The Douglas County Corrections Department Director says routine computer maintenance followed by an unplanned outage caused delays in the processing and releasing of individuals from jail on Sunday.
Overnight Saturday into Sunday morning, there were 109 people booked into the downtown Omaha facility between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m., with 75 percent of them being brought in from a protest near 29th and Farnam Streets.
“It’s a multi-step process to get that many individuals booked into jail and to get them released. It’s typically a single file line,” said Mike Myers, director of the Douglas County Department of Corrections.
“Even when everything is running properly, booking that many individuals at the same time creates a bottleneck situation.”
Certain steps of the booking and release process had to stop at 3:30 a.m. Sunday, which is the scheduled time for the weekly routine maintenance of the computer systems at Corrections, Myers said.
After systems were updated, certain functions failed to come back online, delaying the process again.
“We implemented a paper process, and those individuals who posted bond were released,” Myers said. “As of 4:30 p.m. Sunday, approximately 50 people had been released using the paper process.”
According to the Douglas - Omaha Technology Commission, the outage also affected systems used by the Omaha Police Department and the Douglas County Treasurer’s Office.
"DOTComm" reported all systems had been restored late Sunday afternoon.
“It is truly horrible timing that we had an IT problem during an unexpectedly busy time,” Myers said.
(photo courtesy of 6 News)