Making the Most of False Alarms

The next time you drive through a neighborhood, consider that roughly 1 in 7 homes has a security system. About the same ratio holds true for businesses as well. With millions of security systems installed, how often are officers called out for false alarms?

The problem with false alarms is that we don’t know they are false until they are checked. As a result, law enforcement must treat every alarm call as though it were an actual break-in or other criminal event. At the point where it is determined that the alarm is false, officers have usually already been dispatched and little remains but to fill out the necessary forms to document the event.

According to a paper published by researchers at Temple University in 2004, more than 94% of all alarm activations are false. In addition, these false alarm calls make up more than 10% of all calls to law enforcement. This is a significant number and translates into millions if not billions of dollars spent on non-essential law enforcement activities every year.

The good news is that police departments, sheriff’s offices, and 911 centers have some options for minimizing the impact false alarm calls can have on the agencies’ bottom lines. One of these options is to recover some of the additional cost from those who benefit: the business owners and homeowners whose systems are triggering the false alarms.

Zuercher Technologies’ ledsCAD can provide a way to thoroughly manage the alarm billing process. Calls for service can be coded as false alarms once they have been handled by responding officers. Business rules (defined by each agency in accordance with its needs) can be set up so that each business with an alarm system gets one free false alarm per year, or perhaps the cost for the false alarms increases based on the number of false alarms within a certain length of time. Statistical reports can be created to show what people and businesses are generating the most alarms, what areas these alarms are occurring in, which officers are handling the majority of these calls, and if any patterns or trends are developing.

ledsCAD also permits the alarm billing rules to be overridden by users with sufficient authority in the event there are extenuating circumstances such as an impassioned plea by the business owner or homeowner to not send any more bills since he or she is working with the security system company to find and repair the condition which keeps triggering the alarm.

Once a call for service is defined as a false alarm in ledsCAD, the system passes the billing information to ledsFinancial for creation of the invoice. These invoices are then printed and sent out in accordance with the agency’s regular billing cycle. If agency SOPs require warnings for the first two false alarms, for example, ledsSuite Custom Forms can be set up to generate those standard warning letters.

Billing for false alarms will not make them just go away, but it can help law enforcement agencies recoup some of those costs – costs which otherwise burden an already stressed budget.