OEMC Update?
And some workers aren't happy about it:
By the time the clock strikes midnight on a single Tuesday, Chicago's 911 dispatchers will have fielded nearly 10,000 calls for police, fire and ambulance services.
Of those, some of them are life-or-death pleas for help. But now, some operators and dispatchers who answer those calls say warn 911 chaos will arrive when a new computerized dispatch program is implemented.
Chicago's Office of Emergency Management and Communications has been handling the city's emergency calls on West Madison Street for more than 30 years. On Sept. 22, a new computerized dispatch system is set to be rolled out under a $75 million contract with Central Square, a company that has been renovating OEMC technology for the past several years.
But some dispatchers who have contacted NBC 5 Investigates are less than enthused about the coming change.
We were among the last Officers who handled radio calls from 11th and State before they switched to the current OEMC building, so we experienced the growing pains associated with the system alongside the dispatchers and call takers.
The biggest complaint we remember back then was how the system was cobbled together from assorted low budget bids - the police radios were Motorola, the squad car computers were Badgers (?) or some other rodent and the OEMC computers were a completely separate system that we can't remember....
....and none of them worked well with each other because each system was a separate government bid to spread out the graft and crooked contracts. We were told that Motorola offered to coordinate / sync up all the systems, but the bribe money wasn't enough to sway the City Council people.
But we survived and kind of made it work, probably because the dispatchers were awesome. No idea if that's the case any more.
Labels: department issues





