Imagine being a police officer chasing after a suspect and not knowing if dispatch heard what’s going on or if you will be able to call for help. That’s the level of quality law enforcement and residents of Deschutes County have right now in the county’s new multimillion dollar 911 radio system.

There’s a short list of people to blame. The three Deschutes County commissioners are the accountable elected officials. They are the governing board of Deschutes County 911. Employees at Deschutes County 911 are overseeing the project and the spending of the millions. Employees of Harris Corp. are the hired contractors doing much of the work.

It’s already easy to see where so many things went wrong. There was an attitude that the project was a success before it was switched on.

Before the radio system went live and before the reports started streaming in about garbled transmissions, dropped transmissions or screeching variations in volume, Deschutes County 911 was celebrating. The county sent out a news release in June proudly trumpeting that the system’s project manager was honored with state and national awards for upgrading the system. Didn’t anyone pause to think that you don’t start celebrating before you know it’s a win?

That’s nothing, though, compared to the county making the last payment on the system to Harris before it was certain the system worked.

In the contract for the system, the county and Harris agreed that Harris would be paid in stages as work was completed. There would be testing to ensure the system met the criteria the county ordered. The final 15 percent of the total price would be paid when the county signed off on all the tests and “accepted” the system.

The county signed off on those tests, giving the system a passing grade. The final signoff date was Sept. 7, according to Steve Reinke, director of Deschutes County 911. Harris scooped up its last check. But the system does not work to the satisfaction of anyone, yet. The testing was too easy or scored incorrectly.

Reinke told us the system had serious problems as more and more agencies were added. We asked him if the system was stress tested, because that is not clear to us from the redacted file of the final acceptance test. He was not sure.

End of the problems? Not even close.

The system has had a host of issues, averaging 133 complaints about it per month from August through January. It’s easier to understand the complaints and problems from some specifics. The system went completely down when Bend Police were in the middle of investigating three separate crime scenes. Another time a Bend police officer was dealing with an uncooperative suspect and the officer’s signal suddenly went silent. A Sunriver police officer snapped a photo of his car radio showing he couldn’t reach dispatch.

In a review of 700 pages of emails among 911, law enforcement and county officials, it’s only when Bend police officers make formal complaints in December to the city and the state’s Occupational Health and Safety Administration that the problems get enough of the serious attention they deserve. “No radio system vendor ever wants to be where Harris is right now with regard to major system problems, and they are fully cognizent of the risks to public-safety and the implications for the company if things aren’t fixed ASAP,” Reinke wrote in an email in late December.

Harris flew in a team in early January. A company representative said at a Jan. 11 meeting at Deschutes 911 that the garbles and missed transmissions were its first priority and all other issues will be resolved, according to meeting minutes.

One issue that comes up in the emails is the technical and staff capacity of 911 to implement the system. The city of Bend says it requested that 911 bring in additional outside engineers when the problems began in July and August. Deschutes 911 did not. It was only this week that the Deschutes County commissioners took firm action on that issue to add a temporary staff position and to consider hiring a more permanent engineer.

The new system was promised to be one that would enable local law enforcement, fire departments and other agencies to clearly communicate with each other across the county. More than $4 million has been spent on it. Any new, complicated technology with systems talking to different systems is going to be challenging to implement. But Deschutes County residents have every right to be furious that they bought a radio system first responders can’t count on.