Today's Doofus award goes to the person or persons in England responsible for selling 'redundant' police radio masts. It seems they neglected to check whether everything attached to them was equally redundant.
Police have accidentally sold off specialist hardware that was part of a national counter-terrorism communications system, and was supposed to help them communicate without fear of interference.
Internal documents revealed that police chiefs were getting rid of redundant radio masts to raise money without checking first that necessary police equipment attached to it had been retrieved - and now some of the new owners are asking them to pay to get it back.
Several forces have been selling radio mast sites ever since police moved over to a new billion-dollar digital system that made the mast sites redundant.
But a lot of the sold masts still had specialist devices attached to them, and when maintenance engineers working for the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) went to retrieve them, some private owners charged them to retrieve their own equipment.
There's more at the link.
Now that's an 'Oops!' and a half, isn't it? I wonder how many criminals and/or terrorists managed to avoid detection and/or arrest because the equipment needed to do so had been sold as scrap?
Peter
"...some private owners charged them to retrieve their own equipment."
ReplyDeleteNo, England, you have it all wrong. "...some private owners charged them to repurchase the equipment they had negligently sold." You don't get to sell stuff, realize it wasn't what you meant to sell, and declare it to still be yours.
dave beat me to it...
ReplyDelete