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Can You Hear Me Now? Radio Network Used by Law Enforcement Plagued by Dropped Signals

Paul L. McCord Jr.
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Flickr/Creative Commons

Just over a year ago, Maine declared its new $57 million public safety radio system operational. It’s a system that gives law enforcement and other state agencies the ability to communicate with each other across the state.

That’s the goal, anyway. In practice it’s another story. The system has been plagued with problems and efforts are underway to fix them.

Every day in Maine there are hundreds of radio messages like one recently in which a game warden checks the license plate on a truck. The communication was monitored in Augusta, the truck and game warden were in Aroostook County.

The radio system, dubbed MSCommNet, links agencies like Transportation and Maine Emergency Management with Maine State Police and Marine Patrol. But it has not performed as promised, and that’s a concern.

“We definitely had several areas along the coast that were dead zones where transmissions we’re not possible,” says Col. Jon Cornish, who oversees the Maine Marine Patrol. “We has situations where transmission were lost.”

Cornish says when the system worked, it was an improvement over the old radio system. But when it didn’t, it meant many of his officers had to deploy workarounds for communicating.

“I won’t speak for others but what is happening here is officers rely more and more on their iPhones,” he says.

In an email, Col. Joel Wilkinson, chief of the Maine Warden Service, says his agency has had problems with the system. He says it got so bad last year that he, Cornish and Col. Robert Williams of the Maine State Police met at what has come to be known as the Colonels’ Summit to bring pressure on the state’s Office of Information Technology, the agency that manages the digital radio network.

Williams says there were hundreds of complaints from the field about radios that dropped signals and situations where troopers picked up the radio and nothing happened.

“The guys on the road, I think, have legitimate concerns,” he says. “They’re calling them dead mics. They push the mic, they don’t get the tower.”

Williams says the maker of the system — the Harris Corp. — and the state IT office have been working hard to figure out what needs to be fixed. He says engineers rode along with troopers to see for themselves what the engineers said could not be happening.

“‘Oh, we believe you, we see it is happening but it can’t happen!’ They will shoot it back to the main engineers who will say, ‘Yeah it can’t happen.’ What they are finding I think, some of it, is a glitch in the software, the programming,” Williams says.

Some troopers complained that the system failed them during high-stress situations, like domestic violence, and it was complaints like those that prompted the colonels to demand action to protect their staff and the public.

In response, Bruce Fitzgerald, director of the Maine Emergency Management Agency, sought help from federal government experts. He’s still awaiting a final report from them.

In the meantime the state has been taking steps to fix the system, but the fixes could take months.

John Richards, director of radio services at the IT office, inherited the system and its problems when he got the job last year. He agrees with Williams that part of the problem has to do with software.

There are 40 radio towers located across the state, plus dispatch centers and hundreds of vehicles, and all are interconnected and controlled by the computer system. Richards says programming problems are being addressed but he also sees the need for better training.

He says initial training was not adequate.

“Like taking somebody from a rotary phone on the wall and giving them an iPphone and expecting they are going to be able to use it even with a little bit of training,” Richards says.

He says in some cases equipment is now being upgraded. But some of the current coverage issues simply cannot be resolved with existing towers. For example, one small part of York County is now being covered by a portable tower, but if a permanent tower is put in place that will have to come out of his budget.

Meantime, Richards says Harris has agreed to pick up the cost for the changes needed to get the system operating as it should.

Journalist Mal Leary spearheads Maine Public's news coverage of politics and government and is based at the State House.