COUNCIL OF THE CITY OF PHILADELPHIA PUBLIC HEARING - COMMITTEE ON PUBLIC SAFETY AND TECHNOLOGY AND INFORMATION SERVICES - - - Room 400, City Hall Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Wednesday, July 14, 2004, 2:05 p.m. Resolution 020455 - Resolution authorizing a Joint Hearing for both City Council's Committee on Public Safety and City Council's Committee on Technology and Information Systems to hold public hearings to investigate the malfunction of the City of Philadelphia's digital radio system... PRESENT: COUNCILMAN FRANK RIZZO COUNCILWOMAN DONNA REED MILLER COUNCILMAN BRIAN J. O'NEILL - - - V A R A L L O Incorporated Litigation Support Services 1835 Market Street, Suite 600 Philadelphia, PA 19103 215.561.2220 215.567.2670 2 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 P R O C E E D I N G S - - -
Good afternoon. The joint committee on Public Safety and Technology and Information Services is now in session. Counsel members in attendance, Councilman Frank Rizzo, Councilman Brian O'Neill, Chair of Technology and Information Services, and I am Councilwoman Donna Reed Miller, Chair of Public Safety. Will the clerk please read the title of the resolution.
Resolution No. 15 040655, Resolution authorizing a Joint Hearing for both City Council's Committee on Public Safety and City Council's Committee on Technology and Information Systems to hold public hearings to investigate the malfunction of the City of Philadelphia's digital radio system which occurred twice: Once on March 25, 2004 at 8:59 p.m. and then on May 18, 2004 at 9:04 p.m.; and, in furtherance of such investigation, authorizing the issuance of subpoenas to compel the attendance of 3 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 witnesses and the production of documents to the full extent authorized under Section 2-401 of the Home Rule Charter.
Thank you. We'd like to thank all those agencies and personnel that have come today to testify in this hearing. This is an important issue, and I'd like to now call on Councilman Frank Rizzo for brief remarks.
Thank you, Councilwoman. For the record, that resolution that was read indicated two incidences and we're all aware that there was another occurrence of trouble with the radio system over this past weekend. Not a complete interruption, but some problems with the system. So we want that to be part of the record, that there was a third occurrence. Thank you.
Steve, do you want to start calling the witnesses, 4 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 please.
Yes. I'd like to call Philip Goldsmith, the Managing Director of the City of Philadelphia, please.
Good afternoon, Councilman O'Neill, Councilman Rizzo. I'm Phil Goldsmith, Managing Director. I appreciate your opportunity to discuss the 800 megahertz radio system with you today. This afternoon you will hear from the experts and City officials who work directly with this system and who are more knowledgeable about the technology than I am. I am not here as a technology expert. I appear before you as Managing Director, who is responsible and concerned for the public safety in the City of Philadelphia, both for our citizens, as well as our employees. Communications plays a key role in the ability of our public safety officials to protect the public, as well as themselves. This has always been the case, but even more critical in our post 9/11 world. Our radio communication plan has 5 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 certainly received much deserved attention, and I believe that we have been moving in a positive direction, expanding communication capabilities for both users and coverage area. We adopted this system for a number of reasons. One, the system expanded the number of channels available for communication; two, the reception and coverage has dramatically improved over the former radio system; three, the 800 megahertz system has a user and distress feature for police and fire; four, the system provides the ability to communicate across departments, and, lastly, the system has multiple back-ups, as well as component level redundancies. Even with these added features, we have experienced problems that we are aggressively addressing. Whenever an institution implements a new system, there are bound to be challenges. Practically every implementation of new software systems, adoption of new technology or implementation of new business processes present challenges, some unforeseen, some expected. These are 6 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 often technology issues, but they are frequently training issues and sometimes old-fashioned problems of people not liking change. Still, my goal and expectation, which is certainly shared by the Mayor, the Police Commissioner and Fire Commissioner, is that our public safety personnel be able to communicate with each other in a time-urgency fashion. We have charged Motorola, the vendor, to determine the cause of the problems and identify solutions quickly. It is in Motorola's self interest to make sure our system is foolproof. I am told by our personnel that they are working with us to identify and correct problems with a needed sense of urgency. In addition to working with the vendor, our independent consultant has been directed to look over Motorola's work and respond to incidents and supply additional recommendations to the City, if needed. We have formed a crisis response 7 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 team, which is activated immediately on any serious radio issue affecting public safety. The team comprises members of the Public Property department, Police and Fire departments, Motorola and our independent consultants. Each time a disruption has occurred we have brought in both the vendor and the consultants to investigate the issue and attempted to identify the circumstances under which the system failed. This team was activated over this last weekend and was able to work together to stabilize the radio system without serious disruption to the users. Communication within and among the City departments is important. It is also important that the City's public safety officials have the capability of communicating to public safety officials across jurisdictions. I am pleased to inform you that we have received $5 million of federal Home Land Security Grant funds to support this cross-jurisdictional communication. The regional communication's 8 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res.
040655 interoperability project will link the data and voice communications of the ten metropolitan areas in the Southeastern Pennsylvania Counterterrorism Task Force and improve our response to home land security and public safety issues. Hearings like this one are appropriate and beneficial, for they provide our technical experts with the opportunity to address concerns and issues raised by City Council and the public. I will not sit here before you and dismiss any incidents of malfunction as trivial. This is too important an issue to dismiss concerns, but it is also too important an issue for creating undo alarm. I have challenged our experts with the urgency of an appropriate diagnostic analysis of causes and the appropriate fixes. I have made it clear I am not interested in assumptions, hypotheses or speculation. Let's have the facts, the facts and nothing but the facts. Our priority is clearly to protect 9 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 public safety personnel and the public. We will continue and insist that we are taking every step necessary to have a reliable radio communication system. One thing is perfectly clear, the technology we are now using can and must be improved, but it is also equally clear that it is far better than the previous system that was used. We are certainly committed to continually improving this system until there are no issues and making sure that our men and women who risk their lives every day do not have a scintilla of doubt that our technology is as strong as their valor merits. I thank you. Be glad to take any questions.
Mr. Goldsmith, the testimony about you're constantly improving the system, isn't the reliability on the 9-1-1 system, whether it's the old system or the new system, usually a given, I mean, that it works? All the other trappings of high tech or 800 megahertz versus 10 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 some other lesser technology. It seems to me that if we're looking at a $5 million Home Land Security Grant to go to ten jurisdictions, that if we're not getting the very basic function right, just 9-1-1, not the police here talking to the fire departments out there or the feds at that level in an interoperability mode, that we're never going to get there or have anything that will be relied on if we can't get 9-1-1 right. Because I never heard of 9-1-1 being so deficient before this, and I've been around quite a while. Is this something that --
This is our 800 megahertz system, which I believe is different than 9-1-1, but I'm going to let the experts talk about that. I think we're talking about two separate issues.
No. This is using our radio, our 800 megahertz system, which I think went into effect January of 2003. We're not talking about the 9-1-1 11 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 system.
I'm not sure of the precise amount. I think it was a little bit south of $60 million.
I think what Councilman O'Neill was referring to, that for 30 years we had a 400 megahertz system that worked very, very well, very few interruptions of service. You kind of came back on track on me when you talked about whenever you, quote, whenever an institution implements a new system, that there are glitches that do develop in software applications. We had this system on test, I believe, for a long time, and we'll talk more to the Public Property people about that, but 12 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 I don't agree with your statement that we should hand off or operate a system that jeopardizes the safety and the welfare of our employees. The problem was also experienced in municipal radio over this week, not as significant, obviously, as police and fire, but, again, I don't agree that we should -- and you said we're not taking this lightly, but I don't believe a public safety communication system of this design and this excellence should have had -- these three incidents, in my opinion, should not have occurred.
Councilman, I don't know where you're reading my testimony that I ever said that we should hand over a system that would undermine public safety. That's not what I said. It's certainly not what's before you.
I didn't say you said that. I said that you said that there are glitches in new software installations. 13 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655
And I don't agree that when it comes to a public safety communication system, that we should even allow for glitches or think that glitches are acceptable in this type of technology.
Well, I would agree, and I would say that they will talk in more detail about the type of testing that went on, but the system went through an enormous amount of testing. A lot of times you can't test for every conceivable glitch because you can't test for every conceivable unpredictable circumstance that may happen. And I don't care whether it's our 800 megahertz system or any other system, whether it's sending a man to the moon or a woman to the moon, that you can test all you want, but there are going to be times when there are circumstances that no 22 one ever tested for it. So I think what we've got to find out and I think that the real challenge here is what were the circumstances that put the 14 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 system out of kilter for that period of time it was out of kilter. And I think one of the things that you'll hear is that we will probably have to reenact the circumstances of that day to find out what happened. But you can test 99.9 percent and something comes up where someone introduces a new technology that interferes with yours and so forth. But I think we're in basic agreement on that.
I understand, but, again, I don't remember being told or the field officers, fire fighters being told that, Here, we're giving you a new system, but glitches might develop. I don't think that anyone foresaw any type of glitch developing in this system to the degree that it occurred here. Again, I don't want to beat a dead horse. We both aren't experts in this area and we will hear from the experts to talk more about that. Thank you, Mr. Managing Director.
Thank you. Call the next witness. 15 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655
The next witness, Sylvester Johnson, Philadelphia City Police Commissioner. COMMISSIONER JOHNSON: Good afternoon, Councilmen. Commissioner Johnson, Philadelphia Police Department. And I have Attorney Healy with me just to accompany me today. The officers in the Philadelphia Police Department use the radio system 60,000 to 70,000 times a day, more than any other City agency combined. I'm aware of the issues we have been experiencing and have fielded complaints from individual officers, as well as the Fraternal Order of Police. My first concern is always for the safety of our officers. In any large-scale deployment of new technology, there is always a long period of acceptance, and a new radio system is one of those type of deployments. This new system gives us some capabilities we have never had before but have definitely needed. For example, our undercover narcotics officers 16 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 have their communication for the first time. Drug dealers can no longer simply purchase a scanner and listen to officers' conversations. In the past if an officer lost their radio, the person finding it could cause sufficient disruption of the radio system. Now if their radio is lost or displaced, we simply turn it off, insuring that no one can interfere with public safety communications. Despite all the new capabilities, I realize that we must work through the present problems to insure that reliable communications are available to our officers. The various agencies in this City, including the Police and the Fire department, have been working together for years of both implementation of the radio system, as well as addressing and correcting problems as they arise. I am confident that the City and its vendors will be able to work through these issues. If there are any questions to the Police Department, I have my operational people here to answer them. Thanks. 17 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655
Thank you, Commissioner. COMMISSIONER JOHNSON: Thank you, sir.
That's it. Out of courtesy to the Commissioner, we broke the panel up, so we're going to bring the rest of the -- Charles Brennan, Deputy Commissioner Brennan, in.
We're going to bring up Greg Masi, Sergeant of police radio; Lloyd Ayers, Deputy Fire Commissioner of Operations; Michael Moore, Chief Dispatcher; Joseph James and Frank Punzo, Communications Superintendent of Public Property.
I guess we should start off with Deputy Commissioner Brennan to explain what exactly occurred during three occurrences and the impact that it had on the operation of the Philadelphia Police Department.
My name is Charles Brennan. I'm a Deputy Police Commissioner. 18 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 Councilman, we submitted testimony, all of us up here, to Council and we thought that we would all introduce ourselves and we would prefer, if it's okay with you, to simply answer questions, because our testimony sort of explains from each of our viewpoints what happened.
I have no problem doing that. Do you want us to introduce ourselves first?
Yes, please. DEPUTY COMMISSIONER JAMES: Good afternoon, Councilmen. Joseph James, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Public property.
Michael Moore, Chief Dispatcher, Fire Department's Fire Communications Center. DEPUTY COMMISSIONER AYERS: Lloyd Ayers, Deputy Commissioner of Operations, Philadelphia Fire Department. SERGEANT MASI: Sergeant Greg 19 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 Masi, Philadelphia Police 9-1-1 Operations.
Frank Punzo, Communications Superintendent, Department of Public Property.
And, again, we'd like everyone with prepared testimony to either read their testimony or paraphrase their testimony. I appreciate you starting off, Commissioner Brennan.
Paraphrasing would be preferred. DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: It's not long anyway. The City of Philadelphia operates a twin Motorola 800 megahertz radio system and it's really divided into System A and B. So that everyone understands this, the Police Department is the sole user of System B. Everyone else rides on System A. On March 25th, a Police Department dispatcher used a function called an Announcement Group. This function allows the dispatcher to broadcast a message to the 20 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 entire City, all the officers at the same time using one radio channel. In this case, the incident was a triple assist officer call. While broadcasting, the dispatcher reported that his console, as well as the rest of the consoles in the room, seemed to lock up. The situation lasted several minutes. During that time, dispatchers were switching to one of the back-up systems when the main system returned and all the consoles could broadcast again. Motorola was notified of the incident. The Announcement Group function was tested the next day, although not under the same stressful conditions, but we were unable to replicate the problem. As of this time, Motorola has not been able to fully identify the cause, although they've made a software change which we believe may correct the problem and we are waiting to test the Announcement Group to see if it works. The second incident occurred on May 18th during another triple assist officer call. 21 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655
Can I interrupt? Just to keep the incidents separate, if you could just explain in your own words what the impact, if any, of that block was or that freeze that occurred. In other words, was there a five-minute delay in getting an assist out, did the back-up systems work? What really happened? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: What really happened, Councilman, is that the triple assist got out okay, but what happens is that all the officers try to get back in and mainly they're trying to get back in saying, I'm going in on that. A triple assist is a rare event.
So the two-way part of this was -- the two-way communication was interrupted? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: Yes. What happens is that if an officer calls an assist, we notify roughly half the City. So we notify the division that the assist -- and just so we know what an assist officer means, it's kind of obvious, but an officer is 22 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 in a lot of trouble. It is the highest priority call we have. It takes precedence over every other thing that happens in radio. So an officer calls an assist. We essentially broadcast that to the division that the officer is in and the contiguous divisions. So pretty much half the City knows. And those officers will start to run in to help the officer who is in trouble. By the time it gets to a triple assist, we've notified the whole City. And in order to notify the whole City, we use a mechanism called an Announcement Group. It is a function that Motorola provides with their system. This mechanism permits us to use one radio channel. We have 15. It permits us to use one, but talk to everybody in the City at the same time. Now, there's pretty much bedlam on radio when this happens, because everybody is trying to talk, everybody is trying to say, I'm coming in to help the officer. When that happens, what happened is, the consoles all locked up and the dispatchers could not talk 23 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 to the officers on the street. The officers on the street, though, could hear one another. That lasted for a couple minutes. We think about three minutes, maybe three and a half minutes it lasted for. The system cleared itself up and then everything was fine after that. So you're talking the first incidence was about three and a half minutes of the dispatchers unable to talk to the people on the street.
