Crime & Safety

Resident Asks City Officials to Act Fast

A concerned Naperville resident wants city officials to examine what he and some first responders believe are fatal flaws in the newly implemented emergency radio system.

A concerned resident is asking that the city take a hard look at its new emergency radio broadcasting system and what he says are its true shortcomings.

resident Bill Eagan addressed the Naperville City Council Tuesday evening to share what he says firefighters, police officers and others believe are failures in the new radio system, which is shared by Naperville and Aurora.

"… It involves protecting lives and not just of our citizens, but of our first responders," he said, reading from a statement he'd prepared. "To get straight to the point, a system of this importance and magnitude needs to have no failure tolerance."

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, which officials had said would improve coordination among the police and fire departments in the area.

It also renders scanners tuned in to by community members, reporters and the general public to be useless because the system operates off the city's 43-mile fiber optic ring.

Find out what's happening in Napervillewith free, real-time updates from Patch.

But Eagan said, Naperville is "seeing the same issues as other cities," and that "we must act and act swiftly," to correct them.

He said he has filed several Freedom of Information Act Requests and has not found any record of a load test of the system being done. He had also not found information about the city completing a power emergency simulation to ensure that if energy is lost, the radio system remains in tact.

"I did not see any inter-operability test calls to the State of Illinois, or to Lisle, Bolingbrook, DuPage or Will counties, nor any other agency that may need to be contacted in case of emergency," Eagan said to the council. "I did not see any testing of the firewalls around the network to make sure that we are as safe as we can be against computer hacks."

City Manager Doug Krieger said Naperville refuses to accept a radio system that is less than the best.

But local first responders have also shared concerns about the Harris/OpenSky system. Police have said they often lose contact with fellow officers or firefighters because of "dead zones" in the city. Messages are often jumbled after people's voices are translated by the digital system, they have said.

"The problems with our current radio system are very alarming and the safety of our employees the public, needs to be addressed by every member of the Naperville City Council," said Vince Clark, president of Naperville's Fraternal Order of Police Local 42, in an e-mailed statement before Tuesday's meeting. "With this safety concern in mind, the (union) has joined forces with the Naperville Firefighters Local 4302, in an attempt to educate the public and the city staff on the problems associated with our current Harris/Opensky public safety radio system."

He said the residents of Naperville have understandably high expectations for the service their public safety employees provide.

"In order to meet these high expectations, we need a public radio system we can depend on," Clark said. "The system we are currently using does not meet those expectations."

Eagan asked the city council to add his, and others' concerns, as an agenda item for a future meeting.

"We have implemented a system with no plan B …" he said. "We cannot hit the escape button here … it needs to be fixed quickly and carefully."


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