Back to pen and paper? Key West City Hall computers have been shut down for a week
These days, Key West police officers are in a technology time warp.
City Hall’s servers have been down for a week due to what city leaders suspect is a computer virus.
“We think it’s a virus,” said city spokeswoman Alyson Crean, who was working at home Thursday handling the city’s social media. She can’t access the network at work.
And while IT workers rebuild the servers, city employees are using tried-and-true methods to do their jobs.
That means officers are using pen and paper to write their reports.
“What they started doing is writing handwritten reports like back in the ‘90s,” Crean said. “They turn them into detectives. They’re being stacked up to be input.”
City Manager Greg Veliz said the city has hired people to come in and diagnose exactly what happened.
“We’ve shut everything down voluntarily until we can figure out what the problem is,” Veliz said. “We’ll find out. They told me, don’t turn it on.”
One of the police department’s nonemergency phone lines is down since it’s automated.
But people may call 305-809-1000 for help with police nonemergencies, Crean said.
If you need a police arrest report, you can’t get one from City Hall.
When asked by reporters, Crean refers them to the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office, which keeps them attached to inmate paperwork.
Crean said it will be hard to even locate a report these days.
“Because they’re physically paper floating around the building,” she said.
When asked for an incident report on a recent alleged assault that hasn’t yet resulted in any arrests, Crean said, “That’s in there. It’s the only place it is. Until I can get into the [server] I can’t access it.”
Paying a parking ticket or applying for a building permit? You can still do those things but not online.
For parking tickets, you can mail in a traffic ticket payment, pay it over the phone or in person. But city employees can’t update the online records until servers are back up.
“We’re writing tickets, but they’ve not been uploaded to the system yet because the system is down,” said Parking Manager John Wilkins. “We’ll take your payment and then when the system comes back up and upload all tickets, we’ll apply payment to the ticket then. The reservoir of tickets is in our system and we can’t access it.”
Several Florida cities and government agencies have fallen victim to cyber-attacks over the past year. And on Thursday, a 16-year-old student at South Miami Senior High was arrested in connection with some of the cyber attacks that have throttled Miami-Dade County Public Schools’ first week of online learning.
In February, the North Miami Beach Police Department suffered a cyber-attack, having discovered ransomware.
In June 2019, Key Biscayne, Riviera Beach and Lake City paid more than $1 million in total ransom to hackers. More recently, much of the St. Lucie County Sheriff’s Office’s network was knocked entirely offline as a result of an attack.
This story was originally published September 3, 2020 at 2:43 PM.
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