Okay. So, in your opinion, the safety of the officers that needed the triple assist was not jeopardized by this? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: Well, only in the sense that we did get the assist out and the officer -- a lot of officers can't get in because somebody is trying to get in, but they're all coming to get the officer.
So it's not as effective when you can't have the two-way communication? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: 24 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 It's not as effective. Suppose somebody had to say something. For example, the officer in trouble may have had to say something.
Now you're getting to where I want to go. DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: During that three and a half minutes, he or she could not have said anything that would have gotten through. But as far as getting help to the officer, it did not hinder getting help to the officer, because everybody knew.
But if you're the officer that needed a triple assist, this is not what you want to happen. DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: Well, it's not what any of us want to happen.
Particularly if you're the officer that needs the assist. DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: Exactly.
May I add 25 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 something to that quickly?
Commissioner, you indicated that the assist officer is obviously the highest priority of calls, and from my experience, that many accidents occur, police officers are injured, and one of the important things that occurs during the initial minutes of an assist or seconds is a resume of an assist officer. So if that officer wanted to resume or say that that assist was under control, that was not possible at that time; is that correct? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: Well, he couldn't have gotten through to the dispatcher to tell him to resume, but the other officers could have heard that they should have resumed.
But my point being is that headquarters would not have been aware that the situation was under control? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: The dispatcher would not have been aware.
And that's Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 important, that the dispatcher know that? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: Yes, but in the practical matter, they don't resume anyway. I mean, I'm telling you what happens.
I understand that they keep coming in, but -- DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: They can say resume, resume, resume. On a triple assist, most are coming in.
But they slow down to the point where they are not into the pedal as heavily as they would? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: We would like to believe that they slow down.
How are you confident that the police officers on the street were able to hear those broadcasts? How do you know that? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: Motorola tells us that they understand what exactly happened and they tell us under that condition that the officers, in fact, would not be impeded from hearing one another. And 27 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 I have no evidence from anyone that we've talked to that the officers could not hear one another, although they would probably tell you that because there was so many coming in, that they probably couldn't all get in. So they would probably tell you that they couldn't get in.
Did you verify that the field heard the conversations that radio could not hear? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: No, I didn't. No. No. 14
I think that would have been important to know that. DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: I would say in hindsight, we probably should have, but knowing how much radio traffic goes on at that time, we sort of understood the situation. We look at it sort of in hindsight. We pulled all the radio tapes and stuff, so we pretty much know we hear.
Well, you wouldn't have heard anything. DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: 28 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 What you would hear is one officer. You'd hear one person talking, but, in fact, a hundred might be trying to come in.
So I think it's important to know going forward in the fact if we would have a duplication of this incident, it would be good for management, I think, to know that even though the dispatchers can't hear the conversation from the field, that their officers, their colleagues, supervisors are able to hear. But, again, we're not sure that that's the case. We're taking Motorola's -- we're getting that information from Motorola, that, in fact, that did occur, but we don't know that that occurred. DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: And if I remember, I believe we pulled the radio tapes on this and I believe you could hear it on the tapes also. But, understand, you can only hear one at a time.
Just one 29 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 point of clarity. You mentioned that an assist officer is the highest priority on the radio system. Could you explain the difference between an assist officer and a triple assist officer? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: The really only difference is in an assist officer where we just get one call, as I told you, we would probably tell about half the City, the division of --
I understand the difference, but -- DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: But a triple assist -- well, you have to remember when the first assist goes out, nothing really else is going out. That pretty much takes priority over everything else. And we're just waiting to see what happens. We're sending officers in. We're communicating out, and the officer starts hollering again, I need more help, I need more help, I need more help. So pretty much there's really nothing else going on at that section of the City no matter what it is, except our concentration on that 30 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 assist officer call. So there's really nothing else going to happen until that's cleared up.
What raises it to a triple assist? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: He's calling for more help.
So half the City is not enough help? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: Well, if he's calling three times -- and it might not be the same officer. It might be another officer that gets there and sees that things are so bad, that then that officer, he or she, starts calling for help. So it could be the same officer. It could be a second officer that gets there. It could be a third officer that gets there and screams for help. And keep in mind is that the dispatcher is only listening. They're not quite sure what's happening. They tend to error on the side of sending more help rather than less. 31 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655
Commissioner, just one follow-up. If that happened in one of the divisional areas; that is, the incident, what effect did it have in other parts of the City? Was it a ripple effect? Did it happen throughout the entire -- was every console or dispatch point affected by this interruption or did it just occur in the division where the triple assist was? Are you following my question? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: Yes, I do. The reports that we have from radio is that all the consoles locked up. In other words, it affected the City. So our understanding of what happened, and it's from what we got from the dispatchers, that all the consoles locked up. So that would have affected the City. So it wouldn't have mattered if the assist happened in South Philly. The Northeast people would have been locked up for about three and a half minutes.
Thank you. 32 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 Excuse me for the interruption.
Again, I'm going to follow up again hearing that. Wouldn't that affect the 9-1-1 call going out if the -- DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: It would affect all the 9-1-1 calls going out. There's nothing going out during those three minutes.
Right. When I started out with the Managing Director, and I didn't know enough to argue. Now I am full of information after five minutes. DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: You've been educated in about ten minutes.
This does affect 9-1-1. Whether it's a three-minute lock-up that occurred or a ten-minute lock-up that might occur tomorrow, three minutes is critical if you've got a part one that's active and a person is in danger. So it does affect 9-1-1. DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: I was in the back when you asked the Managing 33 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 Director that question.
He just said it was a radio issue and not a 9-1-1 issue. DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: I just want you to understand that the radio component is a piece of what we view as the entire 9-1-1 system.
Right. But it's an integral piece. I mean, you have to have a console working for 9-1-1 to work. DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: I'm not disagreeing with you. It's that when we talk about 9-1-1 --
We're both disagreeing with the Managing Director, although you are not directly. DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: I never disagree with the Managing Director.
No. I wouldn't ask you to. Thank you. DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: When we talk about 9-1-1, we normally talk about the call-handling piece rather than the 34 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 radio piece. So we talk about the citizen, that call getting to the radio center and how we handle the call internally. That is more of what we refer to when we refer to 9-1-1.
There's two parts to 9-1-1. One is me getting in my call; the other is them getting a cop out. DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: Yes. And I would say to you, Councilman, that the radio response is a part of the entire 9-1-1 system that the citizen sees.
It's actually just as important as the other part. DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.
It doesn't help much to have one if -- DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: Absolutely.
And to help clarify that, in three and a half minutes, if there was another incident, a hold-up in progress, a burglary or another assist officer 35 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 in another part of the City or the calls that Councilman O'Neill is referring to, 9-1-1, were stacking up that were supposed to be going out in three and a half minutes, so if you had a violent crime in progress during that period of time, that call would have not gotten out; am I right? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: Since this was a triple assist, there was nothing going out, nor would there have been if the system was working properly.
I'm talking about other areas of the City. I'm not talking about the console -- what area did this happen, this triple assist? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: 14th.
So you're talking -- DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: Up in Chestnut Hill.
Northwest. But I'm talking about a call in south now, a hold-up in progress, a burglary in progress 36 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 would not have got dispatched even though the incident was at the other end of the City? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: I know what you're saying, but what I'm telling you, Councilman, is that in a triple assist, we're taking over the whole City. In other words, we're taking over all the consoles. J band is taking over the broadcast from all the -- there's no other jobs going out. So whether it was a burglary in progress or a robbery in progress, our main concern on a triple assist is that officer. And my guess is you had people coming from everywhere in the City to help that officer. So if it was a regular assist officer, like one, your point is absolutely correct. In this case, in a triple, there's nothing happening other than that assist in the whole City.
And for radio to know that the triple assist was under control now to me becomes a very significant piece of information back to radio, because you don't need a car from Northwest 37 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 Philadelphia coming to -- or from South Philadelphia coming to Chestnut Hill to involve themself in this triple assist. DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: I agree.
Now we go to the second incident. Thank you. DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: The second incident occurred on May 18th during another triple assist officer call. The resources for this assist officer were called using a different function, because we were not using the Announcement Group function. We used a different way to group everybody together, and we call it a Multi-Select. It is selecting each individual division one at a time. Since we weren't using the Announcement Group, we weren't sure it was working right, I put an order out not to use it again. We used a different way of grouping all the officers together, so that J band 38 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 could sort of talk to them all at the same time. It's called the Multi-Select.
You haven't abandoned that? You're waiting for it to get fixed; is that what I'm hearing? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: We are not using the Announcement Group function. We still use the Multi-Select, although we use it a little differently.
So we have a feature that we designed into the system that we're not using because it created an issue and now you are permanently abandoning that function for this other scenario? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: No. Actually, the Announcement Group function and the Multi-Select function are used for different things. The Announcement Group function is the one way that we can talk to the whole City at the same time. That one we are not using until we test it again. The Multi-Select thing we use all the time. It's being used right now as we're speaking. It's used all the time. 39 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 As in the first incident, the triple assist generated a high volume of radio traffic and a great number of officers trying to access the radio system. As this occurred, a number of consoles as well as officers on the street began to experience what we term system busies; i.e., was not an available channel for them to broadcast. News reports that the system were down were incorrect. The system has never been down. There was limited communication between officers and dispatchers because about half of the channels were available, and either Commissioner James or Motorola will go more into what that means. But essentially it was like we were running on half the horses. That problem persisted for a number of hours and it was eventually rectified by a Motorola technician. The Police Department has been working with Public Property, our management and technical consultants and Motorola to learn what caused these problems. Motorola 40 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 has brought quite a team into Philadelphia, and they're looking at all those aspects of the system attempting to isolate the problems. Although some of the problems have not been solved as of this writing, the Police Department, in consultation with Public Property and Motorola, has taken some steps which we believe will mitigate another incident. First, as I mentioned, we're not using the Announcement Group function until it's thoroughly tested. Secondly, we've limited the number of multi-selects. In other words, divisions that we select at one time to only six talk groups. The third step we've taken is, and this is something we wanted to do anyway, we're trying to pull as much traffic as we can off the radio network. We have way too much radio traffic and we're pulling them to the MDTs, the mobile data computers. We're doing more and more over them. Actually, something near and dear to your heart, Councilman, the 41 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 auto accidents. If you have a mobile data computer now, you're getting the auto accident silently, and you and I understand what that means. It should be noted that pulling radio transmissions from the network is not a radio capacity issue. The radio system is capable of doing it. We just think it's a good operational thing to do. And the only other thing is that we understand and we are very concerned and despite what's said here today, I actually appreciate you calling these hearings, because I think that there's been a lot of misinformation about what occurs, and I really hope the hearings go a long way to settling a lot of these issues and really getting the issue out so that everyone understands. And so although you might think that we didn't want this to happen, I'm kind of glad that it happened. So I thank you for that.
No one was negative about these hearings. 42 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: No. I know that. I know and I have a good relationship and you've never been negative, and your concern is the same as everybody at this table. We're concerned for the safety of the people out there and we just want to see this thing work the way it's supposed to. That's all.
Incident three? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: Well, the --
While we're still on the second incident, I'd like to ask a couple of questions. One, was there any similar time period in the second incident where there was any problem with calls going out from dispatch to police officers within the 9-1-1 system? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: What happened in the second incident was vastly different than what happened in the first incident. Our system has 15 channels, 14 of 43 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 which are usable to talk upon. That means 14 different people could talk at the same time. When we got this volume issue with the triple assist, essentially about half those channels went away. If you had to say something from the street and you were lucky enough to get a channel, you could get through and you wouldn't have noticed that there was a problem. Because the assist generated a lot of traffic, a lot of people couldn't get through. So they would get what looked to them like the system was busy. We call it a bonk. The radio actually goes bonk. It says you can't get through. But people did get through intermittently. When the whole issue actually calmed down -- actually, radio thought the system got better an hour later or so. They thought everything was fine. Actually, it wasn't, but what happened is, the volume of incidents in the City got quieter and eight channels was actually enough to get us through for the next couple hours. Radio didn't know the 44 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 difference. It was really a volume issue. But people could get through the second time. It's just that you really probably waited a little bit longer than you should have.
So to that extent, 9-1-1 was jeopardized? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: To the extent that if you had to get through --
If I'm the guy with a knife at my throat and somebody is calling 9-1-1 for me, anything that causes a delay -- DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: Well, your call would get into 9-1-1.
I understand that part. DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: Getting it out --
It's just as important. DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: Right. Getting it out during that time period 45 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 would have been problematic during the time when we were most busy.
Okay. I have a question. You haven't used the Announcement Group function since the March incident? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: We've tested it once or twice with Motorola on board, but I wasn't satisfied because we didn't test it under stress, and that's what I want to do.
But having designed this system to have that function when an assist officer or a triple assist officer is required, it would seem to me that the Multi-Select function isn't nearly as optimal where you have to go through a series of divisions or sectors, or whatever you would characterize them as, as opposed to one blast broadcast Citywide, but that's what we're using in place of the Announcement Group function. DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: Years ago we used to broadcast a lot Citywide. 46 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 We do so less now. The Announcement Group is only good under really very limited circumstances, believe it or not. We don't really use it that much.
But the limited circumstances is the highest priority and the highest priority within the highest priority. DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: I absolutely agree with you.
One, I'm talking about the public and somebody getting a felony committed, probably pretty nasty for me to be saying minutes or seconds or whatever is going to be critical, but you've got your highest priority situation with an officer in trouble or officers, particularly when it gets to this triple assist. And we've been out of this now for, I guess you're talking, about four months since -- in a couple of days it will be four months that we haven't been able to use the one function that works best for that situation. 47 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: I agree with you.
Commissioner, you didn't, at least I didn't hear you, talk about the fact that your system switched over and started to use the channels that the Fire Department, the B side, correct, or the A side? Which is the -- DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: We're B. They're A.
