(WBBM NEWSRADIO) — The past president of the Northern Illinois Police Alarm System (NIPAS) said police in Highland Park may not have been able to properly respond to the Fourth of July parade shooting without the agency.
NIPAS is a large conglomerate of officers and resources assigned for these kinds of tragedies.
“Probably one of the biggest responses, tonight, [that] this has had since its inception,” said former NIPAS President Tom Weitzel. “NIPAS was really started because of the Laurie Dann shooting in Winnetka.”
Weitzel said suburban police departments don’t have the resources or officers to handle this kind of tragedy alone.
Without NIPAS, Wietzel said, the situation may have been very different in Highland Park.
“Because there is no way that any of these municipalities could handle that situation on their own,” Weitzel said. “We’d need trained, professional SWAT operations and mobile field force, and we’d need them to respond en masse — and we just can’t produce that at the local level.”
Weitzel said what he saw in the response to the Highland Park shooting was fully professional.
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