C.O.P.S. expands in Arizona

PHOENIX, Ariz. - C.O.P.S. Monitoring, one of the largest wholesale monitoring centers in the country, on Aug. 4 announced it was reorganizing and expanding its operations in its Arizona central station, relocating and promoting key employees and hiring 13 new dispatchers. The new hires have completed C.O.P.S.' 120-hour training course and are ready to start fielding calls.

"We take our responsibility to our dealers seriously,' said C.O.P.S. president Jim McMullen in a statement. "By diversifying our central stations and our workforce by increasing our strength in Arizona, we are not only showing our commitment to operate multiple 24/7 facilities, we also significantly reduce the chances that a single local catastrophe or weather event will affect our ability to serve our customers.'

"We're expanding because we're getting more opportunities westward,' said C.O.P.S. executive vice president Don Maden. "We're committed to that market and surrounding region. We're growing out there and we wanted to expand the staff and have a greater presence in that area … Arizona is on a real growth trajectory now.'

To balance staffing more equally among its three central stations and to improve their failover capabilities, C.O.P.S. promoted 10-year COPS veteran Dale Marzili to operations manager of the Arizona central. Marzili and five additional dispatchers and shift managers relocated from C.O.P.S.' New Jersey operation to Arizona in May. C.O.P.S. director of sales Rich Cowan also made the move from New Jersey to Arizona. C.O.P.S.' Arizona outfit as well as the company's vice president of special projects Maria Malice have been in the news a lot lately with stories in Security Systems News highlighting Malice's efforts at false alarm reduction and award-winning performance for her association, of which she is president.

C.O.P.S. owns and operates three hot redundant central stations in New Jersey, Florida and Arizona. The company recently trumpeted a big improvement in response time to high-priority alarms. Ad materials from the company claim a nearly 17 percent improvement, cutting 2.69 seconds from 2009's average response time of 16.09 seconds and accomplishing an average response time of 13.40 seconds, all while weathering some of 2009's harshest winter storms, which shut down businesses, prohibited travel and increased alarm calls from monitored accounts.