- November 15, 2024
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An information technology problem that knocked the Sheriff’s Office’s tech systems down for more than a week seems to be largely over, but part of a virtual hard drive was damaged, and officials aren’t yet sure if the Sheriff’s Office lost critical law enforcement records like reports and booking photos in the process.
The county, which runs the Sheriff’s Office’s server and its New World Public Safety Software, is going through a data recovery process, County Administrator Craig Coffey said.
“It takes time,” he said. “If we find data is lost, we’re going to try to find out if there’s another location we can retrieve it,” such as from other agencies, like the county Clerk of Court’s office, that may have duplicate records.
The problem began Oct. 29, when server issues knocked the Sheriff’s Office email system offline and kept deputies from accessing electronically stored case records efficiently. The problem was a result of the server on which the records were stored running out of disc space, Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman Laura Williams said in a news release. The server also housed the local emergency dispatch center’s Computer Aided Dispatch system, forcing 911 dispatch responders to write out notes by hand.
Still, Sheriff’s Office officials said, the public wasn’t in danger, and the issue affected behind the scenes work like compiling records to fulfill public records requests or prepare for depositions.
“This is not affecting law enforcement or fire/rescue responses to public safety calls for service,” Sheriff James L. Manfre said in a news release before the system was restored. “We have advised the county that the NWS system needed to be upgraded, and as sheriff, I’m disappointed that it has taken over a year to upgrade this system.”
In an interview with WNZF Radio General Manager David Ayres during the Free for All Friday radio program, Sheriff’s Office spokesman James Troiano laid responsibility for the malfunction with the county administration, which has handled the Sheriff’s Office IT systems since 2014.
“We engaged in a contract with them for services, and we entrusted the county to this task,” Troiano said on the program. “...We’re just the major user in the system. But we do know that we made recommendations over a year ago to get this system fixed. And you know, Sheriff Manfre’s frustrated. We knew it had to be fixed. We were moving along that path, and our question to the county is, why did it take so long?”
He noted that law enforcement agencies have to meet state and federal requirements for data retention, and said the county had assured the Sheriff’s Office that the data was backed up.
Coffey said in an interview that when the county took over the Sheriff’s Office IT program in 2014, it inherited a host of problems.
“We went in there, and what we found was a mess,” he said. The county spent $130,000 in IT costs for the Sheriff’s Office in 2014 and contracted a month ago to spend about another $600,000 in servers, software, training and other necessities, he said.
But things are changing, he said, as a result of the mishap: The county is already preparing triple redundancy backups of its information, and planning to get everyone trained in the Computer Aided Dispatch program.
“At the end of the day, I think there’s going to be a lot that comes out of this that’s positive,” Coffey said. “The bottom line is, we walked into a mess. We’ve been proactively working on it. Unfortunately, it didn’t make it before we could get it replaced. ... We’ll take responsibility for our management of it, and we’re working toward fixing it.”
