A senior Boston Police Department officer refuted allegations made by two city councilors that during the height of the overnight violence that erupted following this past weekend’s Dominican Festival, BPD radio communications were down for over half an hour.
The main police radio channel for the massive Dorchester festival went down Sunday night, but the department was able to swiftly switch to another transmission, BPD Superintendent-in-Chief Phillip Owens stated Tuesday.
At an unrelated event in the City Hall Plaza, Owens told reporters, “If the channel goes down, it’s just one channel that went down, they immediately switch over, which they did.” We collaborated with Motorola to ascertain the specifics of what happened, but the lapse you mention was brief.
He stated that everything was promptly fixed once they abruptly changed to a different channel.
The duration of the festival area’s radio channel outage was unclear, according to Owens, but he said the police department’s capacity to respond to the four shootings and one stabbing that took place overnight on Sunday and Monday was unaffected by the communication breakdown.
“Definitely not,” Owens stated. We switched to a different channel right away.
When questioned by reporters at the same event about the breakdown, Mayor Michelle Wu stated that Boston Police had updated her on the situation.
“There are multiple channels available, and they instantly switch to another channel to resume communication in the very rare situations that something like that happens,” Wu added.
In response to Boston City Councilors Erin Murphy and Ed Flynn’s request that the department examine into the radio blackout, Owens stated, “We’re looking into what caused the problem.”
Murphy and Flynn expressed their profound concern in a letter to Police Commissioner Michael Cox on Monday that public safety mechanisms had failed at such a crucial time, as violence was erupting following the weekend festival.
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The councilors asserted that officers were compelled to respond to an active shooting without dependable communication tools due to a radio channel malfunction.
Their letter came after the Boston Police Patrolmen’s Association, the largest police union in the city, posted on social media about the unexplained 30-minute radio outage. According to the union, it happened at a time when police resources were already overextended for the occasion, which frequently results in violence during major festivals.
The most recent example is yesterday’s Dominican Festival, which was released by the BPPA on X Monday. Four persons were shot in less than two hours last night. I beg the question: when will the madness end?
