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What Looked Like Slur On Police Phones Attributed To Technical Glitch [The Hartford Courant](Hartford Courant (CT) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Oct. 16--EAST HARTFORD -- A string of six characters that resembled a racial slur that appeared on three desk phones at the police department this year were the result of a computer glitch, according to a police investigation. North American Communications Resource, the company that runs the department's phone system, was unable to determine what caused the glitches, but concluded that no one in the department was involved, Police Chief Scott Sansom said Wednesday. Sansom said he would have liked more information from the company, but was comforted to know that none of his officers was responsible. "I was very concerned that it was someone within the department. We found out it wasn't," he said. To change the display on the phones, someone would have had to log on to the phone system, he said. Engineers and technicians with North American Communications Resource determined that no one logged on during the times that the word appeared, according to copies of the investigation released this week. The string of six characters, starting with an N and ending with an R, appeared for less than a minute on the area of the screen that usually reads "NORTEL," according to the investigation. Officer Scott Jones first saw the characters on May 29 on his office phone and reported it to Lt. Ricardo Soto. Jones told Soto he was upset over the message. He took a picture of it with his personal phone before the word disappeared. Soto opened an investigation, which involved the police department's IT department and NACR. While the investigation was pending, another officer noticed the same characters on his phone in June and another officer saw them on his phone in July. Soto's investigation was complete in August. "The unusual message being displayed on the department telephones was caused by data corruption. The IT department will continue to monitor the situation," Soto wrote in his report. ___ (c)2014 The Hartford Courant (Hartford, Conn.) Visit The Hartford Courant (Hartford, Conn.) at www.courant.com Distributed by MCT Information Services |