O.C. Grand Jury Sees Safety Threat in Police Radio System

Transmission failures that have dogged a new, $80-million police radio system pose a threat to public safety and will cost the county millions of dollars to fix, the Orange County Grand Jury announced Thursday.

The panel’s report concludes that significant work is needed to bring the radio system to an adequate level, including installation of costly antenna sites to boost signals and replacement of poorly designed hand-held units. The panel also proposed that developers help pay for improvements to ensure coverage inside new and old buildings.

The conclusions differ sharply from the view of county officials, who have characterized the radio problems as glitches that will end after fine-tuning.

Grand jurors said they spent nine months examining the radio system, riding in patrol cars with front-line officers to experience the frustrations with the new radios for themselves.

Officers and firefighters, particularly in South County, have complained for nearly a year that the communications system sometimes produces garbled messages and doesn’t work in many high-rise offices and shopping malls.

Jurors concluded that the problems “put public safety officers and the communities they serve at risk” and that the system requires rapid attention before someone is killed or seriously injured.

“The radios are a lifeline for the police officers on the street,” said grand juror Hal Fischer, who is a retired Placentia police chief. “If they can’t communicate with each other, then you’ve got a serious problem.”

While the grand jury’s report stops short of putting a price on necessary fixes, Fischer said the panel is aware that the improvements will be costly.

An antenna site, alone, he said, can cost up to $500,000, and the county might well have to grapple with buying or leasing land for the sites.

“They’ve got millions of dollars invested already, and we think it’s going to cost millions more to get it up and running,” Fischer said.

The much-touted 800-megahertz radio system was designed to enhance communication among police and other emergency agencies.

But failures surfaced almost as soon as Tustin and Irvine police officers began using the system last spring. The report concludes that other problems are likely to arise as more agencies begin using the new radios.

In assigning responsibility, grand jurors took the county to task.

Government officials, the report says, provided inadequate training to police officers, failed to test the radio system before police began using it and made key decisions during the mid-1990s that reduced radio coverage.

Fischer stressed that county officials are working hard to fix the problems. Nevertheless, the report dismayed county officials overseeing the installation of the new system.

Some faulted the report for highlighting problems they say have long been cleared up. The document, they complained, also makes scant mention of improvements already underway.

Many police agencies in the northern parts of the county, such as Anaheim and Garden Grove, have expressed enormous satisfaction with the system, said Allan L. Roeder, who chairs a county committee overseeing the project.

“I just felt that it was an unbalanced report that unfairly focused a great deal of attention on Irvine . . . with the initial installation a year ago,” Roeder said.

Roeder called the grand jury’s recommendation to add more antenna sites “premature.” Technicians, he noted, are still adding police agencies to the system, which is scheduled to be finished this year.

Until technicians are done fine-tuning the complex equipment, Roeder said, officials have no way of knowing whether the radio system is as flawed as the grand jury report suggests.

“The current system we’re bringing on is far superior to the one we’re replacing,” Roeder said.

County technicians are preparing a response to the recommendations. A Motorola spokeswoman said company technicians are reviewing the report to see what steps, if any, need to be taken and declined to comment until finished.

Motorola and county officials have noted that complaints about the radios have dropped significantly since last year. But some police officers say their colleagues are so frustrated that they have simply stopped reporting the problems.

Indeed, there is evidence that some of the failures experienced in Irvine and Tustin have spread recently to other areas of South County.

Earlier this week, the Assn. of Orange County Sheriff’s Deputies began monitoring reports of problems after receiving complaints about “dead zones” in areas of San Clemente, San Juan Capistrano and Dana Point.

Critics of the system said they feel vindicated by the study.

“It sounds to me like everything that we’ve complained about has been justified,” said Dave Mihalik, president of the Irvine Police Assn. “I still believe that it’s not as good as the prior system was.”

The report shines a spotlight on two factors the grand jury considered critical to the radio’s problems.

Desperate to save money during the bankruptcy, county officials shaved $18 million off the original price of the new system by compromising coverage inside buildings.

In addition, grand jurors said the newly designed system did not take into account the boom in high-rise construction and earthquake retrofitting in buildings that are now blocking radio signals in South County.

Technicians should have conducted a survey of the changing landscape in South County since 1995 to determine how radio coverage might be affected, jurors said.

Had they done so, officers might now be able to use their radios in many of the schools, apartments, office buildings and shopping malls where their equipment sometimes goes dead, Fischer said.

In recommending that the county will have to consider adding more antenna sites to the system, the report notes that San Diego County had to do the same when installing a similar system in recent years. There, the number of sites more than doubled--from 21 to 43--compared to the tally technicians initially thought they needed.

Grand jurors also recommended changes to hand-held and motorcycle radios, which they noted were never designed for police officers.