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Chicomm Blog

Addison Public Safety Makes Strides in Technology

Posted by Jill McNamara on Thursday, February 23, 2012

This is an excerpt from an interview with Delores Temes, Deputy Director of the Addison Consolidated Dispatch Center(ACDC). For more information about ACDC visit their Facebook page or their website.

Tell us about some of the technological changes that have been happening in your department.

    "With technology moving so fast, governments and police departments don’t always move as fast, mostly because it costs so much money. So we are usually at the back end of changes and technology. But some of the things we’ve done internally are look at the processes in place and what we do on a day to day basis, and try to apply technology to those things. For example, with parking permissions, we used to fill out a form by hand and one copy would go to the records department and one would go to the officer on the street, etc.  So we asked, how can we take things to the next level? We need to be able to e-mail that document and attach it to an MDC laptop that’s in the squad cars so the officer that’s in that beat gets an email message. Plus we now have a remote printer to get things to our remote location in Bensenville, and it's e-mailed to both records departments. It seems like something that’s no big deal, but when you have a process like this for every task you do, it ends up being really inefficient. So migrating to these new technologies and new ways to do things makes things more convenient, and now our dispatchers can do everything from sitting at their consoles.       

     Policies and procedures are now online as well, so if dispatchers have a question about anything they just have to open & search. This has helped a lot with ordinances for Addison and Bensenville (and soon Bloomingdale). Now when someone calls and asks, 'Can I put my garbage out two days early?' Dispatch can quickly access the ordinance and assist the citizen. Before you had to find a book and search through to find it, read it, etc. It was time consuming. So we asked how can we make all these processes, that citizens expect, more efficient?  Citizens call the police because they need answers. It’s not always an emergency function, sometimes maybe they're just curious if on a Saturday there are certain times they can cut their grass. And dispatch can now quickly say, 'Yes, there is a time and its 7:00am.' Providing those kind of answers to dispatchers’ fingertips has been a huge help."

Sounds like it’s been a big year!

“Yes, lots of change this past year! We completed one consolidation with taking on dispatching for the village of Bensenville and we also have this in the works for Bloomingdale. With help from Chicago Communications, we recently moved our communication center to a temporary location so our old location could expand and be remodeled as well. I hope that we’re moving in a direction that other police departments will see what we’re doing and say, ‘hey, how did you do that?’ Sometimes it’s hard to think outside the box, but you have to look at your resources. It’s been a big change, but we have the staff behind us to help. They’ve been great, so we’re able to move forward.”

 beforeafter

Before^                                                                                                                                     After^

How has your department handled these changes?

   "We’re still adapting, but we’re moving in the right direction. I think change is hard for anybody because you want to do what’s familiar to you. But when you see that the end result is going to be so much better and that you’re going to be working so much more efficiently, you have to work towards that. When we did the consolidation, the first two weeks were stressful and rough. You don’t want to make a mistake, you want to be there for the client, you want to be able to help everybody out…and I watched as the weeks went by, the stress level went down.  Soon the dispatchers became more familiar with things and its second nature to them now. We expect it to be the same way with StarCom. There’s going to be a learning curve for a couple weeks and then they’re going to be saying ‘what were we doing before?!’ As long as they understand what the benefit is going to be and it makes sense to them, everybody wants to move towards it."

ACDC

Chicago Communications would like to thank Delores & the rest of the ACDC team for sharing their story and applaud their efforts in improving their department. ACDC is setting a great example to other public safety agencies looking for new ways of mastering next generation communications.

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