What could possibly happen if you don't have your own technicians in house?
- The whole arrest system for the entire city crashed last night. Officers sitting in stations because no one could process prisoners for hours. No one would make the decision to revert to paper. Word is that the ISD Commander (JL) [laid] off all the civilians that worked on the system and farmed the work out to an outside company. They took forever to respond. I think when I left work at 0800, they were still down. So we are shorthanded, and those that still make arrests are sitting around wasting time because the system they use to process prisoners is down.
If they don't think the system used to process prisoners is important enough that they farm it out to outsiders, what is the message they are sending out to us? Just saying. Stay safe.
No arrest reports, no photographs, no fingerprints, lines of prisoners headed out the door. It was an amazingly bad display of bureaucratic incompetence and no one in charge willing to make the call to go to paper reports for the moment. But hey, we saved money somewhere, right?