Excerpts from the ChicagoTribune.com:

Two days after naming a new police superintendent from within the Chicago Police Department, Mayor Rahm Emanuel will appoint a top official in the Illinois National Guard to run the Office of Emergency Management and Communications.

Alicia Tate-Nadeau will succeed Gary Schenkel, who headed the agency that includes the city’s 911 dispatch center and plays a key role in coordinating the municipal response to events like large snowstorms and the NATO protests, since shortly after Emanuel took office.

The Emanuel administration said Schenkel, a former U.S. Marine, decided to retire. He is stepping down three months after two call takers at the 911 center failed to send police squad cars to a West Side residence where Quintonio LeGrier had called for help, saying someone was threatening his life. When Legrier called OEMC a third time, officers were dispatched to the home and one of them fatally shot the 19-year-old college student and neighbor Bettie Jones.

Two 911 dispatchers were suspended without pay for failing to send police to the residence. The FBI has joined a probe into the late December police shootings, and the officer who fatally shot baseball bat-wielding Legrier did not initially tell investigators that the teen had swung the bat at his head, police reports obtained by the Tribune show.

In a statement, Emanuel said Tate-Nadeau, an assistant adjutant general of the Illinois National Guard and also the deputy commanding general of the Army National Guard in Fort Leonard Wood, Mo., has the skills needed to head up complex public safety responses.

As part of her work with the Illinois National Guard, Tate-Nadeau served in Israel from 2011 to 2014, where she coordinated emergency management exercises with international partners. She also served in Iraq in 2005 and 2006. Last year, Tate-Nadeau became the first woman promoted to the rank of brigadier general in the Illinois National Guard.

And she’s part of the Federal Emergency Management Agency team working on the Flint, Mich., water crisis, according to the Emanuel administration. Tate-Nadeau has lived in Illinois for more than 15 years and grew up on the dusty outskirts of Oklahoma City.

thanks Dan

Tags: , ,