By Allison Steele
The Phiadelphia Inquirer
PHILADELPHIA — Most of the Philadelphia Police Department’s emergency radio system went down last night for about 40 minutes, police said, meaning the lines of communication between patrol cars and dispatchers went silent.
Authorities did not know last night what caused the system crash, which happened shortly before 10 p.m. As a result, 911 calls had to be routed through the city’s district offices, rather than through a main switchboard, leading to what police said were unavoidable delays in some officers’ response time.
The system went back up around 10:30.
Philadelphia’s $62 million digital radio system has been plagued by malfunctions since it was updated in 2002. Interference from cell phones and hardware failures caused delays and led the system to crash five times in one year,
Copyright 2008 The Philadelphia Inquirer