–AT&T disputed the cause of the Miami Shores Police Department (MSPD) inbound call outage. 

-AT&T blamed MSPD’s server for the outage while MSPD blamed AT&T’s phone line. 

-It is not clear whether the station’s phone system is back to running as it was before the outage. 

-Inbound calls to the police station were unable to go through for at least an hour and a half on January 3. The outage could have been longer, however.

-Residents of the village were directed to call 911 or the Miami-Dade PD who would then forward requests for assistance to MSPD. 

-A MSPD spokesperson said that it wasn’t the first time the department has lost inbound phone service. 

-She also said that the department doesn’t have the budget to get a more sophisticated phone system. 

——–

Residents in Miami Shores were unable to directly reach their police department for at least an hour and a half on Jan. 3, and it’s not entirely clear why.

The Miami Shores Police Department (MSPD) said that AT&T’s phone line went down, causing them to lose connection to inbound phone calls.

But AT&T said that isn’t what happened.

The company blames MSPD’s server for the outage and say there was nothing wrong with their phone line connection.

MSPD sent out a text alert to residents signed up with the Nixle service at 10:53 AM on Jan. 3.

That alert said that inbound phone lines were down at the station and that residents would have to call 911 or the Miami-Dade County Police Department in order for “requests for assistance” to be forward to MSPD.

The next text alert indicating that the phone lines were working again didn’t come until 4:50 PM.

MSPD spokesperson Elizabeth Keeley told RISE NEWS that inbound phone service was only down for around an hour and a half, after the station was notified of the outage by a Miami Shores resident.

Keeley said that MSPD was investigating how long the lines were down in total.

Kelley said that the station implemented a “workaround” that is used as a backup plan in case the analog line goes down.

AT&T didn’t respond to the station’s outage call until earlier today, nearly 48 hours after it was first announced to the Miami Shores community.

But according to a AT&T spokesperson, when one of their technicians responded to the station, he was unable to find anything wrong with their phone line.

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“We sent a tech to the Miami Shores police department this morning,” AT&T spokesperson Kelly Starling said in an email to RISE NEWS today. “The issue the city experienced was with its server, not our network.”

Starling also said that when MSPD’s server went down, their IT department requested AT&T forward its lines until its IT team could fix the problem.

But MSPD spokesperson Elizabeth Keeley said that AT&T is wrong.

“Their information is not correct,” Keeley said. “They can not say who they spoke to. They didn’t speak to the chief. I don’t know how they came to that conclusion.”

Keeley said that AT&T’s analog system was the problem and that the station’s server indicated that it never went down.

When pressed, Keeley could not say whether the station’s phone system was back up and running in the way it was before the outage.

“It is running currently to accept incoming calls in a way that the chief is satisfied with,” Keeley said, while refusing to answer whether inbound calls on the AT&T analog line were now being received.

Keeley said that it wasn’t the first time that the station has lost inbound call service.

When asked why the station has to rely on an AT&T analog phone line for service, she said that it had to do with lack of resources.

“There’s plenty of options, but it all costs money,” Keeley said. “We don’t really have that budget [that Miami-Dade County PD has, for example].”

Keeley said there will not a report on the matter released to the public and that Chief of Police Kevin Lystad was en route to a conference and unable to answer questions about the situation.

RISE NEWS is South Florida’s digital news magazine. Follow us on Facebook to make sure you never miss a story!

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