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State Patrol investigates lost dispatch recordings

By Paul Shockley
Tuesday, January 25, 2011

An equipment failure is to blame for the loss of an unknown number of recordings between Colorado State Patrol troopers and dispatchers in Montrose late last year.

State Patrol Sgt. John Hahn, a Front Range spokesman for the agency, said technicians are working to determine when recording equipment failed at the State Patrol’s Montrose regional communications center, which covers most of southwest Colorado and Mesa County.

Hahn said as much as a month’s worth of data was lost. A supervisor performing routine maintenance in November on a recording system discovered it wasn’t working, he said.

Prosecutors with the Mesa County 21st Judicial District Attorney’s Office had been advised by Montrose officials in December that the State Patrol’s system had “crashed, and they are unable to provide you with any recordings for the last year,” according to an e-mail obtained by The Daily Sentinel,

Copies of recorded conversations between dispatchers and troopers are routinely requested by prosecutors or defense attorneys in the handling of criminal matters, or by the media.

“Absolutely, they can be critical to cases, and I order them all the time,” said Gordon Gallagher, a Grand Junction defense attorney. “And I suspect (the data unavailability) will make a difference for some cases.”

The equipment at issue is designed to switch on and record when a transmission is made by a dispatcher or a trooper, Hahn said.

Increasing failures of State Patrol dispatch equipment were highlighted in a supplemental funding request that the Colorado Department of Public Safety submitted to lawmakers for approval for the 2010–11 fiscal year. The department noted in the request that some communication systems are more than a decade old and at “end of life,” meaning vendors no longer support them.

The Montrose facility is one of five dispatch centers around the state for troopers.