Feb. 24--A multi-county computer system, the Northwest Ohio Regional Information System, which allows departments -- including a number of law enforcement agencies and courts -- to share information and pull records, has been down for at least two days, authorities said.
The system was reportedly affected by a worm, a self-replicating malware program, according to Patrick Wright, director of NORIS.
At least 88 agencies use the system -- including Toledo and Oregon police, Toledo Municipal Court, and the Lucas County Sheriff's Office.
Toledo police Sgt. Joe Heffernan said officers can use different systems, such as LEADS, to do warrant checks on individuals or run license plates.
He declined to comment further on the system's outage.
Oregon police Sgt. Tim Zale said his department is affected, although it is still operational.
"It makes all of our lives more difficult," Sergeant Zale said. "We can't retrieve records like we once did, we can't process records like we once did."
NORIS is the department's filing system, so new reports can't be assigned report numbers, which means looking for the reports is more difficult. The sergeant said he has to pull paper copies of old reports.
"Some records checks will be restricted," Sergeant Zale said. "We'll still work."
Toledo Municipal Court Clerk of Courts Vallie Bowman-English said her office, which is completely computer based, is operating with "minimal" staffing due to the outage. Her office confirmed that 36 people are off from work Friday as a result of the system being down.
The court's Web site started working slowly on Wednesday and completely shut down Thursday at about 9:15 a.m., she said.
Ms. Bowman-English said she was told the system could be restored by Friday night. If that's the case, she said, she will have people working on overtime to catch up on a back log of information to update the court's Web site, which is usually done in real time, she said.
Court proceedings have not been affected, Ms. Bowman-English said. During arraignments and hearings, judges and other court employees will do everything on paper, which will then be transferred to the Web site.
"Right now we're doing things like they did in the '90s, but the good part of that is that we have people who were here in the '90s and they remember how to do it," Ms. Bowman-English said. "They could find the forms and easily revert back to the ways they used to do it. It was good to have them around and that they have that knowledge."
Copyright 2012 - The Blade, Toledo, Ohio