Right. You did switch over and use channels. Fortunately, the Fire Department didn't have a multi-alarm fire. DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: No. No. No. What happened is, a controller switched, and what happened when the controller switched -- and I was going to let 48 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 Commissioner James get into that. When the controller switched in the second incident, it's supposed to take all the channels with it. We're still in on our side. We never -- matter of fact, I don't think Fire even knew what was going on with us. They are not involved in that incident. We're still in our side. Everything is happening on the B side here. When the controller switched, what happened is, all the channels didn't come over with it. And if all the channels had come over, actually the total disruption would have been about ten seconds, had it failed as it was supposed to.
So during Incident 2 -- like this past weekend, I understand a different scenario of events occurred, that other than the Police Department was affected by the breakup. DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: Right.
You're telling me that the issue in the Incident No. 25 2 only affected the Police Department, that if 49 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 the Fire Department would have put a demand on the system at a multi-alarm fire, they would not have seen any problem with the system at all? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER JAMES: Councilman Rizzo, if I could try to answer your question. On the May 18th incident, the problem was isolated entirely to the police side. If the Fire Department, which was located on the A side, had an incident at any time, they had all their resources available to them for communications. They would not have been impacted by the problem that was occurring on the B side at the time of the incident. So at no time did the system switch between the two, between B and A, and there was no diminished effect on the A side.
We'll come back to you to talk more about the technical reasons why this occurred and why it affected Police and not Fire. Incident 3, Commissioner? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: 50 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 The third incident began last Friday night, probably about 6:00, 6:30. We received intermittent breakup of communications. We would classify it as a minor nature where officers had to repeat themselves sometimes. We lost some words. We lost some syllables. That started happening Friday, and it went sort of in and out. It got better and then it would start happening again. Motorola and Commissioner James will tell you what happened. That lasted from Friday night into Sunday, without any major really disruption to communications. And as I said in an e-mail to the Managing Director, is that we never even went to a back-up system. We actually could have gone to a back-up system where this would have completely gone away, but the commanders in charge of radio, I was in constant contact with them over the weekend. They never felt it was that serious to go to the first back-up system, so we never did.
And we'll talk more about the three scenarios 51 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 technically in a bit. Is there anything else, Commissioner? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: No. I have nothing else.
So that was the least of the three in terms of what I've just heard? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: I would agree with you. That was probably the least of the three.
Okay. Can I ask one thing, Commissioner? I assume that Police, Fire and Public Property, if not MOIS, was involved sort of as a team in purchasing this system and putting this system together from a specification standpoint? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: Yes, although I don't think MOIS was. MOIS was not.
Why would we want our information systems people to mess around with technology, right? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: Exactly. 52 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655
But could you tell me other cities, do other cities have this same system? Is there anybody else out there that uses what we have? I know you always want to have what you think is best for your city, but you also don't want to reinvent the wheel if some pretty smart people have spent a lot of money already doing it. Is this a system that exists in other places in pretty much the same format? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: I know the answer to this and Joe will, I'm sure, just repeat what I'm going to tell you. Motorola has these systems all over the place, with this exception: The way it's implemented here is rather unique. And so this technology is well-proven technology. It exists in a lot of places. Matter of fact, if you buy a radio system today in your big city, this is the type you buy.
Is this unique implementation in Philadelphia a potential contributor to these glitches that 53 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 have occurred? Commissioner James? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER JAMES: Councilman, to answer the question, as far as the incident on March 25th, no. As far as the incident on the 18th, there is a possibility. As far as the last incident, no. And we believe that uniqueness of how the system is designed in Philadelphia is, when we started this process back in '95 with the RFP, we set it on a solution where we had 30 800 megahertz channels to work with and we went over different design solutions to best optimize the use of those 30 channels for all the City users and primarily for public safety, and we centered on a solution that basically split the 30 into the two groups of 15, and that was by design to provide the highest reliability for failover in case there was a problem. So that if we had a single system that some cities have where they have all their channels grouped together on the one system, you lose that, you lose everything. So we have the ability of having two 54 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 distinct systems operating at the same time, insuring the safety of the fire fighters on one side and police on the other side and the ability to fail between the two should we lose one or the other.
Do any other cities split it that way? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER JAMES: I think we're somewhat unique in how we designed it. And cities like Baltimore, who have had this system longer than we have, we spent a great deal of time going back and forth and dealing with these other cities to understand the uniqueness of their experience from their design, construction, implementation and management of the system, and we constantly talk to those cities to find out what's going on in their experiences.
Do other cities that are in this universe, call it the Motorola universe described by the Commissioner, Mr. Brennan, have the Announcement Group function? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER JAMES: I 55 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 believe the other systems have the Announcement Group function.
Are we aware of any other problems in other cities with it? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER JAMES: Not that I'm aware of it.
So that's something we can easily learn from. DEPUTY COMMISSIONER JAMES: And that's something that's -- I believe the Managing Director said it and Commissioner Brennan said it, is that we take very seriously, it's a concern for us that we have a system that has a specific function that's inherently important to the police operation. They do not have a comfort level of using that feature. That somehow inhibits their ability to use the system fully, and we're working very closely to make sure we can bring that back on and make that available back to the Police Department.
So in a $60 million system with a single function that 56 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 goes to our highest priority within our highest priority, which affects an officer or officers' safety, four months seems to be an extraordinarily long time to be without it, given that we're not a four-person police department with a thousand dollar system. We really got a huge investment here with the leading company out in the field, right? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER JAMES: Yes. And I believe what Commissioner Brennan said is that when they had the incident on March 25th, which was a three- to five-minute, it created for them a grave concern that they were not comfortable with using that feature.
I understand all that. DEPUTY COMMISSIONER JAMES: But they altered their --
I have a problem with the four months that we're still in where we haven't fixed it. DEPUTY COMMISSIONER JAMES: But I think Commissioner Brennan said they've altered their operation, because there are 57 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 other features. Like a lot of systems have duplication of features just for the purpose that if you have to use a different feature, like they're using the Multi-Select, they're able to still do their officer assist calls.
Commissioner, with all due respect, the description of the Multi-Select function is not identical to the description of the Announcement Group function, particularly in that triple assist officer. I'm trying to zero in on that, because that's how it happened, it happened in a triple assist. DEPUTY COMMISSIONER JAMES: I agree.
In a triple assist situation today, we have to use Multi-Select. I didn't hear anything that said this works, we just turned Multi-Select into something that works just like the Announcement Group. It doesn't. You still are going through a series of functions rather than one. DEPUTY COMMISSIONER JAMES: 58 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 Right. You're doing an operational difference to use the Multi-Select feature for what the Announcement Group --
Which is not as optimal as -- DEPUTY COMMISSIONER JAMES: It's not as optimal, but it hasn't --
But this is four months of not being as optimal. I think that is really a long time. DEPUTY COMMISSIONER JAMES: But that has not allowed the Police Department to do their triple assist.
Right. It just seems four months -- if we're talking four weeks, four days. I don't know when it becomes an overly long period of time, but four months seems to me to be overly long that it's still down. And I'll just leave it at that. Do you have anything else, Councilman?
Commissioner, I think what you're hearing is 59 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 that there was a significant amount of money, close to $60 million, I don't know what the amount is at this point, but for four months, I'm sure we paid a substantial amount of money for that feature and for four months you're telling me that we are using an alternative. It's like a carpenter, his nail gun breaks and he uses his hammer for a week. You know, got the job done, but still you need to fix it. If we paid and we designed the system to have a button that you push to go Citywide, we need to push that button. And if Motorola can't figure it out, then -- I don't know why it would take four months for a company that's had all the experience in installing these systems all over the county can't make it work and work properly. Because it's unacceptable to me for a system to go down for one minute, three minutes, five minutes where officers on the street can't communicate back to headquarters. Again, even though Commissioner Brennan said that the assist officers, they keep coming, but I know from experience and 60 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 talking to a lot of officers, the minute they hear that resume of that assist, they still hurry, but they're not as in a hurry as they once were. And, again, we don't know whether the officers on the street for sure -- we're told that they heard the resume patrol or assist is under control, but we don't know that that happened, according to the Police Department. So I would encourage -- and we'll ask Motorola what they plan to do to get our system back and working and assure that it continues to work in the fashion that they were handsomely paid to provide us a system. DEPUTY COMMISSIONER JAMES: I agree with you. We're working from the same perspective as that. We have a large investment in the system. There is a feature that is in the system, the Police Department does not have a comfort level of using it. That won't impact their operation, and they need to be able to use that feature.
And since I'm talking about this, I would think that 61 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 since we have had some problems and I understand from speaking to one of your associates that we do have spare parts on site, but I understand over the weekend we had to get parts flown in, meet at the airport. And, again, I don't know if this was an obvious part that should be in Philadelphia to support this system, but I would hope that Motorola, and we're going to ask them later, that they do have a spare parts bin here to support this system until we're confident that it's working and working properly. DEPUTY COMMISSIONER JAMES: Right. I mean, to talk about the incident that just occurred on this past weekend, there was a timing issue that affected the audio for the police officers in the field so that there was a clipping, and there is a piece of equipment that we have at City Hall in the City Hall system that is used to synchronize that. That piece of equipment failed. There was a back-up piece of equipment in place in Philadelphia up in Southampton Road. They brought that down here and installed it. 62 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 We still experienced -- so we did have a back-up.
But it was an operational piece that, for lack of a better description, you stole it from Southampton and moved it down here. DEPUTY COMMISSIONER JAMES: We didn't steal it since we all own it. We just moved it down here to replace the piece that failed and put it back in service.
Wasn't it serving some function at Southampton? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER JAMES: It was serving a function, but when we moved it down here, it didn't have an operational impact on Southampton Road.
So it wasn't needed at Southampton? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER JAMES: No, I didn't say that. It didn't have an operational impact on Southampton Road. We fixed the audio. That was what the intent was, to move the piece to fix the audio while Motorola came up with a final solution, which 63 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 is to bring in another replacement piece, which is they flew in at their cost to resolve the problem and ultimately get the system back operational.
That was defective, that piece that came in -- DEPUTY COMMISSIONER JAMES: Yes.
-- also? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER JAMES: Well, no. The piece that came in was not defective. The piece that we had was defective. And Motorola can speak to the issue of whether the piece that came in was defective, but I believe from what I remember from the weekend incident, it wasn't a defective piece.
So the piece at Southampton was defective and it was in operation there? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER JAMES: And they sent both the primary piece and the back-up piece back to the factory for testing and fixing. 64 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655
So we had a piece of equipment at Southampton that was there in service that was defective?
Southampton Road. DEPUTY COMMISSIONER JAMES: We had a back-up piece that they moved down that was up Southampton Road, and, again, I'm going to have Motorola speak specifically to it, but my understanding is the piece that they brought down was because it was working and not a defective piece up in Southampton. They brought it down here to replace the defective piece down here in City Hall. When they put it in the system, it still did not resolve the problem and that's why they didn't feel comfortable and they decided to fly in, and we agreed, that they ought to fly in a replacement piece to replace that.
Thank you, Commissioner. DEPUTY COMMISSIONER JAMES: 65 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 Sure.
I'm going to ask this panel to take a seat. Unless the Fire Department has something to add, it seems like it's mainly a police issue we're dealing with at this point. And if it comes up in the course of -- I believe the two union representatives, the presidents, are going to be up next. If something comes up dealing with fire, we can call you up. But I ask you to stay here, and then I'll ask Commissioner James to come back up after that with Motorola.
Deputy Commissioner Ayers, did it affect the Fire Department at all? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER AYERS: We did have some effect.
You did have some problems? Okay. We'll have you back. DEPUTY COMMISSIONER AYERS: This past week.
I'd like to call on 66 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 Robert Eddis, President of the Fraternal Order of Police, Lodge No. 5, and David Kearny representing the Local Philadelphia Fire 5 Unions, Fire Fighters Union. 6
Pull that 9 mic in closer to you and identify yourself. 10
David Kearny, 12 Recording Secretary, Fire Fighters Union, 13 Local 22. 14
Good afternoon, 19 gentlemen. We would like to thank you for 20 having these hearings. 21 I believe that some of the 22 discussions that have taken place, we've seen that everybody is really truly interested in resolving this problem. I'm not going to be able to dance and give you rhetoric or some 67 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 kind of jargon that may be technological. I'm just going to be able to give you what I hear from the officers and the problem that we've experienced. When I hear March 25th and May 18th, I find it very ironic, because these are the only three issues that have been brought to light. However, these problems have existed for a long time. We actually started implementing where we go out every single week, myself, I ride in police cars just to hear to see what the problem is. A long time ago when I was a young officer, we used to have a terminology that they used to always quip: Use your radio, don't use your gun. My question is, we don't have that radio now. What should we use? And I'm not trying to make light of the issue, because on Saturday I had the opportunity to be out there walking along with the officers, and they are the same way. Their job is not to understand the technology of their equipment. It's just to have the equipment there available to them. 68 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 We've had meetings, I would probably say, I would be underestimating if I would say that there's been at least 15, times we've 5 been down at our headquarters talking to our 6 command staff in regards to, What are we going 7 to do? We hear, Well, you know, it's new 8 technology, you don't embrace it. 9 We do embrace technology. We think 10 technology and the overall goal of this system 11 is fantastic. Any time we can bring all 12 emergency services together, we're all better 13 served. And I think we realized that 14 specifically after 9/11. 15 But the people on the street, the 16 ones that need to have the back-up -- and what we did was, we put out a questionnaire, because we've made every attempt and a lot of times if it wasn't for the information we received from our officers, we wouldn't receive that information. So we don't always have that give and take that everybody likes to think exists, even though we've made an attempt to have that. And we put out a questionnaire this 69 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 week asking our officers in regards to the problem so they can put it in their terms, nothing fancy, no lawyer jargon, no exact English. Throughout the entire tour, transmissions from officers to radio or radio to officers were broken. This went on constantly and required both all too often to have to repeat their transmission radio, also indicated officers were transmitting at the same time and blame them for the problem. This radio system is supposed to prevent that problem. Radio only indicated that transmissions were broken and officers weren't being courteous by transmitting at the same time. This radio system is the worst change the department has made in my years 19 of service, and that was signed from one of 20 the sergeants that's working out there on the 21 street. 22 We have gone out there and we have 23 tried everything we could to talk to our officers to explain to them the significance. And I know this may not be getting to the crux 70 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 of what the technical problem is, and I apologize for that. I can't provide you that. I can just let you know that from being out there, the officers -- and you say, Well, what is a small matter of time? What's a minimal problem? Let's give you an example. I need an assist officer at 4th and... That becomes the question, 4th and where? If you're the person that's calling out asking, that's not insignificant.
