Noah Donohoe inquest reveals issues with police ControlWorks system
A coroner’s inquest into missing school boy, Noah Donohoe, has confirmed that the PSNI had technical issues with its ControlWorks software used to record information reported to police call handlers by members of the public.
The Belfast Coroner’s court today was shown logs from the PSNI’s ControlWorks software recording a “major ControlWorks issue” that could have delayed information being passed on to investigators.
Computer Weekly previously reported that the PSNI had to resort to pen and paper after the PSNI first installed ControlWorks in May 2019, and that the system had slow-downs that required the system to be re-started or software to be patched.
Donohoe was 14 when his naked body was found in a storm drain in north Belfast in June 2020, six days after leaving home on his bike to meet friends. A post-mortem found the cause of death was drowning.
A witness to the inquest, Connor McConnell, told the Belfast Coroner’s Court that he had made three phone calls to the PSNI after seeing a male cycling naked past the window of his mother’s partners house on the night Donohoe went missing.
McConnell told the inquest that he phoned police twice on the night of Sunday 21 June 2020 and again on 22 June.
He said that he had made the first call to the police on Sunday after seeing a Facebook post about a missing person.
Questions over number of phone calls
Declan Quinn KC, counsel for the coroner, said that the police had no record of McConnell’s first call on the Sunday night after making checks on their system and that the first contact from him was on Monday night.
McConnell told the court that he was as certain as a person could be that he had phoned the police on Sunday night. He said he was told that the original call “might have been lost in the swamp of calls”.
He told the inquest that he remembered the time of his first call because Match of the Day 2 was on TV.
The court heard that the PSNI did not ask McConnell to make a statement until March 2022, two years after he had made the phone calls.
McConnell said he asked the police about his calls when he made the statement and was told that there were a lot of calls at the time and that they could have potentially been missed.
Police log showed issued with ControlWorks
McConnell was shown a log from ControlWorks, from 9pm on 23 June which stated there was a “major Control Works issue in relation to alerts not working or cancelling”.
It added that the problem “may cause issues in relation to timeliness of information being passed on”.
PSNI barrister, Donal Lunny KC, said that the issue with ControlWorks lasted for a couple of hours on 23 June and was resolved that day. ControlWorks was running sub-optimally but was still functioning. “It would not explain your missing call,” O’Connell was told.
When questioned about the calls he made to police, O’Connell said: “You’re welcome to access my phone records and clear it up for yourself.”
“The PSNI have the resources to do it, so why don’t they do it?”
Computer Weekly previously reported that a “major issue” with ControlWorks may have delayed information being passed to police officers searching for Donohoe.
PSNI has not reported ControlWorks issues
Computer Weekly understands that information passed to the police force on the evening of the 24 June from another member of the public about an attempt to sell Donohoe’s laptop, was delayed in being brought to the attention of investigators because of a problem with ControlWorks.
It is unclear exactly how long the information was delayed by and what its impact on the search for the missing teenager was. But it is understood that detectives on the case reported and noted the delay during the live investigation.
The force has not reported incidents with ControlWorks, to the Northern Ireland Policing Board, which oversees the PSNI, and has not mentioned any incidents with ControlWorks in its annual reports.
While there is no legal duty to report failures with ControlWorks to the Northern Ireland Policing Board, the Policing Board has told Computer Weekly it would expect any serious incidents with ControlWorks to be reported to it.
How errors are classified
The PSNI uses ControlWorks as part of its command and control system, for managing, logging and categorising calls received by the emergency services from the public and for dispatching police officers to incidents.
According to freedom of information requests to West Midlands Police, incidents in ControlWorks are categorised depending on their level of severity.
The most serious, which affect force-wide availability of ControlWorks, are categorised as P1 and must be corrected within six hours by the force’s IT suppliers.
A force-wide degradation in the service offered by ControlWorks is categorised as P2 and must be resolved in eight hours.
Less serious incidents are categorised as P3, which must be resolved by the force’s supplier in 24 hours, and P4, which do not require urgent remediation.
The PSNI said in a statement to the Policing Board, in response to enquires by Computer Weekly that ControlWorks did not suffer any “critical incidents”.
