system was installed.

The City of Philadelphia has spent over $51 million dollars on this trunked 800 Mhz radio system. This system allows more users than the original conventional system. A pool of frequencies being available when an officer is ready to transmit lets the systems find an unused frequency and assigns it to the officer for that transmission. This trunked radio system is very flexible and is controlled by computer. It was set up this way to avoid needing a technician to set up complex channel assignments and reconfiguring the system as needed. This system also allows other city agencies to communicate on the same channels during a natural disaster.

Each radio is assigned a "talk group", a programmable, internal identification that is transmitted each time a broadcast occurs. When an officer pushes a button to transmit, the ID and assigned "talk group" is transmitted to the base station. The data is decoded then it automatically transmits a digital message back to all the systems radios. Trunked radio systems are designed so that failures of one or more components do not affect communication.

The Philadelphia Fire Department uses the same radio equipment as the Philadelphia Police Department. It has been reported that more than 500 fire department radios were reprogrammed one morning by radio technicians in hoping they would not fail again. This took place after Union officials believed the radio failure may have played a role in the death of two fire fighters in a burning home during a radio failure. Prior to this tragedy, Dave Kearney of the Firefighters Union stated: "This radio system is our lifeline. If it's not working properly, it's going to affect the fire fighters safety and the public's safety." (p1).

During the Christmas holidays (2004) three more police radio malfunctions occurred without warning. Police officers believe the problem lies with Motorola, the manufacturer of the equipment. City officials believe the problems are caused by large cell phone companies by their signals blocking public safety transmissions. Robert Eddis of the Fraternal Order of Police (F.O.P.) stated: "I believe we need a new system..." (p2). The Mayor of Philadelphia believes the system has reduced the number of lives at potential risk despite the failures.

Motorola is the manufacturer of the equipment and Verizon is the high speed communication link. Motorola technicians state that Verizon was having difficulty keeping a strong radio frequency due to the new radio towers being in valleys instead of flat, or hilltop land. Whereas, the members of the F.O.P., wait for the problem to be solved by one or the other, or both.

Verizon company officials admit to human error by Verizon workers causing some of the problems. The Vice President of Verizon, Karen Maquire, reported that out of four radio system outages that happened last year, Verizon was the cause of three of them. These failures were caused by equipment failures as well as human error.

With Motorola and Verizon admitting to the radio failures, the only effort being made to fix the problem is by performing tests on the back-up system weekly and monitoring until another failure occurs.

Technicians are on location during business hours but the radio room operates 24 hours a day. This became a problem on Friday, August 12, 2005, when I was working on East Division. This division connects with the 25th District and that console lost its air. A technician had to be paged to come in and handle the issue. In the meantime, officer safety was at an extreme risk for injury during the communication failure until the technician arrived.

The problem was fixed after 3 hours of using the back-up system, which causes major delays in transmission and not being able to override when a priority occurs. The cause of the problem that night is still a mystery. Fortunately, no one was injured.

It is obvious that a new radio system is needed. The Mayor of Philadelphia simply is not getting involved enough to support this fact. He believes the current system is a new system that has cost millions. But in reality, our current

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