The problem that occurred I believe on the date of May 18th, one of our families -- because we're also part of the community, even though sometimes people like to think we're separate. We are the community. On May 18th, if somebody picks up that phone and calls for an emergency, what response do they get back in return? There was nothing available. The next day we had a call downtown to find out. That night we were notified and we called all of our districts in regards to how the situation was going to be able to be handled. 71 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 I think a lot of times over the last year and a half when I bring it to people's attention, they become extremely annoyed, and I think the reason why they become extremely annoyed is because they've been involved in the process from the very beginning. And I understand the significance of believing in something and doing everything I can to make sure that that works out, but sometimes you have to remove yourself from that and say, What is the benefit to the officers on the street? What's the benefit to the community? And let's not mislead ourself by thinking that these are the only three times that there was problems out there. On the one incident we heard there was nobody hurt. Well, I made the mistake of believing that. So I went out at that press conference that we had on the day of May 19th and I said, We were informed that no one was hurt. On that afternoon, a young officer came into me from the 39th District who had been injured as a result of the assist officer. And a triple assist, if anybody 72 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 knows anything about police officers, we do everything we can not to call an assist. It's almost like you can handle the situation. It may be a little -- I don't know what the term would be, but you'd like to feel as if you're trained and you can handle most situations. If it elevates to a triple assist, there's a problem. If you can't get in, there's a problem. If officers are coming in to a scene when it's not being resumed -- how many people have been hurt either going into or going away from a scene? And that's where our concern is right now. We're not here to point fingers to blame. We believe it was $52 million that was spent on this program. We talked to people around the country and heard other places where they said the system worked. We know in the very beginning we had the opportunity to work with Sergeant Masi and Inspector Scott Small. They worked with us fantastically. Not to put them in harm's way within the department, but we were very upset about that, because some of the stories that 73 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 were coming in weren't being verified. So that then itself became third-party issues. Well, this one heard this. And that's why we wanted to go out ourself and see. The comfort level right now of the Philadelphia police officer on the street is one that was realized this weekend, because we all said what would happen if this happened during an emergency situation. I think we're very fortunate the way the Greek Picnic played out this year, but what if it didn't? What if this would have been one of the Greek Picnics from previous years? And we can all say, Well, you're making it the worst case scenario. Police work is worst case scenario. Any questions?
Mr. Eddis, one of the criticisms -- and I don't know if I even want to use the word "criticisms." There is an operational change from the way the radio system used to work. For 20 years we had, or even more, 30 years, the 400 megahertz 74 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 system where if an officer -- if there was routine traffic going back and forth and there was an emergency, the officer could overtalk that transmission and a dispatcher or other cars because of the way the receivers were able to hear that. One of the complaints I hear, and if you could verify, that if there is an emergency, that they can't get through because the system is so designed not to permit them to get through.
Well, there is a button that they can push. It's what's known as an -- initially it was referred to as an assist button. Because when the program first came out, we were actually out doing roll calls when they were starting the training process of this, and a lot of the officers themselves didn't always use the equipment that was provided there to them, in all fairness. There was a comfort level of reaching for it, and there was different things, as the Commissioner stated, with the 75 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 narcotics unit. That was resolved. But it was changing the whole way that they were used to doing it. And at that time, we made a request and they also included into the training in regards to officers having more hands-on with an item prior to them going out there. But the actual hitting of the equipment itself was handled differently than it was in the past.
But hitting the emergency button tells radio that a particular radio is in trouble, but it doesn't tell them where that officer is, correct?
I believe it gives them a good indication of where that officer is. That's my understanding.
We'll talk more to Motorola about that, but when, I think, Commissioner Brennan and even maybe the Managing Director indicated that there is -- I haven't seen any resistance from the officers to use the new system, but I have heard some legitimate concerns, that the system is 76 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 sometimes cumbersome or difficult to use during an emergency situation. So I really need to understand what that means, because I've been told that in an emergency, I guess what I'm hearing is that the emergency button is the only way to get through, that if there is activity on that radio or that system, that the officer can't get through and say that, I'm in trouble and I have an emergency.
I agree with you. And the other problem was, there was a lot of dead spots also in the beginning. That was a problem that a lot of the officers had out there. Certain areas up in the 14th District, there's a place called the Box, which is just one of those things that lends itself to hard communications. If you don't mind, before you go to the fire fighters, I would like to defer to Jim Wheeler, only because from the beginning when the meetings first started in regards to what this system was going to be, Jim was both the point person for Rich Costello and for 77 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 myself. So if you don't mind him making a few comments and then I'll...
Yes, sir. With due respect to everyone that has spoken, we're talking about a system that the officers on the street have no faith in, and that's the biggest problem. This weekend certainly didn't help. We could suppose or create scenarios that if it happened during Freedom Week or Greek Picnic or some other events that were maybe tenuous at best, it would have been tragic. It didn't. We're grateful. Thank God. The problem is that I have an e-mail here I'm just looking at, it's in my folder. It's from June of '03 from an officer. We've been working with the City diligently, supporting them in every step of the way, working with them. We've implemented new training for our officers for the radios to help, because some of the reasons given, that it wasn't being implemented the way it 78 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 should be is because they weren't trained well enough in how to use that. And we publicized it, we worked on it, we preached on it. We've done everything that we think necessary to be a partner with the City in promoting this system, because we believe in a good system. It's gotten to the point now where we can't wholeheartedly tell our members that you've got a good radio system here. That's where we're at. And it isn't three times. The June of '03 e-mail is just another of many of daily, weekly, monthly calls and e-mails to us about garbled, can't hear, can't get through, knocked off the air, bonked, boinked or whatever the heck it is. And it's ongoing. And I know they're working on it. I know that there's good people here behind me that are pulling their hair out probably trying to get this thing straightened, but as the good Councilman said earlier, how long is too long and do we have to have a tragedy before we really take this thing seriously? It isn't something we can just say, Well, this was a minimal incident. I've got a 79 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 folder here with all sorts of people calling all the time. Bob has got people that he rides with every week. And the first thing out of their mouths, other than what's in the new contract, is the radios. And it is, as you, I think, were trying to allude to earlier, cultural in the beginning. We tried to work on that. We miss our radios in the car dearly. People of my age and experience, we miss that, that safety blanket. But it's something that we're evolving out of, and this is probably a better concept for the future. And we're working on it, educating our officers, but it's got to work, and they have to have faith in it, and they're not -- it's just not happening.
Can you explain the difference between the old system with the radio in the car and how this works and how it's different?
This is a totally portable system. It's attached to you. It's with you all the time. 80 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655
Yeah, it's on your shoulder. And if you didn't have a hand-held radio in a car or wagon years ago, when you got out of the vehicle, you're on your own. So in that respect, I thought it was a great move, but you always knew that your radio in the car or the wagon worked and it was alive, you could hear the --
It is a distinction and you did have that override that you could hear somebody else in another car calling even though two other people and the dispatcher were talking. You could say, No, no, no, he's at 4th and Girard. And that availability isn't with this system and, you know, okay. But if that was the only problem, I think we'd all learn to live with it.
I understood that there was an issue with portable radio 81 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 batteries where an officer couldn't even get through a tour of duty with one battery and they didn't have spare batteries?
We had officers come to us. We'd be out on the street at details and they'd show us that they had batteries in their pockets. I mean, it got to a point where everybody -- the batteries were running out and everybody was afraid to go in and get a new one. They'd get a new one, it would be dead before they got back out to where they were supposed to be. And I know the City has addressed that with getting a new version of the battery, but it makes you wonder when they were sold that particular product -- I was at the meetings. That battery is supposed to last for over ten hours on a full charge, and this is not what was guaranteed, so to speak.
Well, that's it. If it isn't that, Bob mentioned that they had the dead spots. Boy, the Police Department 82 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 and the technicians worked their tails off to get those dead spots cleared up. They adjusted the towers. They adjusted the dishes and everything they did to correct that, and they really were showing a lot of effort that they wanted to get it right. That's why we supported them so strongly, but right now it's really hard.
The last thing we need on police radio is to hear a police officer saying, Can you hear me now.
The most bothersome thing that I've heard from you two gentlemen is that with a system like this that clearly has some problems, and it isn't just the three incidents that have been publicized, that you are taking up the function of management in getting input back from the officers on the street who are actually using this system as to how well it works, not just when something is publicized and we read about it in the Inquirer, Daily News or hear it on the radio. 83 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 It would seem to me that right from the Commissioner's office on through every other part of this responsibility from the City administration side, we should be spot-checking constantly with the men and women that are front line and relaying these problems to Motorola on a constant basis. And I didn't hear any of that. And I know the people are still in the room and I'm going to ask some more, but it seems to me that the union has a different job in representing -- it shouldn't be something that is a communication with management issue. That's management's responsibility. I'm glad you're doing it, because it's bringing information forward and everybody wants more information, but I'm just wondering why the people that are e-mailing you and probably worried about whether somebody is going pick their name up are not being solicited by the people that are responsible for this system, this $52 or $60 million system. I would think that Motorola would 84 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 want to know how this is affecting officers on a day-to-day basis, because if I'm the city out there looking at the next system and Motorola is competing with somebody, it sounds like Philadelphia is a place I'd want to check to see what the progress is on some of the issues that are in the 800 megahertz system.
I think we're all here for the same reason; that is, for truth, and I would not feel comfortable sitting here without responding to that, because in all fairness, Motorola, along with the department, have held probably so many meetings and the department has reached out so many times to legitimately say, Where are the problems, whether it was at the University City, whether it was the 35th District. It's like we're finding a problem -- I point out poor Sergeant Masi. I mean, there was times I'm talking to him 3 o'clock in the morning. 85 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 I don't think that's always the case. I think --
And I truly believe in my heart that there is no one within the Philadelphia Police Department that meant any harm to anyone. I just think it was a matter of wherein the problems were brought up so many times, we brought the issue in regards to the batteries very early on and we were told, Well, maybe the officers aren't having them charged right. We said, Well, that should be then a bulletin explaining how the battery should be rotated, rotated. And then I had the advantage of being a supervisor down in the subway and we had major problems in the area of communications in regards of what to do if a radio went down. And these are things that we tried to sit down and work side by side with the administration in. I think because of the newness of the program trying to put a finger on it, I 86 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 think that everybody in this room is just as frustrated as we are. I think as a result of us being out there on the street, taking the approach that we took to actually ride in the cars, which we felt was our responsibility as the representative agency of these officers, it gave us the chance to see firsthand something that Jimmy pointed out. As a result of this, the confidence level -- and I think when the system was put in, everybody thought that it was what it was being sold to be, the next best thing, because it was going to link all technology. I think as the surprises came up, I think that's where the frustration level may have developed. We said about the batteries. Until May 18th, we never heard back that, Yeah, you're not out of your mind, the battery has been a problem. So while we're out there, at times we were saying to ourselves we're actually becoming almost like the gatekeeper for the department, exactly as you said. We seem to be fulfilling a different role on which we 87 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 thought was our responsibility and not to overvalue ourselves, and that was something that we took serious in sitting down and saying, How can we work this out, how can we get this to a point where it can be identified, we can look and we can know that these people who are saying these complaints exists. We're going out. They exist. There was dead spots and it can be identified. So, I mean, we knew -- and then I think a lot of times the perception was, Well, you want it the way it always was. See, I'm different. I like change. I think change is good. I think we have to move forward in this day and age, and I hate to keep on throwing it back to 9/11, but my thing is, as an elected official representing my members, what level of responsibility do I have if I don't put the City on notice and say, We've come to you, we've tried to work, we've tried to point out these problems. On May 18th we were never given an answer of what actually caused the problem. Over the weekend, minor. When I hear the term 88 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 "minor," it's almost like saying minor disturbance, which is an officer's worst nightmare. You don't know what you're walking into. And we're not trying to be out there making things more than they are. We're just saying that we feel that our officers need to be able to have an environment that's conducive for working. What level of threat can be eliminated as a result of them knowing. The greatest security in the world is knowing when you call for a back-up, that the officers are going to come in. It helps you keep the system under control to make sure nothing gets out of control. If you're calling and you think people are coming and you're standing there and no one is coming and then officers -- I went into the 19th District and a sergeant grabbed me out of roll call and he said, I want you to talk to this officer and explain to him what you as president were doing last night when he almost got killed out there. And it was a radio situation. And the reality 89 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res.
040655 was, when we were done, I was arguing with the sergeant saying, What responsibility do you have to make sure that the training is going to your officers, too. So we're not trying to pin one against the other, and I don't think that was the intent of anybody's hearings here today. I think it's just a matter of saying, Do we have a guarantee that this is not going to happen again? When the officers call me and we asked the questionnaire, we never get responses like this from our members. This was only within like a four-hour period we received these kind of things back from people who normally are not complainers. I mean, you have some people, no matter what, change they're going to oppose all the way down the line, and then we're out there and they always tell me I'm shilling for the Commissioner. That's what I get everywhere I go. Well, you're just defending the Commissioner. I'm like, No, no, you have to embrace this, you have to see. 90 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 But when they're pointing out and then when you a situation like this weekend -- like I said earlier, without overdramatizing it, you call for back-up, you're not coming or they don't hear you, that's very frustrating. So that, compounded with everything else. So I apologize for not being able to give you the technical reasons of all this. I can just tell you from an officer's point of view that they're frustrated out there and they're asking us, as they did last night at our meeting that was full, What are we doing, where do we go, are we safe when we are out there, what's the system? After May 18th, we had a discussion. The Deputy sat down and worked with us a policy so officers now know what to do when this type of thing breaks down, and we're very appreciative of that. But we're just in fear, when is the next major disaster. And we're not looking to wait until afterwards. And I hate to make the analogy, but I sure hope this isn't like Tucker where you're going to wait until afterwards and it was cheaper to pay for 91 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 the damage than it was to fix the problem.
