Detroit's Emergency Dispatch System Fails

dstates writes "For most of Friday, police and firefighters in Detroit were forced to operate without their usual dispatch radio when the emergency dispatch system failed. The radio system used for communication between 911 dispatchers and Detroit's police, fire and EMS crews went down around 5:30 a.m. Friday morning, causing a backlog of hundreds of calls and putting public safety at risk. Michigan State Police allowed Detroit's emergency system to use the state's communication towers, but access was restricted to top priority calls out of fear of overloading the State system. More than 60 priority-1 calls and more than 170 non-emergency calls were backed up. With no dispatch to communicate if something went wrong and backup was needed, police were forced to send officers out in pairs for safety concerns on priority-1 calls. Detroit's new police chief, James Craig, says he's 'appalled' that a redundant system did not kick in. The outage occurred only days after Craig took office. The $131 million Motorola system was installed in 2005 amid controversy over its funding. Spokesmen for Motorola said parts of the system were regularly maintained but acknowledged that backup systems had not been tested in the past two years. They said the problem was a hardware glitch in the link between dispatch and the individual radios. As of 9 p.m. Friday, a Motorola spokesman said the system was stable and the company would continue troubleshooting next week."

Comments

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[girlintraining]

Detroit has had massive funding and infrastructure problems for some time now. It's a dying city with much of the suburbs either abandoned, being reclaimed by nature, and generally being both in appearance and substance as a 3rd world country. It's so bad it has gotten national attention -- an emergency financial planner was sent in to try to right their budget, with limited success.

You can't judge Detroit the same way as you could, say, Chicago. They're no longer really part of the first world. This wouldn't be news if it happened in Afghanistan, for example. It's a sad state of affairs, but this is the inevitable result of a slide into the third world... our bridges and other key infrastructure is also rotting. Detroit is just foreshadowing what will happen to many of our cities over the next 15-20 years as our economy continues to slide into the ocean of wealth inequity.

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[Anonymous Coward]

That's what happens when you build a colossal public sector and a wealth transfer system that punishes productivity and rewards doing nothing. Eventually the productive members of the society decide to pack their things and you're only left with the socialist bums complaining how their shitty life is the fault of banks and corporations. Trying to force income equity is a sure way to destroy even a prosperous economy.

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[ttucker]

Except again, from TFA, the city of Detroit was paying an enormous sum of money to a reputable vendor to maintain the system. How does that coalesce with this third world, wealth inequality theory?

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[DigiShaman]

Globalism. This is what happens when it's cheaper to move automotive manufacturing overseas only to be compounded further by the unions squeezing out all the profits and stonewalling the change that's necessary to survive. It's one giant death spiral that was enviable. We've had ghost towns in the past, there's no reason to think we wont have them again in the future. Hell, Midland TX (currently a boomtown) might be the next one should all the fracking stop via legislation.

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[Rockoon]

While Detroit hasnt had a Republican administration since January 1962, its still hard to conclusively blame the problems on the left.

We'll get a larger sample size soon enough.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Shhh, it's all about wealth inequity. Everything is. Didn't you get the memo? It turns out that the secret to happiness in life is worrying more about other peoples' bank accounts than you do about your own.

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[theskipper]

I think there are subtle differences in interpretation when discussing wealth inequity.

Wealth inequity won't ever go away and in itself isn't bad. If you work harder than your neighbor then your net worth should eventually be greater. That's the American Way (tm).

The problem is when you reach a tipping point where 1% of the population owns 30%+ of the gross net worth of a country. Because of that overwhelming wealth, it results in the owners having a huge amount of influence in the political and legal processes. Meaning they can fund lobbyists to bend lawmaking to their wishes, and they can afford the absolutely best legal representation after breaking laws (i.e. powerful enough to be above the law).

That's seems to be crux of the wealth inequity argument imho. Viewing it as some type of "jealousy" by your viewpoint, and its systemic effect on the other (the OP).

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[FatdogHaiku]

Maybe it should be Motorola, Solutions?
Actually, I'm betting this was a failure at the local level, a couple of techs or more likely a middle manager that spreads their people too thin...

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[girlintraining]

Globalism. This is what happens when it's cheaper to move automotive manufacturing overseas only to be compounded further by the unions

Okay. Pardon the french, but I'm gonna have to ask you to take a step back, and literally go fuck yourself. Every major industrialized country except the United States has a labor party, and strong unions. The wealth gap in every other G20 country is significantly less than here in the United States. If your argument had even the slightest rootings in reality, the story would be very different. Unions had nothing to do with this; Rapid deregulation brokered by large corporations and a cozy relationship with Congress did. Unions have exactly dick to do with this -- it's just propaganda pushed out by Fox News and rabid conservatives who think profits are people too. Unions act as an economic stabilization force -- they cool the fluxuations in unemployment, wages, etc. Even Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations said Unions were a necessary part of a capitalist economy -- and he said the same about health care and unemployment insurance. He then went on to provide examples of how the long term growth of an economy improves with such policies; But they are usually not implimented because of short term focus on profit. He also advised governments to step in and create public works projects during periods of higher unemployment, back-filling the natural boot/bust cycle of capitalism, and then increasing taxation during periods of economic prosperity as an investment into the next cycle.

As much as many conservatives think they have a handle on what capitalism really is and what's best for it, they have a remarkable lack of education on the positions of its strongest supporters. It's unfortunate, really; If they weren't so fiscally irresponsible with their short term thinking and focusing on things like reducing government spending during a recession, etc., we wouldn't be stuck in these "stagflation" situations where inflation rises but unemployment remains constant. Such an (unpredicted) economic stall-out was first observed during the Reagan administration courtesy of "trickle down" economics. Its successor has resulted in the longest period of elevated unemployment in American history. And none of this has dick to do with Unions.

It's one giant death spiral that was enviable.

The death spiral isn't actually a spiral so much as a cycle. Deregulation leads to market crashes, which lead to regulation, which lead to market crashes, which lead to deregulation... Capitalism itself is fundamentally and systemically unstable, especially in its pure form. This is why almost every major world economy is a hybrid of socialist and capitalist policy, and any divisions between the two are largely arbitrary and based more on the political beer googles of the person assigning labels than what the economy is in actuality.