Mayor: LAPD Outage 'May Have Been Both' Engineering, Personnel Failure

LOS ANGELES (CBS) — Just weeks after defending emergency response times for the fire department, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa promised on Monday to come up with answers for why the LAPD dispatch system lost power for nearly 12 hours.

KNX 1070's Pete Demetriou reports Villaraigosa hopes to have an explanation by the end of this week.

Villaraigosa demanded information from Information Technology General Manager Randi Levin, General Services Director Tony Royster, and City Engineer Gary Moore in the wake of the system failure on April 3 that forced the LAPD to manually answer dispatch calls and route them to individual divisions.

The mayor said a review of the outage — which occurred at Mount Lee, the prime site for LAPD dispatch transmissions to originate — is still currently underway.

"We are in the process of reviewing that issue," said Villaraigosa. "I did meet last week, my staff has had a couple of meetings, we're trying to get to the bottom of what happened."

It was the second time in nearly one month that Villaraigosa was forced to address growing concerns over emergency response times.

Villaraigosa held a joint news conference with Los Angeles Fire Department Chief Brian Cummings back in March to clear up discrepancies in reported response times and offer new measures taken to enhance the department's communication system.

On Monday, however, Villaraigosa was in no rush to lay the blame on any specific engineering or personnel failure.

"It may have been both," said the mayor. "There are personnel issues that precipitated it, but it may have been both."

Villaraigosa said a comprehensive report will be available to both the relevant City Council Committees and the Police Commission as soon as possible.