Except for brief stints this weekend, Summit County Sheriff’s deputies have been without one of their key tools since Friday night.
Sheriff’s Capt. Andrew Wright said the software platform known as Spillman is integral to how the office performs law enforcement.
“Everything that we do in public safety is documenting information, and that information flow is so, the volume of it is so massive, that when a system goes out and has the amount of issues that we've been experiencing over the weekend into today, it creates some big challenges for us,” Wright said Monday afternoon.
Wright said deputies are working around the issue and continuing to enforce the law. He said the outage has not prevented essential functions from occurring, like dispatching first responders where they’re needed.
All of Summit County’s first responder agencies are dispatched through the Sheriff’s Office. The Park City Fire District, for one, said there’s been no reduction in fire or EMS response.
Wright said the Sheriff’s information technology department is working to solve the issue. He said it does not appear to be a cyberattack.
He said the system came back online a few times over the weekend, only to crash again. In the meantime, dispatchers are using radios to respond to service calls. It’s a workaround that Wright says brings him back to his time on patrol in the mid-2000s, when incidents came in over the radio and he would pull over, write the address down in a notebook and then take off.
“It in essence takes us back in time. And when you're so reliant upon technology, an outage like this can really hamper what we're doing,” Wright said. “And it doesn't, of course, hamper any type of response times or anything like that.”
But without Spillman, there are challenges creating police reports and issuing citations, there’s no map that comes up on responders’ laptops showing where an incident is and deputies have less information about what they’re walking into.
“Oh, certainly, yeah, they certainly have less information,” Wright said. “... That is a database that we rely on for future interactions. Whether it's an address or a person, it gives us that information that we can know previous interactions, any alerts that we need to know about whether it's medical alerts, or, you know, to be cautious with someone if they're aggressive toward law enforcement.”
Wright said he did not know when the issue would be resolved.
