Two-Way Teamwork with the City Of Berwyn

     Curtis Nekovar is the 9-1-1 System Administrator for the City of Berwyn, which means his responsibilities involve all of the equipment in the 9-1-1 center. He's been in the industry for almost 30 years and has worked at several agencies where Chicago Comm has been involved in one way or another. A couple years ago Berwyn completed a system upgrade project with Chicago Comm that remodeled the entire 9-1-1 center. The furniture was replaced, the radio system upgraded, the phones re-installed, and the dispatch center itself was relocated.  Most recently ChiComm assisted Curtis and the City of Berwyn in a "National Night Out" event that reminded us Public Safety Telecommunicators are a critical piece of the puzzle. The following is a letter he wrote to our maintenance director following that event's success.

Future Concern for Public Safety: Funding

Every year we make the glorious trip to Las Vegas to attend the Motorola Expo and follow up with IWCE (International Wireless Communications Expo).   For geeks like me it lends to understanding new technologies and reviewing what new products and innovations the two way radio community develops.

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.