Keep in mind that the complaint is a interpretation of a lawyer based upon what the officer complained, and the complaint was then interpreted by the media for released. There is going to be details that are left out and not clarified, because what we all consider important i.e. the exact details of the system failure or dead spots, the general public care nothing about. The media is more concerned with the details of the crime as they spent time describing the charges, the people, and the injuries because that is more news worthy than a article over how radio waves travel. If there had been a dispatch error then audio recordings would have clarified that very quickly. I think that the officer is suing the county as a wake up call stating that the dead spots or busy signals needed to be addressed because someone whether it be fire or police are going to get killed. Additionally, for all we know officers could have been complaining for years about the dead spots and the county might have responded with "we can't afford to fix it" or the common " We will get right on that " reply.
I spent time working on a federal installation and our department switched from a analog VHF (1 Site) system to a P25 UHF system from MACOM (4 Sites). We begun to have numerous dead spots and when you would key up sometimes the radios would go into a error and restart. This could have been the same scenario, luckily for us after numerous complaints we left the system and switched to a State TRS built by Motorola and the problems were fixed.