I've talked 6 to officers. You talk about confidence in the 7 system. I've talked to officers that tell me 8 that they now carry a personal cell phone on 9 duty with them because they are concerned 10 about their safety. 11
The night that I 12 was in the 24th District there was a stolen 13 auto and the officers couldn't get through 14 from each other, and they actually were able 15 to relay and make the apprehension as a result 16 of talking to each other through their own 17 cell phones. And I believe now the policy is 18 that the officers are not allowed to have 19 their cell phones out there, which is making 20 it even worse. 21
That's 22 pretty sad. Oklahoma City was -- cell phone was the only way anybody could talk to each other, and that is what got all the interoperability started nationwide. 92 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 I said Engine 22. That's mine. But Local 22. Sorry.
Commissioner Ayers indicated that there were some problems with the fire system. Could you tell us, after you make your remarks, of what effect this has had on the Fire Department?
I'll start out by saying we haven't had nearly the same amount of complaints --
I'm sorry. David Kearny from Local 22. We haven't had nearly the same amount of complaints it seems as the police officers have. I'm guessing it's because operationally we function differently in the way we use the radios. I will say this: I'm a front-line paramedic. I've been through the radio training through the Fire Department, and the first questions that were asked when we went for our training is, Is this the same -- one 93 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 of the first questions that was asked when I went for my training for the radio was, Is this the same system New York has? And I'm sure you're aware that they had many problems with their radio system failing prior and post 9/11.
It is the same type of radio system. It is an 800 megahertz trunked radio system.
It is a similar system. So there's a lot of -- in the world of the fire side, there's a lot more communication between departments. Guys know different departments. So we knew that they had had problems up there. We've had no similar communications with the Fire Department such as the FOP has. 94 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 There's been no formal communications that I know of as far as problems with the radio. The department has a form that we can send in to list problems. What action they've taken on that, I don't know. It's not -- we've had some slightly larger concerns in the last few months, as you well know. So this has kind of taken a back seat to those things. I can tell you from many anecdotal accounts and my own personal accounts that we have the same problem with the bonking, the radio traffic gets too much, you can't get through and you might have to push the button, and then if you push the button, sometimes you're left having to explain, Well, why did you push the button, it wasn't that big of an emergency. When you have multiple units responding at one time, the way it happens in our operation on calls, a lot of the time you're constantly trying to get through on the radio, trying to key the radio up, waiting your turn in line to get through. 95 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 I know that we have problems with penetration into high-rise buildings. I've been on many fire grounds where we had to switch to what they call the analog band, which doesn't use the repeater system, so that the chiefs could talk to each other on different floors of the building. The biggest problem with that is, it totally defeats the emergency call button. Every fire fighter on every ladder and engine has their own personal radio that identifies them as the fire fighter with the tip, the officer, the pump operator, the pack man, and if one of those men goes down and are operating on this analog band, we don't know.
Headquarters doesn't know. That's who would tell us. It would come up on their console.
But because you're using the analog, you're not being monitored by fire headquarters, correct?
Correct. But 96 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 that's not an everyday occurrence. It's occasional and it's specific to certain incidents. It's not on the same scale as the police are having. However, there are problems in the system.
Commissioner Ayers again on his way to the last panel indicated that there were problems this weekend. Could you describe your knowledge of what occurred and what effect it had on the Fire Department?
We received at the union hall no complaints about the problem. We did not receive any complaints this weekend regarding that problem.
Maybe the Commissioner knows something that we're not aware of. We'll ask him that question. Thank you.
Thank you, gentlemen. Why don't we call Commissioner Ayers up before we bring Commissioner Brennan back with Motorola, just to follow up on that 97 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 recent situation. Commissioner, you just don't have to limit yourself just to this past weekend, but any comments you want to make about this system is appropriate. DEPUTY COMMISSIONER AYERS: Well, basically the comments that I was going to make was related to this weekend.
Okay. DEPUTY COMMISSIONER AYERS: It was basically some intermittent transmissions, which was spoken about earlier by Commissioner Brennan.
Who makes the decision not to go to the back-up, to the back-up system? I know it was made. Is it a joint decision between Police and Fire when you stick with the primary system and not the back-up system? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER AYERS: Mike, you can answer that.
Yes. As has been stated, the City system is comprised of two independent identical but interconnected type 98 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 of systems. We reside on System A, the Fire Department. If there was a total systemwide failure on A, then we would make notification where the system management, being Public Property, would know about it and we would then migrate to the B system. But that's a natural path of migration that would take place.
So that is your back-up system, is to migrate over to B?
That is the final solution, yes. In regards to this past weekend, the unit that malfunctioned actually affected both systems. The effect it had on Fire was very minimal. On Saturday from 7:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m., we had maybe ten instances, and at midnight Saturday going into Sunday from 12:00 to 1:00 a.m., we had about 11 or 12 instances. And the effect itself was an audio fluctuation in a transmission where the audio would drop until a word or two would be clipped from a transmission. To adjust, the dispatchers 99 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 would have to simply ask the unit to repeat the transmission. That is the effect that Commissioner Ayers was referring to as the Fire Department being affected. If I could in response to Dave from Local 22's comments, the Fire Department since going operational in October of '02 has encouraged our members, our users, to report any instances of reception problems or diminished reception, coverage problems, and that is in the form of a memorandum, which Dave spoke to. That memorandum is forwarded to the Fire Communication Center's Fire Survey Unit where it's investigated, and if validated or substantiated, then it's turned over to the 800 megahertz team, the management, the Department of Public Property. Since going online in October of 2002, I've received about approximately 30 reports of reception issues. In most cases when investigated, these turn out to be user-related issues or training issues. For instance, the bonk. The bonk indicates a talk group busy, which means someone else is 100 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 talking. The new system is intelligent enough where it is telling the user that someone else is talking. In the old system that we used, there were such things as busies. The fact of the matter is, you didn't know you were being busied out. You just talked and the system didn't notify you of that. When you are out of range with the new system, the system will give you a steady tone. In the old system, you could be out of range very easily and not know it. So some of these effects that are being described as nuisances or dangers are things that did, in fact, exist and probably existed to a much larger degree in the old system, but the user simply wasn't aware of it.
Could you comment on the issue of coverage where the fire operations are switching over to an analog system? Are you aware that they're required to do that or is it an issue -- fire fighting is a bit different than the rest of 101 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 the world where you get to a location, you can't monitor or know wherever you're going to have coverage issues. So I guess the alternative when there is no digital coverage is to switch to the -- I guess it's a duplex system or simplex system?
Exactly. It's a conventional duplex, radio to radio, walkie-talkie, yes, sir.
So that's good supervision in the field, because if you're not able to communicate on your primary system, that's your only alternative, to go to the duplex system, but I would think that when they encounter that kind of an issue, that it is reported so you can address that specific geographic area of why you're not getting penetration in that particular location.
You're exactly correct, Councilman. And we designed Fire's system due to the nature of the business we do. We do a lot more operational-type things inside buildings, and if due to the physical characteristics of the building, it's densely 102 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 constructed, the systemwide channel may not be effective. So we equipped our system with three analog radio-to-radio simplex channels. Now, we use a systemwide channel to do fire ground communications because of the emergency activation feature. We feel that's important. But if upon arrival on a fire ground it is determined that there is signal degradation to the point of negative -- there's a negative effect on communications, then the Incident Commander has the latitude to switch the internal communications on the fire ground over to an analog channel.
I understand there's technology that can actually be brought to a scene that has poor coverage that could enhance the signal, like a suit case. Is there technology like that that you could have in the event you ran into -- let's say you had a major incident and you had no 22 Citywide coverage. Is there a portable device that could be brought to the scene to help correct the coverage issue?
That has been 103 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 explored. We have asked that question, okay, and it's one that we have not gotten an answer back as of yet. We've had some diminished receptions at at least two high-rise fires that I could think of and we brought the question of the high-rise fire to the City's team and the City's consultant, radio engineering consultant, RCC. I don't know if there's a digital repeater portable radio that is on the market yet, but we have raised the question of diminished reception in high-rises and asked for a response or a solution.
Thank you. DEPUTY COMMISSIONER AYERS: I wanted to add one other thing to the simplex channel. When we actually switch on the fire ground to that channel, one of the things that 104 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 happens as far as the emergency button is that it is not completely disabled. One of the instructions that go along with that order from the Incident Commander is that we will have the aide monitoring the simplex channel, because if that button is pressed, we still get the readout, we still know exactly which radio was affected, just to let you know.
Commissioner, I appreciate that, but for the investment that this City made, I want to make sure that our fire fighters have the ultimate maximum protection. I understand that there are issues of coverage, but, again, we want this system to work the way it was designed. And, again, if we have coverage issues, we really need to address them, but it's not acceptable that we can't communicate on a Citywide digital frequency in a high-rise building, especially when we're in the upper floors. DEPUTY COMMISSIONER AYERS: Okay. I appreciate that.
Thank you, 105 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 sir.
Do you want them all back together? John McFadden from Motorola, will you please approach the table as well.
If there's anyone else on your team that you need to bring, bring them, please. MR. McFADDEN: Good afternoon, Councilmen. I welcome the opportunity to present Motorola's participation with the City system today. With me I have my Engineering Manager, Mary Beth Krantz. She's the head of engineering for the Motorola Northern Division. Also with me I have the Project Manager for the Philadelphia project, Melissa Hanlon. Melissa has been involved in this project for almost six years. At this current time, there are four 106 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 people that are dedicated, that are assigned full time to the City of Philadelphia to monitor the system. They're technicians that are basically on call for this system as a system manager. One of the things I think I'd like to say at this time is that there is in Chicago a monitoring center. It's like a war room. And in that monitoring center, they're watching the Philadelphia system electronically. They can literally -- all your sites are being monitored for alarms, any critical path, like a microwave path. So people are sitting there and when an alarm goes off, that means there's something happening in your system and they can literally see that. A lot of times what happens is, they see something, an alarm goes off, we dispatch technicians and the modification is made and nobody even sees that that happened. It's almost what we would consider to be normal maintenance. In this particular incident, the 107 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 incidents that we're discussing today, we put most of the power of the Northern Division engineering resources into this and all our resources out of our headquarters in Chicago. We have the architects that originally designed this system involved in troubleshooting this. We have our software engineers. We brought people out here from our factory to look at the system as it stands. We have also put together in our lab a system that looks just like your system, and the reason we did that is, we want to test it under stress in a lab. One of the issues I thought earlier I heard was that why is this taking four months. One of the things we want to do in a live system is, it's a live system. You cannot put a live system -- we do not want to put a live system under stress. So in our laboratories, we have your system set up. We are loading the computer up and stressing it constantly for the last month. We got another at least month worth of doing that to see if 108 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 we can duplicate some of the issues that we saw here. That's the resources that we have brought to this account. We're extremely concerned as a company about the situation in Philadelphia and we want to make sure that this customer is served extremely well. And I believe we have put in the resources to do that. I brought my Engineering Manager and my Project Manager here today so we can answer your questions, and I'll be happy to take any questions.
Real quick, Councilman. In your written testimony you make several references to the May 18th situation. Maybe I'm reading too quickly, but I don't see any references to the March 25th and -- MR. McFADDEN: There were a couple instances I did not address in the testimony. Specifically, we addressed the May 109 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 18th, but we intend to answer any questions about any incidents that you'd like to talk about.
The March issue is over a month older than the -- or two months older almost than the May issue, and in terms of time, I mean, at some point it's extremely long. I don't know where the line is that you draw on how long is it taking to fix this. But the March incident is four months old and yet there's no sign-off by Motorola that we're ready to go back to the Announcement Group function, and it seems to me to be a key part of the whole system. MR. McFADDEN: We do have a modification that we believe corrects that problem. We've tested the modification in our lab in Chicago. The issue really is when do we want to put this live on the system so that the Police Department and everybody involved in the City is comfortable that we do that. We're suggesting that we do that on a quiet day at 4:00 in the morning, that we bring this in and we turn it on and we stress it. 110 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 We do not want to do this at any time that there is even the remotest potential that something will happen. So there's a caution both from the City side and our side on when exactly do we bring this back up. And we are not interested in having any other events of this type. So that's really -- it's not a delay that we don't know what the issue is. It's more of a case do we want to stress the system and are we very, very, very comfortable that when we do this, that we don't have another incident.
So your solution has been in place, your prepared solution? MR. McFADDEN: Yes.
It's just a matter of -- I don't want to say pull the trigger, not with this crowd here, but actually making it real and -- MR. McFADDEN: Going live.
And having it tested in the real world. MR. McFADDEN: Yeah, in the 111 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 real world. I tried to explain to you, the difficulty -- this is, as you're very well aware, a public safety system. This is not something you can -- it's not like Verizon can shut you down for an hour and do something and change some software. This thing is live. It's running every day. It's an area of expertise that we have. We know how to manage and maintain these police systems, and you cannot do anything that puts the system at risk inadvertently. So that is the caution. It's not a case that we don't know what we need to do.
How long have you had this ready to go given the right circumstances, the 4:00 in the morning call since March 25th? MR. McFADDEN: I'll ask Melissa that.
Actually, the modification that we identified was put in place approximately the first week of April, and we did demonstrate to the City, to the 112 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 Police Department that the Announcement Group worked, but as Mr. McFadden said, it has not been stress-tested and until it has been stress-tested with the City and the Police Department, they do not feel comfortable using it in a triple assist situation. Our goal is to test this out with the City at the appropriate time, and that time has not been selected yet.
So this isn't a problem for Motorola at this point. Motorola is trying to fix it, thinks they've got the solution. At some point the Police Department has to stress-test this. And if the solution that Motorola recommends that's going to work has been in place since the first week in April, our problem isn't with Motorola, our questions aren't for Motorola. MR. McFADDEN: Well, there's another --
Our questions are for the City side. What is taking so long if this is critical to our most critical police radio function, the triple 113 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 assist or the assist officer in the first place? Mr. James, could you take a shot at that? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER JAMES: I'll try to answer your question, Councilman.
Because you got to do it, unless you're just going to say $60 million, forget the most important function of our most important function, we're not going to ever use it. DEPUTY COMMISSIONER JAMES: No, I'm not saying that.
At some point you got to try it. DEPUTY COMMISSIONER JAMES: Yes, we do. And I think we were planning to try it. We're taking the lead from the Police Department, because it's basically going to impact their operations, and to the point where they were comfortable that this Announcement Group was changed, that Motorola's planning was going to work, we were waiting for the Police Department to really be 114 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 in a position, along with us, to be able to tell Motorola go ahead and do that, and before we had -- it did take some time -- the May incident occurred. Since the May incident occurred, not clear exactly if we resolved that problem, it didn't make sense for us to now add another component back into the system, because we need to find out what happened on the May 18th more than we do about the March 25th incident. So we have not asked them to change anything because we want to try to test what we understand to be the current environment and which caused the incident on the 18th.
