Robbery missed as police 999 system crashed for eight hours

POLICE emergency call takers were forced to make handwritten notes of more than 2,500 incidents after its multi-million pound Oasis Command and Control system crashed for nearly eight hours.

The “major technical fault” meant resource dispatchers could not input incident details taken from 999 and 101 calls directly into the command system.

Police admitted that the “outage” meant they were unable to respond to three incidents.

“One of the incidents was an attempted armed robbery in Coventry but there were no injuries,” a source said.

The crash happened on October 6 this year but details have only just emerged. The system went down from 4.35pm to 12.22am.

The revelation follows the admission by West Midlands Chief Constable Dave Thompson that more than 170,000 emergency calls to 101 went unanswered because of staffing shortages.

The force said that although the command system was fixed, it is still not clear what had caused the crash.

Engineers were only alerted to the fault nearly eight hours after it was identified because officers thought the system would “reset and sort outself out”.

A source said: “Police officers were retained on duty next day and had to listen to hours and hours of all the 2,500 calls again to retrieve the information.

“They then had to check it all against the hand-written notes before finally re-inputting the incident information into the Oasis Command Control system.

“It meant extra officers had to be called in, but all the information has not yet been fully recovered.”

A West Midlands Police spokesman said: “Contact was made with the three callers to ensure their call was responded to, and an explana- it tion offered about why been a service delay.

Force Contact Manager, Chief Inspector Matt Markham, added: “During the period of the outage, just over 2,600 calls were received.

“Each one was re-listened to and checks made to ensure that they had been dealt with correctly.

“In only three cases could find no evidence response.

“Contact was made with the three callers to ensure their call was responded to, and an explanation offered.”

A full review has been launched but it is still not known how and why the crash of the much vaunted Oasis there had could we of a police system happened. The command and control system is provided by Northgate Solutions, which has a near £4.7 million contract for its upkeep.

Perry Barr MP Khalid Mahmood called for a full inquiry and said he feared the glitch might have been an attack by computer hackers.

“It’s very worrying that the cause of the major outage hasn’t been discovered yet,” he said. “The fear is that it could happen at any time again.

“It could easily have been a hacking attempt – maybe a dry run by criminals or even terrorists – just to check the response. Such a scenario potentially puts both officers’ and the public’s safety at risk.”