Windsor, Ont. police affected by national police computer outage

Windsor police were without a computer system they usually rely on through the overnight hours on Wednesday night, due to a national outage of the Canadian Police Information Centre database.

• Canadian police hit by major computer network outage

The system, also known as CPIC, was down from around midnight ET and lasted about 12 hours. It's used by police and border guards to search people's license plates, criminal records and warrants.

It also provides frontline police with criminal histories and warnings. Not having the system meant information was not always available to local police in Windsor, Ont. last night.

"That would be a safety concern, because it is a system that we normally use and normally rely on," said Sgt. Steve Betteridge of Windsor police.

Police used backupsin Windsor, but that only provided information on issues dealt with by Windsor police.

"The checks that our officers were doing were mostly local checks...if a condition was issued via our service, we actually have hard copies we can verify that with," said Betteridge."Luckily it didn't become an issue."

Ontario Provincial Police say no issues over the CPIC outage were reported by officers in the field.

"It did not have a significant impacton the operations of the OPP," says Sgt. Peter Leon who added that they were able to carry out operations as normal.

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