NJ Mall Shooting: "Interoperability" Didn't Exist

[902]

i used to live in bergen county also. and to show how much the pd up there knew about radio, i can't remember which town it was but the cars just had a radio update. the cops found that they had a new channel to use and were using it for a tac channel.
at that time it was called spen2 155.475 yep they thought they had a new private channel and were using the second most listened to channel in the state. a little knowledge can be bad.

That could be anywhere that thinks they got a "free" channel. The early SPEN bases were T2-2R (one transmitter switches between SPEN 1 and 2, but there are two separate receivers - one on SPEN 1 and the other on SPEN 2), so that privacy must have provided a lot of entertainment for a lot of people... if they didn't unplug the SPEN base to have an open outlet for the Mr. Coffee.

 

[aaron315]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 4.1.1; EVO Build/JRO03C) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/30.0.1599.92 Mobile Safari/537.36)

Its well past time to stop blaming the radios for interoperability failures. The human factor is the root cause, be it poor knowledge by the end user or poor planning by the admibistrators. A hypothetical 70,000.00 subscriber radio on a 70 trillion dollar international all modes encrytion cracking trunking system with 200 percent redundancy still can't fix stupid.

I live in a city where nearly every public safety radio has nearly every public safety talk group in it (special units have private encrypted talk groups. Homicide,SWAT, EOD etc) and still they struggle to talk from one district to the next. That isn't a failing of the radio....

Just saying.... Don't blame the radios so quickly.

 

[n5ims]

I agree that it's generally not the radio that's the problem (most often there are interop channels programmed into them) but a failure of the officers (either directly or more likely their training) to switch to them during interagency operations. There are often large training exercises where the officers can practice working together during simulated events like the mall shooting. One problem is those officers often keep to their own channels and don't switch to the interop channels even during these training exercises.

For example, there was this recent exercise in the DFW metroplex (http://forums.radioreference.com/te...s-tactical-agencies-tested-massive-drill.html) where numerous area agencies participated in one or more of several such exercises. Apparently from the monitored traffic it was mostly a case of the agencies remaining on their channel(s).

News story from Ch 8, WFAA, on yesterday's exercise. ... Most of the individual agencies (that were in range for me) were using their existing 'special events' or ops channels or talkgroups.

Rescue teams sharpen skills with mock disaster drills | wfaa.com Dallas - Fort Worth

But at least some did switch to the interop system in place for such a situation.

There was quite a bit of traffic on the two NCTCOG systems, both the Dallas side as well as DFW Airport/Fort Worth.
Rescue teams sharpen skills with mock disaster drills | wfaa.com Dallas - Fort Worth

The NCTCOG systems (Dallas P25 / NCTCOG Trunking System, Dallas, Texas - Scanner Frequencies and DFW Airport P25 / NCTCOG Trunking System, DFW Airport, Texas - Scanner Frequencies) are specifically designed for interagency communications as indicated by nearly all defined talkgroups containing the word/phrase "Interop" or "Regional InterOp". One issue that may have legitimately kept agencies on their own systems and not the NCTCOG systems is the lack of digital radios in many departments. Since the NCTCOG system is a 700 MHz digital system, they may have had difficulty directly accessing it. As more agencies move to P-25 digital systems, this may change.

It's also quite possible that the local channels were used for operational activities while the NCTCOG system used for command and control with the various commanders working both systems. This possibility could be by design as well since most local systems have many frequency pairs while the NCTCOG systems generally have only a few.

 

[RadioDitch]

I heard some traffic on these systems but the focus and importance was patching most critical communications for this incident in to the Bergen County trunk system. For an incident like this, they did not want the press and persons to monitor critical tactical communications. Why the Bergen County System? It's encrypted.... Hmmm?????

The only active operations on the BC system were those of Bergen County authorities. Paramus was on their normal frequencies, NJSP operated entirely on B2-07 Tac, and Interop for feds/surroundings/railroad police was via low power simplex (less than 0.25w) on UTAC, directed through the IC in the BCSO comms van. Once NJSP arrived, it basically was their scene anyway with the ROIC running the show, despite what it was made to seem.

Press didn't need to listen anyway. Paramus Mayor was giving VERY detailed hourly updates, including the perp's name 4 hours before they ever found the body.

 

[902]

...was giving VERY detailed hourly updates, including the perp's name 4 hours before they ever found the body.

That is exactly why I thought this situation would have benefited from standing up a Joint Information Center (JIC) staffed by public information officers who are all on the same page and not giving out internal information (and probably why, given that person, a spokesperson for another elected official, and an appointee getting on the camera and nearly choking, it gave people the impression that this was a big cluster...).

At the end of the day (or morning, as the case may be), people lucked out and all but 1 got to go home. Okay, 2, if you count the guy who showed up with his .45 and had to post bail.