Police Computer System Crashes

The EG Police Department's computer system crashed last Tuesday and is only now — slowly, carefully — coming back to life, meaning there's going to be a lot of “paperwork” to make up once the system comes back on line completely.

“The server supporting the police software had a major failure last week,” town tech director Wendy Schmidle wrote in an email Tuesday. “It’s a very unusual occurrence,” she said, noting that the town follows best-practice protocols.

According to Police Chief Tom Coyle, the computer problem is not hampering actual police work, just the record keeping that goes along with it.

“It only means there will be a lot of back filling, which could take several days on our end,” he said.

Schmidle did say that some minor (she emphasized that word) damage to files had occurred that they were addressing.

“The system is stable and we are moving carefully and slowly as we bring users back on line to be sure that any abnormalities are identified and resolved before causing further damage,” she said. Schmidle said it was limited to EGPD software only — “significant but limited in scope.”

She continued, “This has got to be a careful process to be confident the data integrity remains. There is going to be some healing that needs to take place in the next few days through the weekend before I can categorically state that “everything’s back up and running.’”

Town Manager Bill Sequino cautioned those who've had interactions with the police this past week not to imagine their offense or arrest might magically disappear.

"If you were arrested and you thought we lost your records ... we still have them," he said.