Before Hendricks County went on SAFE-T, we had four dispatch centers in the county: Brownsburg (PD and FD), Danville (PD and FD), Plainfield (PD and FD for both Plainfield and Avon), and the Hendricks County Sheriffs Department (HCSD and some of the rural county FDs). Now, we have one dispatch center in Plainfield that handles the entire county.
This has been a huge political problem. There are many people in high places in Brownsburg, Danville, and the Sheriffs Department who think they got screwed because Plainfield got the dispatch center and they didn't. They are convinced that public safety has been degraded by this change. They are working publicly and behind the scenes to cast the county-wide dispatch center in a negative light. We even have public safety people who writing anonymous letters bashing the system which are being published by local "newspapers".
As a resident and a taxpayer in the county, it's disturbing to watch. All of these people should be focused on one thing: improving public safety for the entire county. Instead, they seem focused on protecting their own turf and making sure they get their way.
I seem to remember a piece of legislation making its way through the Indiana statehouse this past spring that would require each county to pare itself down to no more than two public safety answering points. Does anybody have a link to that bill? Did it get signed into law? Was there any discussion here in the forums about it?
