The 1 of COST Crying Wolf

Mar 1, 2005 12:00 PM, By Michael Fickes

For every 100 burglar alarms that go off, only a handful actually signal criminal activity. About 98 of every 100 alarms indicate nothing more than errors by system owners, severe weather, nosy animals at the alarm site or an equipment malfunction.

According to a U.S. Department of Justice report entitled “False Burglar Alarms,” police responded to approximately 38 million alarms in 1998. The cost? A stunning $1.5 billion.

Thanks to programs established by communities, the police and alarm companies, the false alarms have decreased in many communities. “We've seen communities reduce false alarms with aggressive programs,” says Thomas Seamon, retired deputy commissioner of the Philadelphia Police Department and co-chair of the International Association of Chiefs of Police Private Sector Liaison Committee, which has been working on the false alarm problem for years. “Are false alarms down to an acceptable number? No. And it is a burdensome workload for the police.”

FALSE ALARM REDUCTION IN MONTGOMERY COUNTY, MD

YEAR	REQUESTS FOR DISPATCH	DISPATCH	NO RESPONSE	VERIFIED CALLS	%REDUCTION	% REDUCTION FROM BASE
2004	38,248	19,190	17,492	1,566	-10.5%	-55.2%
2003	44,673	21,452	21,431	1,790	-8.3%	-49.9%
2002	46,409	23,402	21,064	1,943	-5.8%	-45.3%
2001	45,702	24,855	19,026	1,821	-7.5%	-41.9%
2000	48,603	26,877	20,172	1,554	+.035%	-37.2%
1999	48,434	25,951	20,932	1,551	+.003%	-39.4%
1998	46,839	25,877	19,371	1,591	-11.4%	-39.6%
1997	45,791	29,219	15,057	1,515	-9.8%	-32.0%
1996	40,534	32,390	7,339	805	-9.1%	-24.3%
1995	40,967	35,624	4,855	488	-16.8%	-15.7%
1994	43,936	42,821	1,115*
*Does not include dispatch vs. non-dispatch or verified calls for January, February or March, 1994, as statistics for those months are not available.

The alarm industry estimates that its programs have reduced false alarms by as much as 40 percent in recent years. But it is difficult to figure out what that means. The fact is that a lot of alarms still go off, and when they do, almost all are false.

Police departments and alarm companies have been fighting false alarms for years. Attempting to relieve police of the burden of responding to thousands or even tens of thousands of false alarms, communities have enacted ordinances that set fees or penalties for false alarm abusers. Alarm companies have improved training programs for company personnel and users, developed new equipment specifications and instituted telephone programs that aim to verify problems before the police are called. The vast majority of police departments and alarm companies appear to judge these programs successful in reducing false alarms.

On the other hand, a small, but growing, cadre of police departments claim that ordinances and other programs are not working well enough. The only satisfactory solution, according to this group, is to require a witness — preferably a private security officer — to verify criminal activity.

Causes of false alarms

Mistakes by alarm users cause 80 percent of false alarms, says Stan Martin, executive director of the Security Industry Alarm Coalition (SIAC), based in Houston. “People forget codes or use the wrong doors, and the alarms go off,” he says.

Alarm companies contribute to user errors by failing to properly train users of new systems, Martin adds. Improper equipment installation plays a role, too. Technicians occasionally install the wrong sensors for applications, they position sensors wrong or they set their sensitivity level too high.

Strategies for reducing false alarms

SIAC is the alarm industry's response to the false alarm problem. The organization, formed in December 2002, receives support from a coalition of security associations: the Security Industry Association, the National Burglar and Fire Alarm Association, the Central Station Alarm Association and the Canadian Security Association. SIAC's mission is to provide information and resources to help communities develop alarm management ordinances and procedures to reduce police dispatches to false alarms.

A number of early industry programs designed to reduce false alarms have been folded into SIAC. These include a model ordinance program that advises communities about policies that can reduce false alarms.

False alarm ordinances

Montgomery County, Md., enacted an ordinance in 1995 and has seen dramatic declines in false alarms ever since. In 1995, county records show a commercial false alarm rate of 2.29.

The false alarm rate, a common measure, is calculated by dividing the number of false alarms by the number of alarm systems. If 10,000 alarm systems set off 22,900 false alarms, the false alarm rate is 2.29.

After five years of operation under the Montgomery County ordinance, the rate of commercial false alarms had dropped to 1.9, a decrease of more than half. Four years later, in 2004, the rate had fallen another 50 percent to 0.89.

Norma Beaubien, the director of the false alarm reduction section for the Montgomery County Police, attributes the improvement to the county ordinance, which requires all alarm systems in the county — commercial, residential, and governmental — to be registered with the police department. Police will not respond to alarms that are not registered.

Police will respond to all alarms from registered systems as long as the user pays for false alarms. “Our ordinance allows one free false alarm in a calendar year,” Beaubien says. “After that, alarm system owners must pay escalating response fees starting at $25 for the second false alarm in a calendar year.”

The fees escalate rapidly. For the 20th false alarm in a calendar year (and each subsequent false alarm), a business must pay $4,000. The residential escalation crests at $1,000.

The ordinance imposes other requirements, too. On the third false alarm, owners must have their system inspected by the alarm company and undergo re-training. On the eighth false alarm, the alarm system itself must be upgraded to meet standards laid out in the ordinance.

The escalating fee structure has proven to be the most important provision. “If you fail to pay a false alarm response fee, the police will no longer respond to your alarm,” Beaubien says. “As long as you pay the fees, we'll continue to respond. It would be cheaper to hire a security guard, but you don't have to.” Improvement in false alarm performance comes as users mend their ways.

