By Dan Belson
Baltimore Sun
BALTIMORE — An outage in the city’s computer-aided emergency dispatch system snarled some communications between Baltimore police and fire officials last week, briefly causing disarray as officers repeatedly called for medics to help a man who later died in custody.
The Baltimore Sun confirmed the outage with emergency personnel and analyzed hours of police and fire communications from June 24 in which multiple dispatchers, officers and firefighters are heard discussing the system being down, causing confusion over various calls for service. A 30-minute span of transmissions is missing entirely from the archive of recorded radio communications, another likely technical issue, according to an archive official.
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The full extent of the system outage — and how much of a role it played in medics’ response — was unclear. State investigators are probing the in-custody death at a hospital, where police had taken the shackled man after waiting more than 40 minutes for medics while he appeared to suffer a mental health crisis and became unresponsive.
The Maryland Attorney General’s Office’s Independent Investigations Division, which is probing the matter, said that last week, around 9:40 p.m. on June 24, a man approached a Baltimore Police officer in his cruiser at the intersection of West Franklin Street and North Franklintown Road. Officers restrained the man “for [his] own safety” because he repeatedly walked into the road, and requested fire department medics, the agency said.
“While in restraints and awaiting medical assistance, the man became unresponsive,” investigators said. At around 10:30 p.m., medics had still not arrived at the scene, so officers took the man to a hospital in a police cruiser. He died there at around 3 a.m.
The IID had not released the names of the man who died or the officers involved, nor said what ultimately caused the man’s death, as of Tuesday afternoon.
City officials declined to comment on the communication outage or whether it impacted the medics’ response in this case, although multiple emergency services workers confirmed that the computer-aided dispatch system had malfunctioned that night.
As part of The Sun’s review, police officers are heard on recorded radio transmissions repeatedly requesting medics to help treat the man. However, fire department crews, who are heard discussing the outage, don’t appear to receive the message.
Fire union officials, who also confirmed the outage on June 24, said that breakdowns in the city’s computer-aided dispatch system — the primary line of communication between separate police and fire department requests — are common.
“It goes down every so often,” said Matt Coster, president of the IAFF Local 734, the Baltimore firefighters’ union, who noted that the outages cause various problems for first responders.
Computer-aided dispatch systems, or CADs, are digital mechanisms for emergency response agencies to track their resources and what they’re doing with them, said Glenn Marin, a retired Los Angeles County Sheriff’s lieutenant and longtime public safety dispatching consultant. He said that “a million things could have caused” the city’s CAD system to go offline, from power outages to machine failures.
Josh Fannon, who leads the fire officers’ union, IAFF Local 964, said he’s unsure of the frequency of CAD outages in the city, but in his opinion, they occur “far too often.”
In Baltimore, police requests for fire department medics typically go through the digital system; when that goes down, those requests usually have to be transmitted through other means, such as by phone.
Marin noted that it’s rare for such outages to cause major issues — usually, any emergency communications system has a backup plan. But it’s unclear when, if ever, fire dispatchers received the requests for medics on the evening of June 24.
Pieces from that night’s dispatch transmissions from the fire and police departments from around 9:30 p.m. are missing from Broadcastify’s database of archived communications. The service’s CEO said that it did not delete those segments, and that the most likely explanation was “that the feed experienced a technical problem during that timeframe.”
In the recorded dispatch audio after that, both police and fire personnel are heard discussing problems related to the system outage, while officers also try to deal with the man in crisis.
“I got a gentleman pulling on my doors asking for help,” one officer says, noting that the man suggested he was being chased, but that it “just seems like he’s having a mental crisis.”
Almost 10 minutes later, an officer says that the man is “very irate right now. They have leg shackles on him and handcuffs already.” The officer says that “all cops are okay,” but they’re “gonna figure out some transportation here to get them off the street.”
Later, they attempt to verify that a medic was requested, but it appears that technical problems persist. A dispatcher verifies that the request was made, but there isn’t any estimate for how long they’ll take to respond.
“We took the CAD back down. We can’t do anything up here for the next eight to 10 minutes,” somebody says several minutes later.
“Can we reorder the medic?” a police officer says later, adding that the man had become unresponsive.
“We tried to place him in the car. We were unable to do so due to his limp body. So we’re still waiting on the medic,” another officer says. Roughly four minutes later, somebody is heard saying that the computer-aided dispatch system is still down.
Meanwhile, on the fire department’s end, crews are heard having confused exchanges about the CAD system. One person is heard on the radio telling another fire department worker that although the system had restarted at that point, it was unreliable.
“You can’t really look at that,” the fire employee says. “A lot of those calls have been sitting and getting caught up, so you gotta wait on that.”
Police officers eventually said around 10:37 p.m. that they’re taking the man to the hospital on their own, as medics still hadn’t responded. Authorities are also told to restart the mobile data terminals in their cars around that time, apparently due to the system outage.
This death happened amid a spate of police-involved deaths in Baltimore: on June 17, police fatally shot a former arabber who had pulled a gun on officers in Upton; and on June 25, officers shot and killed 70-year-old woman who lunged at them with a knife. All three deaths involved somebody who appeared to be in a mental health crisis.
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