‘The police department acknowledged errors in the report that it said was the result of the reporting program creating a paper file.
“Inaccuracies in the report are unacceptable to us, and we are taking immediate steps to correct the report and to ensure the accuracy of incident reports going forward,” the statement said.’
Seriously? “Software problem” has become the new ‘dog ate my homework’. Do they actually expect someone to believe the software somehow turned their verbose and well-documented description of what actually happened to “PIU investigation”?! Leaving that element aside …
I’ve done software development for some 25 years. From a technical standpoint, incorrect data mapping happens — worked on a bank project once where they had bought a smaller company and mis-mapped previous and current address fields (+ instituted an annual fee — notice of which was sent to your previous address. Along with the first bill on a card you hadn’t used in three years, the next month’s bill with late fee and interest, the next next month’s bill … you get the idea. It was an ugly cleanup process full of angry people who generally didn’t even realize they *had* that card anymore, never mind wanting to pay 30$ a year to have said card).
But here’s the thing — you don’t randomly map “forced intrusion == true” to an unchecked box or find a non-null list of injuries and write “none” as a one-off. If they had one data inconsistency and wanted to claim a software bug? Suspect but technically possible — some specific data condition caused a problem generating a paper report. But *this* many errors in the reporting program impact *just* this one report? In the credit card company case, the *only* people who had their current address listed as their mailing address had never moved. 100% of the people with a previous address had that address recorded as their current address. I’ve encountered companies that had problems in specific conditions — everyone in Alaska had a bad address because someone had mapped “AR” to “Alaska” on the input form drop-down.
If their software had data mapped wrong in the paper file generation process, it would be generating bad paper files rather regularly. And, honestly, if the department wants to stick with this story … they need to put major time into validating all of the *other* paper files that the software has generated.