Do you know why -- the police are here, so I can ask them, but do you know why from the first week in April we hadn't tested this until the third week in May when Situation 2 happened when Motorola wasn't going to change the recommendation? This was what they felt was going to work. Why wouldn't it have been tested within a very short period of time or put under stress, or whatever the proper 115 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 terminology is? Why four, five weeks when it affects such an important part of our public safety system? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER JAMES: I can't answer that question for you.
Can I ask Commissioner Brennan on that one? That to me is a key issue, unless I'm not understanding some of the factual parts of this. Commissioner -- DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: No. I understand the question.
I want to make sure that I'm clear on the record. You have a problem with the Announcement Group function that affects your triple assist situation. It's been put into the system for that. It has a separate channel. All that has been planned. It breaks down in March on the 25th. A week later or so Motorola says, You're going to have to stress-test this, but we think this is going to work. These are the same people that we are relying on the whole system for for 116 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 upwards of many millions of dollars. And at some point, we have to do this o'clock in 4 the morning thing. What would take us even to the end of April, let alone May 18th, not to have done it? What would have prevented us from doing it when it's so important to have it -- and we got to do it sometime or we're just going to forget about it, and I hope we're not going to forget about it based on how important it's been explained, how important this function is. Could you explain why just the window between the first week in April and May 18th? I can understand Mr. James saying, Now we got this other problem and, God, you already got one, you don't want to put too much in this pot. But we only had one in the pot up to May 18th. Could you explain that over-a-month situation where we didn't stress-test it? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: Councilman, after the March 25th incident we were extremely wary, even though Motorola told 117 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 us that they had fixed it. And really it was my decision, mine alone, not to use that function again, despite Motorola's assurances that it would work, until it was stress-tested. That was mine and mine alone. That test was actually scheduled for May 20th. May 20th in the early morning hours, just as you said, that's when we do this, like 2:00, 3:00, 4:00 in the morning. We had that test scheduled and then May 18th happened. So when May 18th happened, that sort of made us step back, because we weren't sure now at this point are these problems somehow related.
I understand after May 18th. I understand. Commissioner James explained that very well. You were just hesitant to even rely on Motorola's recommendation that this is going to work? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: Motorola said it would work, but --
This is 118 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 the first week in April situation. DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: Right. Except we were just really concerned what would happen if it didn't work.
But what was it that changed from the first week in April when you weren't comfortable testing it and the scheduling it for May 20th decision? So there was an initial decision not to do it or not to do it yet. Motorola is not changing anything. They've already made their recommendation. DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: Right.
What was it that gave you the confidence to stress-test it on the 20th, even though you never got to do that? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: It sounds like a long time, but when we test this, as Mr. McFadden said, we test it live. In every other computer system that I have, there's always a test side. If you blow something up, it really doesn't matter. 119 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 In this case, there's no test system. It's live. In order to test a system of this magnitude, there's a lot of resources that have to be brought in and coordinated. It doesn't happen overnight and it doesn't happen if we're not comfortable. For example, we want to do something right now. We've postponed it three times because we're not comfortable that we have the resources in place to do it. And we are at the point now that if we're not comfortable, we always put it off. So I'll tell you, I know it seems like a long time.
Could you describe the resources that are needed? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: I think probably Motorola can describe better, because I see what happens on my end in radio. In other words, I have the radio people there, but I know they have people, not only on site, but they have people off site at different places in case something should happen. 120 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655
So what would be the lead time, Commissioner? If your schedule is for May 20th, which was cancelled, I understand that, but what would have been the lead time when you would have said, Okay, Motorola, ready to test this? What would that time frame have been; in other words, the lead time before May 20th that you would have needed? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: I would say, and I think Motorola can probably tell you, we did have other things going on at this time besides that. For example, I think there was the training. We had a lot of training that was going on in the middle of this that we didn't want to interrupt, because we had significant resources with dispatcher training. There's a lot that the dispatchers had to know about the back-up systems. That was all going on between March 25th and May 20th, and we didn't want to interrupt that either.
But you said initially you weren't comfortable with 121 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 even a live test. DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: Right.
So at what point did you get comfortable enough to schedule it and how much lead time did you need once you got comfortable? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: I'd like to tell you, it was probably -- I probably told Motorola that we wanted to test it and it probably took us a couple weeks to bring that all in, and that's probably what led up to the May 20th date. I actually can't remember back to then.
But it took you a while to get comfortable with even the idea of putting it under stress? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: Yeah, it did. And to be honest with you, I know that you understand that this is an important thing, but we kind of felt and we were comfortable that we had a work-around that was effective and that worked fine, so we did not feel that this is like a number one 122 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 priority. We did not tell Motorola drop everything and do this, because they do what we tell them. If we had told them drop everything and we want this fixed right now, they would have done it. We didn't tell them to do that, because we felt we had a comfortable work-around with the Multi-Select. The Multi-Select is working fine. So we were kind of comfortable that that gets us around the problem until we are comfortable enough to get this in and working.
You say it's working fine. It doesn't mean it's working as well as the -- what's that, the Announcement Group function. DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: The Announcement Group is the only thing that we can have that we could talk to the whole City at one time.
So a lot of this is terminology, what is fine and what is optimal. Fine is more like okay. DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: There's no doubt the Announcement Group is 123 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 optimal.
Optimal is more like the best. DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: There's no doubt that the Announcement Group for when we have to talk to the City is the best way for us to do it.
You talk about loading the system. You're talking about officers on the street at the same 14 time able to talk back to police radio, 15 15 channels, correct, Commissioner? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: There's really 14. One channel is a control channel and 14 are opened up.
It's not really a fancy test. You're talking about having 15 people try to communicate at one time to police radio and you test the system, right? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: No. Actually, if it was only 15 people, we 124 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 could do that ourselves. And, actually, Motorola did that.
But if you told every police officer in the street on a tour of duty to key your radio, you'd be, what, 400 plus units trying to come in to police radio, and that's the test, right? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: That's exactly what I want. We actually tested the system, Motorola and our people. We actually got, I think, 10 or 15 radios and we come in and we couldn't do the stress, and I told them I didn't think that was a fair test. I want to do it with the cops on the street live. And we actually did one. We told all the cops on the street start keying your radio like it's a triple assist.
And I would assume that Motorola could develop a way to abort any significant crash of the system during that stress of the system? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: That's why it's important that everybody be in place, in case the system does have a fault, 125 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 is that they have everybody in place to make sure that we can recover very quickly. Actually, I have been pushing very strongly to try to fail the system. They are less -- they are more reluctant to do that. It has been my experience with other computer systems you try to make them fail. And I think that we may push them to the point where we want to try to make it fail, and in order to do that, I need all those 400 officers to help me.
Okay. Commissioner, I appreciate that. I want to go back to Mr. McFadden. Mr. McFadden, how many 800 megahertz radio systems do you have in public safety? I know that there are utility companies that use them. Let's just talk about public safety now. How many systems do you have in service? MR. McFADDEN: Around the country, hundreds.
How many? MR. McFADDEN: I don't know exactly. Just from this location, 126 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 Philadelphia, Montgomery County, State of Delaware, all the counties surrounding Washington, DC, Washington itself and then down to the south, most of Florida. I don't have the exact, but it's hundreds, because we've been selling these probably now for at least ten years. The system the City has is similar to ones we've been selling for ten years. There's been changes in software, but basically they're out there.
One thing I know about technology is, you can relate it to a problem with a motor vehicle, that you call the technician and you tell him that it's doing this and they'll say, Oh, yeah, you need to get a new widget and it will fix it. Have you ever experienced this condition in any of your public safety systems? MR. McFADDEN: This particular -- which condition? Are we talking about the one on the 18th?
Let's talk 127 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 about all three of them. MR. McFADDEN: I would say the one on the 18th, the fact that the channels didn't switch over where you have channels 6 and when the computer switched over, the 7 channels didn't follow, only eight followed, 8 we haven't seen that anywhere else. That was 9 the reason for setting up the lab in Chicago, 10 to try and duplicate that particular incident. 11 So that one was unique. 12 I can't address every single issue 13 around the country, but I'm sure there's been 14 situations where -- that's why you have a 15 maintenance contract, that's why you monitor the systems, to see that -- electronic parts do wear out, they do get old and they do have issues occasionally.
The analogy that I just used when somebody said to one of your lead technicians, This is what happened, did somebody say, Yeah, this particular part failed, because we saw the same thing happen in Detroit? MR. McFADDEN: I'm sure that 128 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 happens every day at our monitoring center where something happens and say, All right, we've seen that before, I know exactly what it is. It's this, this and this. And that's when we have spare parts. We have a recommended list of spare parts. These are things that could possibly weaken. We have a rather extensive way of monitoring the systems and what parts are used, because if something starts showing up with some regularity, then we have to go address the vendor we get the part from, that if this part seems to be having problems, then there's something wrong with our quality control and maybe their quality. So we either change vendors or we get them to fix whatever it is we see. So there is a rather complex system of monitoring parts, because parts are a cost to a system. So if we've got something that looks like it's having a problem all the time, we want it out of our systems for a lot of reasons, but because it's public safety, we cannot have that happening with any 129 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 regularity. So if there's something we see, we change it right away.
I'm sure you want to comment on some of the testimony that you heard here today. MR. McFADDEN: Yes, I can.
Specifically, you mentioned the 18th, that that was unique where the channels were dropped. How about the March 25th incident? MR. McFADDEN: The March 25th, it looks like a software issue. I don't think it's that unusual to have software issues in systems that now have moved away from the conventional technology of old into the computer world. So software issues are -- over the years, yeah, they appear.
But have you had that particular problem where it's a Citywide announcement jamming? MR. McFADDEN: I'm not sure. I'd have to find out for you. That particular 130 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 problem? Because when I said we have hundreds of these systems, many cities configure them based on how they want to operate. The City of Baltimore, as an example, is configured, I'm sure, differently than the City of Philadelphia. The City of Philadelphia is bigger. It probably has more incidents, probably has more fires.
You're not aware of a specific incident in another city that's like this? MR. McFADDEN: No, but I wouldn't want to say that there's never a software issue someplace. There's always software issues.
I'm not speaking about software. MR. McFADDEN: Specifically, no, that I'm aware of today, but I can certainly double-check that for you.
What was the problem with the design of the system that we're discussing right now, the Citywide alert system? What is the problem with that and 131 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 what are you doing -- in other words, what was designed improperly out of the gate? MR. McFADDEN: I don't think it was designed improperly. What happens in computer systems is -- and maybe I should have one of our engineers answer this question rather than me.
Please. In other words, what I want to know is what went wrong with the initial --
What happened with the initial design? MR. McFADDEN: This is Mary Beth. She's our Engineering Manager.
Yes. Specifically, with regard to some of our features, that feature is set up in more than one piece of equipment. The radio actually has the Announcement Group feature in it. The 132 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 dispatcher has it in it. It also resides within our main controller. There are different parameters that you can set in each of those devices, and you have to reach the optimal choices of all those parameters. We changed one of those parameters for the Philadelphia system, which we think is going to alleviate the issue going forward.
So the parameters may not have been set as well as they could have been?
So -- MR. McFADDEN: I don't know if that was -- I guess all the devices have that piece of software in it, and I think when all the devices start sending information into the main computer, that it has a tendency to almost start overloading it away. I mean, that's maybe a simpler way of explaining that. The computer then sees an awful lot of signals coming in from multiple places and 133 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 it starts loading the cue, basically starts getting loaded, loaded, loaded. The reason you have back-up and back-up computers is just for that, for the incident that something like that happens and now the thing automatically switches because now I've got too much stuff stacked up in this first computer. It goes to the second one and I start fresh with fresh information. So maybe that's probably a layman's description of what was happening.
That's good. I watch this whole process very carefully, because I have a real interest in our public safety communications. I heard you say something earlier that got my attention, or someone said it. I believe it was you. I'm not sure. This is not your typical Motorola 800 trunking radio system installation here in the City of Philadelphia. We have a tendency to do that in this City. We can't even buy a trash truck that resembles the rest of the world. We have to have a Philadelphia design on almost 134 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 everything we do here. Is the design that you were handed to build and install so complicated or so unique that it's creating some of these problems? MR. McFADDEN: No, I don't believe that. I think the designs for these systems in Philadelphia is typical of a police environment, that there is procedures, operational procedures, in place. They're how you manage your police force, and every city manages them the same, but a little bit differently. That really drives how you configure your police radio system, how you manage your officers, how you respond to an assist officer in a city, how you do all those things. Every city wants a certain amount of redundancy. In the City of Philadelphia, you actually have five levels of redundancy. We do not have very many systems that have five levels of redundancy. That's very good. There are cities that we don't think possibly have enough redundancy, but Philadelphia has 135 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 five levels. So that's the difference. I don't think the system was overengineered. I think it's driven by how you originally set up, how the city is set up and how the patterns of operation. So I wouldn't say that somebody was trying to do something crazy.
But someone did mention earlier that some of the things that this package has is kind of different than the norm. MR. McFADDEN: Well, I wouldn't call it the norm. The basic system is the same. Everybody puts their own kind of configuration in.
Could you explain the redundancy levels, levels of redundancy, why it's better to have more? MR. McFADDEN: Well, when something terrible happens, that's when you really need all this redundancy that you've got built into this system. The fact that the computer dumped over -- overloaded and dumped over into a back-up, it's great the back-up 136 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 was there. You have a system if something really terrible happened, you could go to that police back-up, then you could go to the fire, to the fire back-up, and the last stop is something that's built into all our systems, it's called Fail Soft, which means if all the computers fail, your officers can still talk the way they used to talk years ago. 10 So it's just a matter of how much 11 redundancy a city can afford, and with the 12 change -- with the world that's changed the 13 way it has, a lot of cities are looking now at 14 what they have and how they're backed up and 15 how they interoperate. 16 You had asked me earlier about do I 17 have -- the only comment I had about the 18 testimony was that I was very involved in New 19 York City. I understand their systems in 20 depth, that the people that were working with New York for the last ten years were people on my team. They do not have an 800 megahertz system in the police and fire in New York City. In fact, what they have is what you 137 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 used to have. The Fire Department in New York City had a high-band radio system like you used to have with two or three channels and that's it. So that's the only piece of testimony that I'd like to comment on, that we were kind of -- I think there's a lot of misinformation, because New York City does have a police UHF system -- a VHS system for fire, they do have a 800 megahertz system. It's for public, but what you would call public property. So I just really wanted to correct that. See, they had what you had and they're trying to buy what you have, I guess is probably -- so I think you're a little ahead of the game in that regard as far as redundancy and as far as coverage and as far as being able to communicate and identify officers that have the ID that you have in this system.
