Consider it a "stay away from jail" free card.
For about an hour-and-a half Tuesday night, Denver police officers could not put anyone in the city’s downtown jail.
“They cannot take any more prisoners,” one voice chirped over the police radios. “Apparently, they’re having some technology issues.”
The issues stemmed from a planned outage, according to the city’s chief information officer. The IT department had planned to take the jail management system down during an upgrade between 11 a.m. and 4 p.m.
“At approximately 5 p.m., it was determined that the upgrade was not working,” Sheriff Patrick Firman told Next with Kyle Clark on Wednesday.
The sheriff said the computer system had to be reverted to a backup made prior to the upgrade, about six hours old.
“In that process...we think that we lost some data that had been entered during that shutdown,” he said.
The IT department didn’t fully get the system back online until about midnight. In that time, deputies had to book inmates manually and release them manually.
Luckily, Firman said there was a back-up.
“It's a paper file,” he said. “It could be pictures that are in the system that we printed out previously...a series of questions that we'll ask the inmate.”
As in, instead of answering security questions to get into something - like your bank account - inmates had to answer questions to get out of jail.
For about an hour and a half Tuesday evening, officers were told to hold incoming inmates at district police stations. The sheriff’s department told Next that 6 inmates were impacted during the special hold.
