LAS VEGAS (FOX5) — Law enforcement across Nevada is feeling the impact of the cyberattack on the state.
“They may have 8 or 10 or 15 people out there that they’re having to keep track of on a little piece of paper,” explained Nye County Sheriff Joe McGill to FOX5.
With state computer systems down, it’s a challenge to keep track of deputies’ locations in Nye County, one of the largest counties in the country.
McGill says outages have happened in the past but in all his years in law enforcement, key systems have never been down for as long – the outage going on three days now. McGill also has no idea when the state systems will be restored.
“It is greatly affecting us every day… anything that is interfacing to the state is down. So, we cannot run drivers licenses, we cannot run license plates. We cannot run people for warrants,” McGill revealed. Deputies have no way of knowing exactly who they are dealing with.
“We are very much ham stringed… We had to go over to our jail and go around and scan everybody’s wristband to create our own on paper database on an Excel sheet so that we knew who’s in our jail,” McGill revealed.
Phone calls to 911 are going through, but dispatchers can’t input information into their computers.
“The dispatchers are having to take as brief of notes as they possibly can in handwriting on a piece of paper… they’re having to keep track on another piece of paper of where their units are… It absolutely is an officer safety issue… Our CAD system, our Computer Aided Dispatch system… shows the GPS location based on the computer in the car. We don’t have that right now. More often than not, that simply a convenience. But if somebody were to come on the air and scream, ‘I need help’, they don’t know where they are,” McGill explained.
Wednesday night, we asked other local law enforcement agencies how they are being impacted:
It seems to vary from department to department.
Henderson Police report their CAD system the GPS tracking in police vehicles is fully operational.
Metro did not get back to us Wednesday night but on Monday did say people seeking records and fingerprints may face delays due to the state system outages.
We also heard back from North Las Vegas Police. They also say the statewide network outage is impacting their ability to access state DMV records and national criminal record databases. They are able to look up local records.
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