Commissioners want 'panic' response (2/11/04)

The response to an accidental push of a “panic button” at the Jay County Courthouse Monday left two Jay County Commissioners less than pleased.

And the fact that harmless incident occurred less than an hour prior to a fatal shooting at a Randolph County government building didn’t add to their level of comfort.

The response to the accidental incident Monday in Jay County apparently consisted of dispatching a county police officer toward the courthouse, a phone call and resulting conversation with Commissioner Mike Leonhard, and then contacting the officer, who was en route from the Redkey area, and calling off the run.

“By golly, if that panic button pushes, I’d like to see some officer come through that door. That’s what the hell we’ve got them for,” Leonhard said Tuesday. “What’s going to happen if it’s real? ... if procedures was followed, that officer should have been at the door.”

Jay County Sheriff Todd Penrod said Tuesday that “I’m not going to discuss the policy on what we do ... to be fair to the safety of the courthouse employees.

“Our procedures were followed,” Penrod said of Monday’s false alarm and the ensuing response.

The courthouse is wired with a number of buttons that, when pushed, send a signal directly to the county’s 911 dispatch center. The signal gives the location of the button that was pushed.

All three commissioners and a reporter from The Commercial Review were present when the false alarm was accidentally sent just after 2 p.m.

A short time later, Leonhard answered the phone. He later said that conversation was with an employee of the county’s 911 center. Leonhard said the dispatcher asked him if there was an emergency, and Leonhard said there was no problem.

“She just said, ‘Is everything OK over there?’ I said, ‘yeah,’ and she said, ‘I was just calling to find out.’”

At about the same time, an employee of the auditor’s office came into the commissioners’ room. That employee said she had gotten a call from a member of the public who had heard a county deputy dispatched to the commissioners’ room. When he received the call, the deputy was in the Redkey area.

While on the way to Portland, the deputy was told to “signal 9,” or stop the run, because it was a false alarm, the caller said.

Commissioner Milo Miller Jr. said he was not happy with the fact that an officer — whether from Jay County or Portland police — did not show up to confirm there was no emergency situation.

“It really concerned me when I got home and heard on the radio ... what happened in Randolph County (a fatal shooting of a man allegedly by his former common-law wife). My thought is, if (police are not) going to respond, we might as well just save the money we’re paying out to (the alarm company) and let life go on.”

Jay County clerk Jane Ann Runyon said this morning she would feel more secure if she knew an officer was going to show up.

“As someone who has an awful lot of money in her office and an awful lot of angry people coming from court, I would rather have someone show up instead of a phone call,” Runyon said.

A survey of courthouse officials couldn’t find an actual emergency incident in which the panic buttons were used since they were installed in 1999.

The initial cost of the equipment furnished and installed by FailSafe Alarm Co. of Decatur was about $3,100. There is also an annual maintenance fee of about $400 paid to Priority One Life Safety Systems of Fort Wayne, which has since acquired FailSafe.[[In-content Ad]]