Dallas Police Screw Up - Prisoners Set Free

Blame it on the software. It seems the Dallas Police Department went live with some new software last June 1st that replaced a system that was about 30 years old. Well, it seems the software was a wee bit too complicated for most of the officers. After they struggled with it for about three days or so, some prisoners remembered that Texas law requires the department to file cases within three days or prisoners being held there have to be set free, no matter what the crime or how bad it might have been.

So, something like 20 jail inmates, including a number of people charged with violent crimes, had to be set free. "The law is real simple," Judge Rick Magnis from the 283rd Judicial District Court says. "The Constitution in America says you can't hold people without charges."

A Dallas police media relations staffer said the department had no further comment beyond what the Dallas Police Chief David Brown said in an interview this week with a local reporter. "We expected that there would be a significant learning curve," Brown said. One problem is that officers using the system didn't get trained recently enough and may have forgotten how to use the software properly, he said. Also, some officers didn't take the training that was made available, he added. "It was a voluntary thing to get familiar with it, and some didn't take advantage of that." 

Dallas PD's legacy system "was outdated, antiquated, not easily worked on, but it was familiar," Brown said. "This is a new system and very unfamiliar." While the mishaps can partly be attributed to user error, the software is also running slowly and needs to be sped up, Brown said. "We let the vendor know that."

I'm sure all that is really consoling to the victims of the criminals that were set free and are now roaming the streets of Dallas with smiles on their faces from ear to ear because of their extraordinary good fortune.