Oakland 911 system restored after police union blasts mayor for system delays
OAKLAND -- Oakland's 911 system was back in service Friday, city officials said, after an interruption that was criticized by the Oakland Police Officers' Association.
"Technical issues affecting the City of Oakland's 911 dispatch services were effectively resolved Friday afternoon and, as of 5 p.m., all emergency calls are being received and dispatched as normal," the city said in a social media post.
Earlier in the day, the police union said Oakland's 911 system was experiencing delays after a power failure caused the system to go down Thursday night.
While the 911 phone lines were restored, the city's computer aided dispatch system remained inoperable, the police union said.
Backup generators went down after a power failure on Thursday, and the city's 911 system crashed. The 911 system could not be restarted even after power was restored, the police union said.
"Police officers, dispatchers, and even the county grand jury all warned this would happen," OPOA president Barry Donelan said in a statement.
According to the city, it took about 10 minutes to get the system back online. The system was then routed through the Alameda County Sheriff's Office dispatch center.
"The dispatchers are toiling literally with papers and pen writing down individual calls and running across to the dispatcher and sending it out to the officers in the field," Donelan told KPIX.
The police union cited an Alameda County Civil Grand Jury report released last month that warned that Oakland's 911 system was facing "imminent collapse."
"Yesterday it happened," the union said.
"The same folks in IT who have gave us the ransomware and the terrible response to it are the ones responding to this so inherently we have little confidence of them actually getting is fixed," Donelan added.
The union said it had little confidence in Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao's administration after its "inept response" to a ransomware attack on the 911 system in February.
A ransomware attack occurs when someone encrypts files and demands ransom to decrypt them. The encryption makes the files and the systems that rely on them unusable, according to the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
The February ransomware attack prompted the city to declare a state of emergency to expedite its attack on the malicious software as various city departments were affected.
City councilmember Dan Kalb admits there are issues to address. One that's directly linked to the 911 system is the slow response times.
"The wait times we've had with our 911 system have not been as short as they should be," Kalb said. "That's not because we're not trying. It's because it's been a challenge to hire enough of our dispatchers on a regular basis and to be able to retain them."
The Oakland mayor's office did not respond to a request for comment.
Andrea Nakano contributed to this report