Police Officer Preparation & Law Enforcement Resource - Archive

Work was busy enough earlier without having to deal with computer issues. Our CAD software crashed about an hour ago, and I called the communications supervisor at home to ask her what to do about it, since it's a commercial cad program that our IT people can't fix. Basic answer was that the company that supplies it isn't available for tech support after hours, and that we'd just have to go to manual (paper) cards for the rest of shift. I don't really mind the cards, but the CAD generates the case numbers for the officers, and without that we can't give them their case numbers. Wonderful. You'd think a CAD software for public safety would have 24/7 tech support.

Ok, my rant is done. Thanks for reading. :p

I think I've heard of CAD companies providing 24/7 service contracts - For a price.

The issue may very well be that your agency is unwilling to cough up the $30,000/year or whatever it takes (depending on the system and number of users, etc) to pay for a 24/7 on-site service contract.

They probably would rather spend that money on hiring another dispatcher or something, which would be much more help overall than worring about the occasional downtime.

Sounds like our system.

Have they tried turning it off and starting it again? That is all they seem to know what to do with ours. :rolleyes:

Sounds like our system.

Have they tried turning it off and starting it again? That is all they seem to know what to do with ours. :rolleyes:

That's probably all it needed, but they won't give the Communications supervisor the log on info. Only the chief and his secretary have it. And they won't come out in the middle of the night. Go figure. :p

I love that, they give the info to 2 people who don't use the system, but not the person in charge of the system..brilliant.

As far as going to cards... When the system crashed couldn't you see what number you were on? Then just write the numbers on the card as you go along.

I love that, they give the info to 2 people who don't use the system, but not the person in charge of the system..brilliant.

As far as going to cards... When the system crashed couldn't you see what number you were on? Then just write the numbers on the card as you go along.

We pull the cn's after we get CAD back up....but then we have in-house tech support that are on-call 24/7.

My cursor freezes on me severaltimes a shift. The cure ? unplug the keyboard from the monitor for 5 seconds.

But in a cruiser, this is easier said than done as the angle of the plug and the location of the connection can't be seen, must do it by feel.