Could you please -- and, again, we've been at this for a while now. Could you just possibly discuss 138 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 some of the operational aspects of your system that you heard here today, about some of the complaints from the officers about coverage, about the fact that -- how simply to describe it is if there's an officer in trouble and they don't want to push the panic button and you hear that there's some criticism heading their way if they use that feature. Is it -- and, again, you're right, we had a 400 megahertz radio system that worked very well and I think, matter of fact, there are probably some cities that wish, maybe New York, that they had our old 400 meg system that was very, very effective where our officers could hear each other. I think they called them voting receivers, where they would be able to hear each other's conversations back and forth, and I believe they can still hear that today. And I agree that there is an adjustment in coming to this new technology, and I think that one of the points that I thought was good that the Fire Department made, that maybe we didn't know when we were 139 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 using the old system that we were having some of the coverage issues or we were out of range or whatever. And this system is better, that it makes us aware of every little issue, like the fact that you can't get through. You didn't know it on the old system. But could you talk about, just for a minute, some of the complaints that we're getting? Again, this is one of the hottest issues that we have had. Is this typical when there's a transition -- I'm asking this of Motorola -- to one of your systems, the complaints that we're getting from the field? Is that also occurring in other cities that you have your systems? MR. McFADDEN: I would say when we move from the old technology, the conventional technology, to the trunk technology -- and, by the way, the FCC is going to pretty much mandate in the next couple of years anyway that you move to digital, because they're not going to allow the building of any other gear that's not digital I think in 2008. So everybody is 140 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 going to these digital platforms. What has happened -- this is not unique. Any system that's had an old conventional system, there was always a feeling of comfort by the -- and I won't speak of Philadelphia officers, but just around the country, of the fact that, Yeah, I know somebody is already talking, but I'm going to start talking over him and I'm going to keep pressing this thing and hope that I blast them off the air. And that gives people the sense that at least I'm doing something, even though in fact what they were many times doing is actually interfering with maybe another critical conversation going on over here. So there's always been the feeling of officers when you switch to the new technology, that at least in the old one I could keep backing that thing. The results are the same. Nobody is going to hear you because you're interfering with each other. So that is not unusual, that when you come in with a new system, that a lot of training has to be done. It can't be done 141 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 quickly. It really is a cultural change. And I can't address specifically what these officers are hearing in the street. I don't know what they're hearing, but that is typical around the country. When you move from an older system that has limited functions -- because what happens, everybody forgets that the old system had a ton of problems. And I don't mean just here, I mean everywhere. When you have a system that's years old, you have all kinds 13 of problems that you've learned to live with. 14 You literally know that I can't talk at 15 Kensington and Allegheny, so I don't even try. 16 I drive another block.
17 Well, with the new system, you get 18 there, you get to a spot, you can probably 19 talk there, but maybe three feet later you get 20 a bonk, at least you know you can't talk. So 21 there's a lot of things people -- I mean, it's 22 almost a memory -- you forget how bad the old 23 system was and now we address what we have 24 now. And that's how things keep getting 25 better and keep getting better. 142 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 So it's usually somewhat of a cultural change, a training issue, but it is a real issue. It is not something I'm saying nobody has had this. Everybody has had the same kind of issues when you make those kinds of changes, because the comfort level changes even though -- I heard earlier that you had the radios in the cars, which is great, but if in the old system you didn't have a portable radio, you were running down the street and something happens --
They had both. They had the hand-held and the fixed radio. MR. McFADDEN: But a lot of cities, everybody didn't have both. There are a few --
In Philadelphia pretty much we did. MR. McFADDEN: So that's basically it. When you go through those kind of changes, it's a cultural change. And then if there are some incidents like we had here, then it tightens up a little bit and it's 143 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 just -- you need to go back out, reaffirm what we have, understand the levels of back-up that you have. We have people, like I said earlier, sitting in Chicago watching your system, literally watching it.
I understand, but, Mr. McFadden, you heard the FOP say that they --
Councilman, I think Mr. Brennan switched seats so he could address the --
I'll get to him. But, Mr. McFadden, the comfort level -- and I can tell you of listening to police radio for a lot of years, that in the old 400 megahertz radio system if an officer did depress their microphone, they could talk over, in many cases, if they were closer to the receiver or whatever the technology allowed, and at least the cars in the field could hear them hollering for help. And that's the issue that the officers on the 144 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 street are dealing with. Saying that they couldn't get through is not accurate. They could be heard in an emergency. If they decided to take the air, the dispatcher in the radio room might not have heard it, but a colleague on the street may have heard it. Today they can't do that. And that is one of the issues. And, again, I'm not saying that's bad, the system the way it's designed and how it works, but you have to understand, you've got a lot of officers for years or so have 14 been out there working with a system that did 15 a lot of things that's important to them, and 16 today what's important to them isn't 17 necessarily there. 18 MR. McFADDEN: Right. 19
Commissioner 20 Brennan? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: Thank you, Councilman O'Neill, for seeing I wanted to say something. I've been hitting John in the leg. Either his leg is absolutely numb and he feels nothing or he thinks I love 145 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 him, either one. I'm not sure.
Was that a stress test? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: Just a couple things with some of the complaints the FOP brought in. Actually, the issues that we're addressing today, the issues in March and May, actually as Bob Eddis will tell you, we've had complaints since the day this went up, but I will tell you this: Before the first radio was in the first officer's hands, we knew we were going to get complaints. Their complaints largely, if you look at all their complaints they -- let's take the batteries aside, because I'll address that separately so you understand what happened with the batteries. The officers don't like two things about this system. They don't like them now and they'll never like them. And those two things are -- the first thing they don't like is, in the old system when you pushed the button, you could talk right away. Right now you have to get permission to talk. It's 146 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 called a grant tone. It takes about a little less than a half a second. They don't like that. They don't like to have to wait to talk. So we knew that that was going to be a problem, and that was a big, big resistance factor. But that's not the number one thing they don't like. The number one thing they don't like is not being able to talk over one other. They really, really hate that. If you really look at all the complaints that we get, that is really at the heart of almost all of them. What the officers really don't understand is that --
We couldn't have a City Council meeting if we weren't allowed to talk over each other. I can understand the frustration. DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: What the officers really never understood -- and really I worked under the old system for many years, so I know how it worked -- is that the system rigorously enforces that one person can talk at a time. Actually, the dispatchers 147 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 love it. They can fully hear every officer very clearly now, unlike before. In an emergency situation is when this comes up all the time, is that in the old system, the dispatcher would hear a lot of garbling, screaming and garbling. They really couldn't figure out what was going on. What they would say is, One at a time, one at a time. You know, let's find out who is -- and then they'd all try to talk again, and there would be all this garbling again. What happens now is, and Bob Eddis referred to it, when we first put the radios out, we referred to that little button that he told you about -- I don't know if anybody has got a radio here. It's a little orange button up top. We referred to it as an assist button. We realized right away that was a mistake, because it sort of indicated that the only time you push that is when there's an assist. So we've changed that now. We try to educate them. It's more like when you got to have the air. In an emergency, you have a priority 148 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 or an emergency, you push the button and you get priority over everybody else. That is actually a safety feature which we never had before. It takes a while for the officers to understand that and to use that. They actually are learning, believe it or not. The only other thing I'll disagree with President Eddis, and believe me, I got the highest respect for him and I know we've had a lot of conversations about this, is he said the officers embrace new technology. I find them to be a very tough sell. I find them to be a really tough audience. I think the learning curve for this system is going to be real steep. I anticipated that from the beginning, and we in radio sort of knew that. So those two issues are really at the heart of why they don't like this thing. Let me just talk about the coverage issues. The reason that Bob gets a lot of complaints, and I know this, is that although we've opened up to them, is a lot of times they're afraid to come to us. I don't know, 149 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 maybe they're afraid they'll get in trouble. And I've brought this up to Bob and I told him nobody ever gets in trouble for making a complaint. I mean, we've had people go publicly, they go on the air, they go in front of the news cameras. Nobody has ever gotten in trouble, and I think he would come up here and tell you that no one has ever been disciplined for criticizing the radio system. They can have their own opinion. That's fine. We did have some initial coverage issues actually, and every single coverage issue that we got we turned over to Motorola and we addressed every single one, but all of them were not necessarily Motorola's fault, and I'll give you examples and you'll probably like some of these. We ran into coverage issues early on that we couldn't understand, because they were coming sporadically. We would get an officer say, I can't transmit from this area, but we would go back and we could transmit fine. It was happening at different spots all over the City. 150 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 We found out that -- and this was a good trick. I used to use it. In the portable radios what the officers would do to make sure that they wouldn't forget the radio in the operations room, they'd put their keys over the antenna. And in the old system, the old system was very forgiving of that, you could still transmit. Well, the new system doesn't like that.
If you put the keys over the radio and you try to transmit with the keys there, the system is garbled, it won't get through. We quickly identified that as being -- that was sort of an epidemic in the department. A lot of cops did that. The cops complained early on about not being able to broadcast underground. For example, a lot of the locker rooms are below ground. They would go down there, they couldn't transmit. They would say, I can't transmit underground. Well, the system is not rated to transmit underground. We explained that to them. Although it does transmit in a lot of places underground, much more than the 151 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 old one, it is not rated to, nor does Motorola guarantee, that it will go underground. We understand that. As far as coverage issues even today -- and we do get a lot of them up from the street. If we get them up from the street, I send someone out immediately to test the coverage in that area. We often cannot duplicate what the officer is telling us. When we can duplicate it, we turn it over to Motorola, Motorola addresses it. So these coverage issues, I don't think that neither the FOP nor the officers understand how little coverage you had with the old system. Although, Councilman, as you said, we had in-car radios and we had portables. Once you walked in the house, the portables didn't work. And the portables, the old system, was really geared to in-car radios, the mobile radios. This system is made for portable radios. That's why we got portable radios. And I think Jim Wheeler referred to it as the fact that the officer now has got his communications device with him 152 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 all the time. We actually even bought better coverage for in Center City so that we could go into the thicker buildings, like these skyscrapers. We've paid more money and Motorola put up more equipment in Center City so that an officer could go into a skyscraper and still get coverage. A lot of people don't understand that, but we did that. We tested 1,600 grids in the City. We went into multiple locations in 1,600 grids in the City and tested. We banged on people's doors and asked them, Can we go into your house and test the radio? Some people threw us out and said no; other people let us come in. So we extensively tested this system before we did it, before we put this out. And just on the battery issue, the real battery issue is our fault, partly our fault. When we initially got complaints about the batteries, we weren't -- since we put all the batteries out at the same time, we thought that why aren't we getting complaints across the whole City at the same time. They were coming from very specific areas of the City. 153 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 So we actually did a test in the area that we got the most complaints from. What we actually did is, we went out and we gave them all the same batteries we've been using, but we rigorously rotated them. In other words, we made them charge the batteries like they were supposed to, and the complaints actually went away. The biggest problem in the districts was the failure to rotate the batteries. The ones that worked well, they had day work batteries, 4:00 to 12:00 batteries, and midnight to 8:00 batteries. And as we all will tell you here, every cop in the world, they took whatever battery they wanted to. A lot of times they took a battery that was not properly charged. Even saying all of that, we realized that the batteries were coming to the end of their life cycle. And little known by anyone here and Motorola, it's one of the -- as much as we can have beaten on them, and we beat on them pretty good, is Motorola stepped up to the plate with the batteries. And I don't 154 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 think anybody knows this, they gave us a half a million dollars in new batteries.
Those batteries out there today are brand new batteries given to us by Motorola for free.
I hope we have a warranty. There's nothing like free. DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: No. The batteries are not -- the batteries are disposable, are consumable. The batteries are consumable. I mean, that's something that we know that we have to replace.
Commissioner, nothing is free. DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: I sort of believe that, too, but I expected Motorola to go out with a news conference, and they really kept kind of quiet about it. And Motorola really said to us, You tell us what you want to do, we're going to give you all new batteries. They gave us all new batteries. And I think Bob will tell you, since those new batteries went out, I haven't heard of one complaint. Neither have my radio people, not one complaint. 155 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 So the battery problem we look at as that's something that we just have to refresh sooner. I know you want to say something. We had never had a totally portable radio system. So the batteries in our old radios, the old portables, they lasted for years, because we didn't use them all the time. So it was our inexperience in how fast these batteries had to be replenished that really led to the problem. Now we fully well understand. The batteries that are out there today, I will get money for those in the fall and by next summer we will replace those well before the months that we realize that 16 they start to fail. 17
Do these 18 batteries, Commissioner, that we presently have, are they of the technology where they don't have to be totally discharged before they're recharged? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: We decided -- we brought this before the Managing Director. Actually, he was very interested in the whole battery issue. 156 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 The batteries we have now are two types. They look identical, but actually they're two very significantly different batteries. One is of the type you just mentioned, Councilman, where it actually knows when it's got to be reconditioned. It has a little chip in it. There's a second battery that is a higher milliamperage battery. In other words, it's a more powerful battery, but for want of a better term, I call it like a dumb battery. It doesn't know. We have to recondition those ourselves. We actually wanted to try them, and half the City split up. Half have the dumb batteries and half have the smart batteries. And we did that sort of deliberately just to sort of test the technology. But they're both new. We know they'll last, and Motorola is going to strictly the smart batteries. Our next buy will be totally smart batteries.
Well, I would hope going forward, and I know this is maybe a first generation or second generation, 157 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 but that radio is heavy and big and bulky, and I would hope that some day going forward that we would have a radio that kind of is smaller and lighter, because I've heard a lot of officers complain that this new radio is heavier than the old one. DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: If you look, Councilman, it's really the battery that's heavy. The radio is actually not that bad. And we sort of knew. I mean, we watched the battery situation. Actually, part of the battery problem again that never came to light was that when we went out and started to look at the battery issue, we found at least 60 batteries that weren't even ours. We knew they had come over from other departments. They looked absolutely identical. And that's the problem, they all look the same, but actually they were only half the power of the batteries we gave out.
