Deerfield Police Department

THE COMMUNICATOR

Rapid Notification System

The Deerfield Police Department has an extremely valuable tool at its disposal called “The Communicator” ("The Communicator" is a trademark of the (Dialogic Communications Corporation.) This is an interactive community notification system, which enables a recorded telephone message to be sent out to selected areas, blocks, or neighborhoods. This system can be used to notify residents and businesses of a missing person, evacuation order, boil order, and many other emergency situations.

This emergency notification system can make approximately 1600 calls per hour based on a 30 second message. Residents and businesses can identify calls from the system with a phrase such as “This is the Village of Deerfield”, or “This is the Deerfield Police Department with an important message.” Caller id will display Deerfield Villa. The system is able to track which phone numbers it has reached, when someone hangs up, when an answering machine answers and how many attempts were made. If the system is hung up on, normally it will retry that number 2 times. Depending on the situation, if the system detects an answering machine, it will leave the same message that would be transmitted if you had been talking “live”.

In the event there is a message that needs to be delivered in a more rapid manner than the 1800 calls per hour, we can use a mass call system utilizing phone lines at an offsite location allowing for approximately 24000 calls per hour.

If you are a resident of Deerfield and have an unlisted number or have changed your telephone number recently, your telephone number may not be in the system. Also some households have multiple phone lines, so we ask you to please provide our department what line you would like to be notified on. In order to for you to be notified by the system, we would ask that you fill out a short form providing your name, address, and telephone number. (This information is confidential and will not be shared.) This form can be obtained at the police department, village hall, or on the police department website at http://www.deerfield-il.org/CommunicatorForm.

If you have any questions regarding the system, please contact the Deerfield Police Department 847-945-8636, Brent Reynolds, or Communications Director Mary Anne Glowacz.