By Sean Maher, Oakland Tribune
Original publication date: Aug. 23, 2011

OAKLAND, Calif. — Police officers still face radio communication breakdowns on a daily basis as they patrol through signal dead zones in the city, though the problem has improved since the city installed a new multimillion dollar system in June, police said Tuesday.

The new system, called Platform 25 or P25, switched public safety radios from analog to digital signals, which are stronger, technicians said after the June 5 install. But officers are still running into problems with dead zones across the city — including in high-crime areas — as well as dropped calls and calls in which voices sound “like they’re underwater,” Sgt. Dom Arotzarena said.

“They’re just not dependable yet,” said Arotzarena, who heads the police union. “The bottom line with a radio that doesn’t work is that you won’t be able to call in backup, and that’s a huge issue.”

Arotzarena said he believes the city is doing everything it can but that “right now I would say it’s not a good system.”

However, a recent audit found that in the past two weeks, officer complaints of radio trouble were down about 40 percent from the prior two-week period, said Acting Lt. Randy Pope, who helps command the radio room for the police department.

“We’ve always had dead zones,” Pope said. “That’s the nature of radios. We’ve been systematically going through every one previously known in the old radio system, and everywhere our officers have trouble with the new one. We go out, test signal strength and see if it was isolated, equipment related, interference related, or caused by the topography.”

“In June, it was horrible,” Pope added. “Both the old system and the new one. Our officers have been very frustrated. But we’re doing much better now.”

There were more glitches than expected in the new system, Pope said.

“We had to take some extra precautions because of that. If we got a call in a spot recorded as a dead spot, we’d send an additional officer out, to (act as) an automatic cover, because we don’t want an officer to end up needing assistance and not being able to get one on the radio.”

In the next month a new major antennae site will be installed to bolster the two that already exist, and a series of smaller antennaes will also be installed to cover small pockets of dead radio space, Pope said.

When the $18 million system was announced in June, Ken Gordon, the city’s Information Technology director, said the city would go through a two- or three-week period of “refinements and adjustments.”

City Administrator Deanna Santana’s office said Monday that there was also an anticipated 90- to-120-day period to work out problems with the new radio system that appeared over a longer term, and that more than a week is left before the 90 day mark. Santana has also asked Gordon for a detailed list of any radio issues that remain a problem and said she plans to release that information by the end of this week.

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