More than half of the city police's radio frequencies crashed when dispatchers used a command to speak to all officers at once because an officer was attacked, officials said Wednesday."Our worst nightmare was experienced (Tuesday) night," said Bob Eddis, the president of Philadelphia's lodge of the Fraternal Order of Police. "There was a time that the radio went completely dead."The radios were out for between 20 and 40 minutes and experienced glitches for another two hours.Eddis, who until Wednesday had been reserved in his criticism of the police administration, said angrily that there was no viable backup.Deputy Police Commissioner Charles Brennan, who is in charge of police radio, said Wednesday that the breakdown began because police cars from all over the city were dispatched to the Germantown neighborhood, where the attack on the officer was.In order to talk to all officers in the city, police radio used a special command, Brennan said. But invoking that command caused a series of glitches that prevented officers from speaking to dispatchers and vice versa, he said."We still don't know why this happened," Brennan said.The city's relatively new $52 million police radio system went completely off the air for 20 to 40 minutes Tuesday night, leaving a night shift of about 600 patrol officers without their electronic lifeline to headquarters, FOP officials said today.The failure came as waves of officers were responding to three repeated calls for help from police at a location in Germantown, where an officer was being attacked."We had a break in service within our police communication system," said a steamed FOP President Bob Eddis.Speaking at a press conference at FOP headquarters, the normally reserved Eddis said it was good fortune that a police officer or someone else who needed help wasn't hurt during the period. He also said he was aggravated that police brass downtown did not yet know what caused Tuesday's problem or a similar instance about two months ago.On each occasion, he said, no viable backup system was in place."Our worst nightmare was experienced last night," said Eddis, who previously has limited his criticism of the administration of Police Commissioner Sylvester M. Johnson. "There was a time that the radio went completely dead."At a press conference at headquarters this afternoon, Deputy Police Commissioner Charles Brennan, head of the department's Science and Technology section, confirmed the breakdown, which he said began around 9:05 p.m. He attributed the crash to the influx of police cars from across the city being dispatched to the Germantown case.
"In order to talk to all the officers in the entire city, police radio uses a command in the radio system which . . . permits us to talk to all the officers on the street at the same time," said Brennan. But invoking that command caused a series of glitches that forced the system into backup, causing more than half the frequencies to crash, he said.Thus, he said, dispatchers "couldn't get out to the people on the street and the people on the street couldn't talk to the radio consoles [dispatchers]," he said. "We still don't know why this happened."After the blackout, there were sporadic problems with the radio system for another two-hour period, said Eddis. During an emergency meeting this morning at headquarters with the brass, Eddis said he was encouraged that officials approved a contingency plan. Under the new plan, should a similar situation arise, officers will immediately report to their districts to be deployed.But, said Eddis: "The question we're asking today is whether there is any guarantee that what happened last night won't happen again today, and the answer was no. They have not been able to identify yet what the problem is."The blackouts come in the wake of another technical problem with the 800-megahertz digital trunked system, which went online here in December 2002, that left the portable radio sets with batteries that could not be recharged. Now, supplies of new batteries, originally expected by the department at the end of the summer, will be available in the next week or so, said Eddis.After another breakdown two months ago, Eddis said he had been concerned that the problem was not being corrected.Eddis said he was fearful for the safety of officers operating without an effective radio communication system.Brennan said that in both failures, the problem was traced to the radio command that permits dispatchers to talk to police citywide. "We know that it happens when a certain command is invoked and as long as we don't invoke that, it doesn't happen. So, we're not going to use that command until we're sure again that everything is fine."