Charlotte-Mecklenburg in North Carolina has seen similar results, says Glen Mowrey, retired deputy chief of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department. In 1995, Charlotte Mecklenburg logged 106,000 false alarms. Since adopting an ordinance with escalating fees in 1996, false alarms have fallen to just over 60,000.

How much does it cost to administer an ordinance? “City Council told us that it had to be done at no cost to taxpayers,” Mowrey says. The City Council ruled out registration fees as well as allocating money for a police officer to manage the program.

Outsourcing solved the problem. The Police Department hired EDS to send out notices of fines and to track and collect payments. False alarm fines pay the freight, including the salary of a police officer assigned to the program. To set up the program, all revenue from the fines went to EDS. Since then, EDS has returned 15 percent of the fine revenue to the city.

So fees help police departments control false alarms. Perhaps more important, a tightly managed system can cover costs incurred by police in responding to false alarms.

Industry measures: Improved training and procedures

On the other side of the equation, alarm companies are implementing false alarm reduction programs. Their approach involves more comprehensive training and new procedures for alarm system customers as well as alarm company sales people, technicians and central station monitoring personnel. “A successful false dispatch reduction effort must encompass all aspects of the system,” says Pam Petrow, executive vice president of Vector Security Inc., Pittsburgh.

Two years ago, Vector implemented a false alarm reduction initiative in which new customers undergo seven days of training before their system goes live. Because new customers tend to set off numerous false alarms, the company only calls the premises when an alarm goes off. Monitoring personnel identify mistakes made by customers and review proper procedures again and again.

Vector has also designated certain older components of alarm systems as prone to false alarms. “We place those components on a legacy list,” Petrow says. “If a service technician on call finds legacy equipment, it must be replaced, whether or not it is the problem.”

Vector salespeople stress the serious problem of false alarms to customers and train all users to operate the system. They also record a minimum of three emergency contacts and their phone numbers, and employ a new protocol called enhanced call verification or ECV when dealing with alarm activations.

According to Petrow, these measures have reduced Vector's false alarm rate from 1.65 in 2002 to 1.27 today.

ECV has played a major role in this improvement by altering the protocol for notifying police. Traditionally, when an alarm goes off, the central station calls the premises. If no one answers, the next call goes to the police. With ECV, however, the central station makes a second call, preferably to a cell phone of the system owner.

Petrow says Vector's early testing of ECV reduced false dispatches by 29 percent. As companies throughout the industry have adopted ECV procedures, false dispatches have continued to fall. “We believe that we're getting 30 percent to 50 percent reductions with this one technique,” Martin says.

Improved alarm equipment specifications

Working with Underwriters Laboratories Inc. (UL), manufacturers have developed 20 new performance specifications for equipment. Each attacks a false alarm problem.

Chief among the new specifications, referred to as CP-01 standards, is an increased delay in alarm activation when users enter and exit. “If you do something dumb, CP-01 control panels give you extra time to get back to the keypad and punch in a code to prevent an alarm signal from going to the monitoring station,” Martin says.

CP-01 panels provide 45-second exit delays and 30-second entry delays.

The City of Phoenix, which has a highly regarded false alarm reduction program, tracked the performance of CP-01 systems for a year. “We selected 74 problem systems and replaced those systems with CP-01 equipment,” says Patti Rea, code enforcement managers with the Phoenix Police Department. “The false alarm rate of the old systems was 0.97 — they had recorded 72 false alarms the year before the test. After a year of using the new equipment, the rate had dropped to 0.60 or 45 false alarms.”

What's good enough?

While the vast majority of police departments and alarm companies are making headway against false alarms by enforcing strict ordinances, better training, ECV and improved equipment, a tiny but rapidly growing minority has decided that the problem of false alarms is so overwhelming that a solution requires more dramatic measures.

“The alarm industry has underestimated the frustration the police have felt for 30 years,” says Shanna Werner, the alarm administrator with the Salt Lake City Police Department. “And it's all beginning to break out.”

At the beginning of 2001, the Salt Lake Police Department began to respond to alarms only if an eyewitness verified a problem. The results have been impressive. In 2000, police responded to 9,439 alarms — 9,340 of them were false. In 2001, the first year of verified response, police responded to 898 alarms.

“We've had a 94 percent decrease in false alarms since beginning our verified response program,” Werner says. “Nothing that the alarm industry has advocated can touch those results.”

On Jan. 1, Bellingham, Wash., went to a system called modified verified response. “That means there are certain alarms we continue to respond to as we always have,” says Randall H. Carroll, chief of police. “These include retail, wholesale or warehouse fire alarms. We respond to human-activated panic alarms, hold-up alarms, and bank alarms — where it takes a conscious effort to set off the alarm. We also respond to commercial intrusion alarms between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m.”

For other alarms, Bellingham police require verification by an eyewitness before responding. “We accept verification by alarm companies using audio and video technology,” Carroll says.

Bellingham's results are dramatic, too. In January 2004, police responded to 123 false alarms. In January 2005, the first month of modified verified response, police responded to just 35 false alarms.

The alarm industry and some police departments criticize verified response, saying such policies will embolden criminals. Verified response advocates dispute the claim. According to Werner, no burglaries or assaults can be attributed to Salt Lake's adoption of verified response.

Is verified response the solution? “We tell chiefs and sheriffs that no one solution will fit everyone,” Seamon says. “Different programs make sense for different cities. We don't have years of research into what happens when a department makes this switch. So you have to be careful.”

FOR THE RECORD

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