Issues continue to plague the city of Oakland’s 911 system. After failing Thursday, the automated system failed for a second time Saturday and was down for hours. However, residents and the city’s police union say the issues have been going on a lot longer than that.
On Thursday, a power outage knocked out Oakland’s 911 automated dispatching system, forcing dispatchers to handle calls manually for hours.
President of the Oakland Police Officers Union Barry Donelan says the writing was on the wall for a 9-1-1 collapse — citing a recent grand jury report.
The city of Oakland released a statement Saturday morning, which said in part: “We observed impacts to the automated dispatching system.” They added that “All dispatch staff resumed manual call routing, so routing for calls was slower than normal.”
In a statement Friday, Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao blamed decades of underinvestment in the city’s IT infrastructure and noted that she included $9.5 million in her next budget to address the city’s aging IT systems.