Darien Police Adjust to Working with DU-COMM Dispatch Center

Change is always tough — especially when you’re moving police dispatch services for a 23,000-resident town to a center miles away. 

But despite some minor glitches, Chief Ernest Brown said that the transition from closing Darien’s own dispatch center to using DU-COMM’s services is going well.

“We have to recognize after 10 months, we’re running a lot smoother than we should have expected,” he said during Thursday’s Police Committee meeting. 

Deputy Chief John Cooper presented a report of some of the issues the department has faced through the switch. 

Many of the bumps are a simply a result of a new way of doing things, he said.

Darien’s officers were previously dispatched using their badge number, which Cooper compared to a second name. DU-COMM, however, relies on an alpha-numeric code to identify officers.

“I’ll be honest with you, some of our officers said, ‘This sucks,’” he said.

Unlike Darien’s former dispatch center, DU-COMM’s dispatchers can’t run criminal histories to help officers in the field. While this has bothered some officers, Cooper said they’re all trained to prepare for the unexpected. 

“They should never let their guard down (anyway),” he said.

DU-COMM also hired new staff to deal with the influx of calls they received after adding Darien, among other towns including Oak Brook, Wood Dale and Itasca, to their roster. The mix of old and new employees made the quality of service somewhat inconsistent, he said. 

The center has, however, responded quickly to any service complaints, Brown said. He said he met with the director and deputy director in February. 

“They’ve had no problems making personnel changes when we’ve pointed out when a staffer mishandles a call,” Brown said.

DU-COMM opened in 1975 and serves 38 police and fire departments in DuPage County, Cooper wrote in a memo accompanying the report. Darien transitioned its police dispatch to DU-COMM at the same time as Lisle, Woodridge and the .

The center responded to roughly 794,000 phone calls in 2011, about 36.5 percent of which were 911 calls, Cooper’s memo said.

Cooper wrote that he and Brown have requested DU-COMM send Darien a monthly report on caller complaints to help them track any problems. 

“I believe as we move forward, issues will drop off based on being more familiar with each other,” Cooper wrote.