Broward police radios failed in another crisis
The Broward County radio system that buckled under the crush of police officers connecting to its channels during the response to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School has now twice been overwhelmed amid mass shooting scenes, stoking miscommunication and confusion among police.
When a gunman killed five travelers at the Fort Lauderdale airport in January 2017 and again when a shooter killed 17 people in Parkland just over a year later, the failing system forced officers to at times ditch their radios, use hand signals and stay in groups to relay information to each other.
The radio issues should come as no surprise to local officials. In 2015, a consultant warned Broward County that its radio system was past its useful life and should be replaced quickly, but the county is running behind schedule in replacing the system.
The radio problems at Stoneman Douglas left some law enforcement officers unable to communicate and hear from dispatchers. They included Broward Sheriff’s Of-
fice Capt. Jan Jordan, who commands the Parkland district where the shooting occurred. She was sometimes not able to hear what was coming over the radios, the agency said.
“Attention all units, if you can hear me on this radio, be advised the radios are having malfunctions,” a dispatcher told officers. “You can hear me but I cannot hear you so stand by.”
Combined with the uncertainty of where a shooter was, a rush of people fleeing, and officers and paramedics racing to a scene, the confusion caused by radio issues was similar to what happened at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport.
The radio breakdowns there were so severe that police missed words and whole phrases of transmissions as they pursued reports of a second shooter that were later unfounded. In one instance, a request to “confirm shots fired” was heard as a declaration: “shots fired.”
The false reports of gunshots fueled panic at the airport, causing thousands of travelers to race to the tarmac, where many were stranded for hours.
The county for years has tried to extend the life of its radio system, originally installed in 1992. In September 2015, the consulting firm Mission Critical Partners reviewed the county’s radios and said the overall system needed to be replaced. Much of its equipment was 15 years old, “past the end of typical replacement periods,” the report found.
The county’s radio system used by firefighters and police is made up of 28 channels. When a channel reaches its capacity, users are given a busy signal or error message when trying to use the system. The problem — called “throttling” — was identified in the 2015 report and caused breakdowns at both the Fort Lauderdale airport and Stoneman Douglas. The Sheriff’s Office said it is looking into the radio issues, and did not answer further questions about the “throttling.”
County officials say that no system, no matter how old, is limitless and may have similar problems during the acute surge of traffic seen during such extreme situations. But county radios were reported to have complete failures, sometimes multiple times in a day, even during routine events.
The Mission Critical Partners report also identified systemwide gaps that may have posed problems at Stoneman Douglas. The county’s radio system did not perform well in school buildings, the report found, creating a potential problem in the event of a shooting on a school campus.
“In a dynamic event — active shooter — users found they had no coverage inside the schools,” the report said.
It is unclear whether school buildings contributed to radio communication issues at Stoneman Douglas because the Sheriff’s Office has not released the majority of the audio transmissions requested by the South Florida Sun Sentinel under Florida’s public records law.
The Mission Critical Partners report said that the county should work quickly to get the system replaced because it could take two years to do so. “With the challenges faced by the existing system, time is of the essence,” the report said.
A year and a half later, Broward County commissioners in May approved $59.5 million to replace the system, but officials at the time said it would not be ready to use by the end of 2018. In recent months, the expected replacement date has been pushed back a year — to the end of 2019.
Brett Bayag, acting director of the county’s office of regional communications and technology, said throttling and other issues can’t be reduced until the new system is running. “We can’t add anymore, or improve the processing of the older
system,” he said.
Bayag said it took time for officials to solicit bids for the project and negotiate with the company that will do the replacement. County officials are still working with Tamarac and Parkland to secure sites for towers meant to improve radio signal strength across the county.
In addition to radio failures, officers on scene also faced problems because not all law enforcement agencies in Broward use the county’s radio system.
A handful of cities, including Coral Springs, have their own.
That meant that police radios for Coral Springs and the Sheriff ’s Office, the first two law enforcement agencies at Stoneman Douglas, had to be connected so officers from both agencies could communicate.
“Our systems can patch, we do it time to time,” said former Coral Springs Police Chief Tony Pustizzi, who recently retired from the department. “But their system went down, it failed. So we could not patch.”
Pustizzi said the agencies were able to connect when the system came back online. The Sheriff’s Office said that came after the shooter had left the school.