Oakland police radio response defended (radios failed during Obama's visit)
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
Oakland officials struggled Thursday to explain why it took more than 2 1/2 hours to dispatch repair crews to fix a transmission-tower problem that caused a police communications meltdown the night President Obama visited the city.
The city's $18 million radio system has been prone to dead zones where officers cannot communicate since it was rolled out in June 2011. City officials say they are considering whether they should junk the network and join one being built by 40 neighboring police and fire agencies.
The problems Monday night may have been the most disturbing yet. Sporadic communications difficulties that officers suffered while Obama was at a Fox Theater fundraiser cascaded into what police called a "severe" breakdown about an hour after the president left the city.
That started about 10 p.m., as more than 100 demonstrators were still lingering on downtown streets, but it wasn't until 12:30 a.m. that police contacted city technicians about the trouble. Crews eventually traced the problem to a transmission tower at the Gwin Reservoir in North Oakland, which had overheated when a cooling unit failed.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Oakland-police-radio-response-defended-3739270.php
Jaxon Van Derbeken, author of this article, was recognized as Journalist of the Year for 2011 by the Society of Professional Journalists. See also his previous reports about Oakland police radio failures: "Oakland: Dead zones plague police radios" and "Oakland police radios fail during Obama visit".