When they're out on the street, they borrow a battery from Lower Merion. 158 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: Well, we think it actually -- my Fire Department friends, we're going to blame them. We actually think that what happened is, in the past, what happened is, we had a different radio, so there wasn't really a problem, because the batteries were all different. We never swapped batteries. In the new system, all the batteries look different. There are a lot of fire engine companies that are right next to our police stations. We think probably what happened is, they came in and said, Look, you know what, can you give me a battery, I need a new battery. The operations guy swapped it, not realizing he's getting a battery half the power of the one he had. And we found at least 60 of those when we went out. So we know that that's part of the problem.
Color the police blue and I think they'll figure it out. DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: Well, you're laughing. All the new batteries, we actually colored them. We actually got a 159 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 big white stripe on half of them and a big red stripe on them. We said, If you don't see the white or the red stripe, don't take that battery because it's not ours.
You're a genius. DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: Thank you.
Commissioner, now that you got raised to that level, I'm more comfortable -- DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: I can only go downhill from there, I think.
Earlier we heard from Bob Eddis and Jim Wheeler that they're doing something that normally isn't a union function, trying to help the whole family get this thing working. I guess your sergeants are probably the supervisors that have the most interaction with your patrol officers on a regular basis. I don't care if it's a sergeant, a lieutenant or captain, but I would assume it would probably be the sergeant. Is there any system that has them 160 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 on a regular basis asking the officers, Are you having any problem with your unit, with the radio, and could you tell me so I can get it downtown? You have a constant stream almost sort of a comsat of this 800 megahertz. You're seeing more, less, different, same problems, so you can kind of get an idea of whether you're getting a better handle on this. Is there anything like that going on? First of all, it would make what they're doing not necessary, but also it would institutionalize it within your -- forget the voluntary part where I have to put my name down, but where the sergeant is saying three people this week said, I have no faith in this, this system is -- and I've gone over are they well trained. These people know how to use the system. Do they know how to use the batteries, do they have smart batteries, dumb batteries, whatever. Could you just address that? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: One of our biggest issues -- and we were 161 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 talking in the back of the room. Actually, my sergeant, Greg Masi, he gets some of the complaints. The complaints come in and they're very non-specific, and they go along this line: This system stinks. And we say, Well, can you be a little more specific? And it's -- well, it really stinks.
It really stinks. DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: And we try to sort of nail them down. I will tell you that I would bet you that 90 percent of the complaints the FOP gets relates to the two issues that I brought up, and probably almost the one, that they can't get through when they feel they have to get through. They get this bonk sound. I can't tell you that -- and it almost always happens in every big incident that we have, every assist. Every assist that's an issue. Every double or triple assist, I almost always hear complaints at my level that they're complaining that they can't get in. And it's true, they can't get in. 162 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 And for the longest time, and I think Bob sort of referred to it, is how the officers sometimes are very reluctant to call an assist, because maybe they feel that, I don't want to call it an assist because if it's really not that level, then they'll think like I'm a sissy or something. So they really don't like to call an assist unless they have to. Sometimes to their detriment they don't. So when they understand that if they push the button, that they get the priority, those who understand that are -- when they learn that -- and, actually, a lot of them didn't understand. We got a lot of these questions: What happens if I push the button and you push the button and all together we all push the button? And it actually works fine. Actually, the three of us get priority. Everybody else sort of gets second shrift here, short shrift and the whole thing. But they're learning that, that that button is there for their safety, and I think again as I go back, is that this longer curve of learning, I believe that it will eventually 163 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 take hold in the department. The new officers get a lot of training on the radio system and the new officers, I bet they don't get any complaints from them, because they didn't know anything different.
I got a question on the technology. The 800 megahertz obviously is light years ahead of some other technologies you were referring to, older technologies. Is there anything on the horizon or here today that is a level of technology above 800 megahertz? MR. McFADDEN: There's always new technology. The FCC is about to release another bank of channels. They have to wait until some of the broadcasters get off them. It's very close to the 800 spectrum, and that will generate another new generation of things we want to do. But public safety is probably a little slower in adopting new things. Traditionally public safety wants to see a system they're going buy. They want to see it 164 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 up and running someplace. They don't want to be the first person to experiment with that. So there are new things coming, but there's a reluctance until it's established in public safety that it doesn't get widely distributed in public safety.
Does that next generation have a name yet that if I heard it, I would recognize it? MR. McFADDEN: Well, it's really not a name. It's a way of taking the channels and breaking them up, and it would be TDMA, which the phone companies and the cell phone companies have been using. In fact, they are past TDMA. They are onto the next -- they went through TDMA, which is time division. They're in cell division now, and they're looking for the next thing, because in their environments, they want to load these systems up with as many users as possible because it generates income. The public safety environment is different. They do not want to load these systems up. So I think the next step is probably 165 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 TDMA, which would give you different features. It's only for use in urban areas, but that's probably the next thing that's coming.
For instance, the TDMA, do we have to throw out what we have to put that in or can we layer that on? MR. McFADDEN: No, you don't have to throw it out.
We can layer that on the system that we have? MR. McFADDEN: Yeah. And the reason is this: That I said earlier, a lot of these systems now are computer based. There's technology out there now that will take your -- just call it a very sophisticated switch and put that switch into your network and then allow you to add things on top of that. So that's the way the transition over -- that's one of the ways to do it. The limiting factor, however, is channels. You're still going to need somewhere to go, and public safety right now is struggling with channels. There's a whole 166 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 issue right now with trying to get some channels from Nextel. Public safety never has enough spectrum, quite frankly, and we're hoping that the 700 megahertz spectrum relieves that. The City of Philadelphia right now, I believe, has enough spectrum, but as your requirements change as -- some of the things you might want to do in the future operationally, because that really drives what you buy, may change. I guess you're looking in -- I'm sure you've got mobile data terminals now. What's the next generation mobile data terminals. So I think in public safety the next thing that is probably going to be bigger than anything else is more along the data lines, is more along sending IDs, fingerprints, photographs to the officer's car. That's probably where we're going next versus more voice things.
Okay. Do any cities have or counties have more than 30 channels on their 800 megahertz? Are we 167 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 pretty much the highest? MR. McFADDEN: No. I would say that's -- I'm trying to remember what certain people have. It's typically anywhere from 6 to 28, in that range. It's hard to get 7 channels, but that's typical. You have to 8 justify it to the FCC, is the other issue. 9 You have, I guess, 30 channels, only because 10 you were able to justify to the FCC to load, but if I were Chester County, I could not get 28 channels from the FCC.
Before we recess this joint hearing of Public Safety and Technology to the call of the Chair, I have three last questions for you. We want to get a commitment for the record of what Motorola really plans to do to support this system. When we first started talking about -- I came to Council right when this system started to be discussed and it was presented to me that we were going to have so much capacity, that we might even be able to sell some of the excess capacity or share the 168 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 excess capacity with possibly other interests, public, SEPTA or the PGW or Delaware River Port Authority. From the testimony, it sounds like the system may not have a sufficient channel capacity to support the demand. Your response to that? MR. McFADDEN: My response to that would be, public safety always uses as much as you give them. If you give public safety 28 channels, we can break those channels down into talk groups, which is the change, which gives you the capacity. Suddenly you're putting people -- you're making talk groups for groups in the city, any city, that did not have their own system in the past. Like typically would be suddenly we're going to add fire marshals, we're going to add some kind of teams in the Police Department that normally weren't off by themselves. So we start segmenting these changes into specialized functions, and that has a tendency to fill the thing up. I don't know exactly what new 169 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 functions or what groups that this City was broken off into, but that's typically what happens. That's why I said there's never enough spectrum for public safety because there's always a program that may change your operations and now we want to add more people, we want to add more functions, we want to add more groups.
This is to Commissioner Brennan, talk about training. When this system was designed and discussed here in Council, we were told that there would be private groups where a supervisor could talk to another supervisor. I was at a recent scene of an incident where the sergeant was talking to the lieutenant over the air and they really wanted to have a private conversation. Those supervisors, that lieutenant or the sergeant, did not have a clue how to program that radio or use that radio where he could talk to his supervisor privately. Now, that amazed me that they had no clue, Commissioner, that that radio had the capability of giving them a private 170 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 conversation between supervisors. That really surprised me. DEPUTY COMMISSIONER BRENNAN: The supervisors don't have a way to privately talk. The commanders do. There's 7 channels, but there's 80 talk paths. In other 8 words, there's 80 -- for want of a better 9 term, the way to explain it is, it looks to 10 them like they have 80 different places to go. 11 And a lot of those talk paths are -- the ones 12 that you're most familiar with are the ones 13 that you hear on the air, like Southwest 14 Division, you hear the cops down there, and up 15 in Northwest and North Central, you hear those. That's only -- you listen mainly to the 15, but above the 15, there's 65 which you probably don't hear in places like narcotics, homicide, SWAT. They all have what appears to them to be their own radio stations for them. They talk privately. There is a way for the commanders to talk privately. That's used really by the Chief of Patrol on -- probably over the July 171 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 4th, he would tell all his commanders, Look, I want to talk to you, switch to the commanders channel. That channel -- that talk group is only available on commanders' radios. It is not available in the supervisors' radios. So the sergeant can't talk to his lieutenant privately.
Okay. Second question: Does the vendor, Motorola, maintain degradation records leading up to the March and May incidents? MR. McFADDEN: We have on -- the system has something called a System Watch, which is a computer that basically tracks all the activity on the system. So we have records of what is happening on that system, how many transmissions. I can probably have the technical people tell you.
Has that data been reviewed? MR. McFADDEN: Yes, I believe it has. I'm sure it has, because we had to go back and -- yeah, we did a thorough investigation. But I would rather have 172 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 Melissa answer that since she did it versus me answering questions.
And I hope it was shared with Mr. James, Deputy Commissioner James? MR. McFADDEN: What did we do as far as going back on the history, I guess, of this --
Yes. And we share the results. We don't always share all of the data. What the System Watch does is, it records all of the outbound traffic on the system, when a call starts, when it ends, the ID of the radio that was transmitting, the channel that it was assigned to and the system, the talk group, that it's on. And because the Police Department, for example, has 60,000 transmissions a day, all of this information is recorded, and ten seconds of air time equals about one megabyte of data, 20,000 lines of data, as every radio switches talk groups or pushes to talk or a dispatcher 173 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 talks. So what we do is, we analyze this data and consolidate it and deliver it to the City.
Last question: If the system has so much redundancy, why is it failing? Why are we having these problems if you've got five back-ups? Why are we in this situation? MR. McFADDEN: Well, I guess it's when do you want to move to the back-ups. The switchover happens automatically on the, I guess, the 18th, but you could manually move these systems over to back-up, if required. The reason you have all the back-ups is, in something you can't imagine that would happen right now, that it's a massive incident that something has happened, it gives you these -- manually you can move to these back-up systems. But you don't want to be doing that. It shouldn't be something that you're doing unless there's something like a 9/11 incident. It should not be switching to the back-up. And if it does, you shouldn't 174 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 even notice it. The redundancy there is that worst, worst, worst case scenario. So the system is not designed to be constantly going back and forth to the back-up.
I would hope not. MR. McFADDEN: And that's not what we think is the optimal way this thing should be working. DEPUTY COMMISSIONER JAMES: If I could weigh in on that, too, Councilman. On the March 25th incident, there was no reason to go to a back-up, and in the period of time of transition, there was no back-up to go to really at that point in time for that Announcement Group for that three to five minutes. By the time you got everybody in the back-up, the problem was back -- they had unlocked. So by the time they got everybody there, they still were locked up, so you wouldn't have had a back-up to go to. And we're talking about the larger back-ups where we actually move traffic from 175 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 controllers -- or we move traffic from one side to the other, which you wouldn't have done on the 25th. On the 18th, the back-up was -- the system switched from the primary controller to the back-up controller like it's supposed to, so it did go to one level of back-up. And on the past weekend with the system, when you mention municipal radio had a problem, we did go to our back-up dispatch contegra units. So there's elements of the back-up that are different than just moving from one side to the other.
But I think we have to develop -- whether it's three minutes, ten minutes, I think going forward, Commissioner Brennan, at some point there's got to be a call made when you do go to your back-up. Whether it's three and a half minutes, four minutes, eight minutes, somebody has got to make the call, because if you have officers not able to communicate with headquarters for any length of time, it's unacceptable, especially if you have the 176 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 ability to go to a back-up system that would provide reinstating that service. I think we're at the point now, Mr. McFadden, where we really need to hear for, again, the record what Motorola plans to do to give us the support that we so desperately need here. MR. McFADDEN: We plan to continue with all the resources, and by "resources," I mean people, who are working on the system we have in the lab to see if we could duplicate the incident of the channels not switching over. We intend to keep all these resources. The monitoring center is 16 hours a day, seven days a week, until this 17 customer, the City of Philadelphia, is 18 satisfied with this system and that the 19 officers in the street have a comfort level 20 that I didn't hear today. But that's what we 21 want to do, and we intend to keep the 22 resources on it. 23 This is not a case where you bought 24 something from us and now you can't find us. So that's our commitment, to keep pumping 177 Public Safety/Technology - 7/14/04 - Res. 040655 people and engineers and architects until you are satisfied. And the people that are managing this system are on us constantly. This isn't a case where we show up once in a while. No. This is an everyday job for us until you're happy, quite frankly.
I'd like to thank everyone, not just the witnesses but those in attendance. This is very rare that we have a public hearing in the summer, July or August, in City Council. I can't even remember the last one. And so you know how important this is to the City Council, and I'm glad that everyone gave it that level of importance today, and hopefully we can move forward and keep improving this system. So the hearing is recessed until the calling of the Chair. Thank you. (Hearing adjourned at 4:50 p.m.) - - - 178 CERTIFICATE I HEREBY CERTIFY that the proceedings, evidence and objections are contained fully and accurately in the stenographic notes taken by me upon the foregoing matter on July 14, 2004, and that this is a true and correct transcript of same. ______________________________ MICHELE L. MURPHY RPR-Notary Public (The foregoing certification of this transcript does not apply to any reproduction of the same by any means, unless under the direct control and/or supervision of the certifying reporter.)