You do understand that approximately 80% of home alarms are false, right? You know that many cities have had to add cops to the force to deal with these false alarms, right? Who should pay for that extra manpower? It's an extra cost to the city that should be reimbursed by those imposing the burden...the suckers who put in home alarm systems. Many municipalities also charge for responding to false alarms, and they should.
As a general statement regarding home alarms. The average police response time to a home alarm is 30 to 45 minutes (if they even respond). The average home burglary takes 10 minutes. Do the math. ADT and others are making a ton of money on the backs of local police departments and all the false alarms are keeping cops from doing real work.
Whaaaah. Do you want some cheese with that whine? Maybe a waambulance?
I did a stint as a 911 dispatcher pre-E911. I got the joy of answering the calls all night every few minutes from the malfunctioning cassette tape based alarms that had no recording, that couldn't be traced until Monday by the Bell System's finest. It was Friday night usually when they started.
All calls were logged manually then too, no computer aided dispatch. Our computer system was for running things on NCIC and we had the equivalent of "Notepad" for logging calls. It did a "fancy" auto save from a Function key and had a few keyboard shortcuts for standard things we typed, and it did its own time stamping in the margin. Pretty basic.
The Sheriff didn't hire any additional staff to deal with them. And we didn't need any.
Those old alarms back then, didn't go through an alarm monitoring company, they came in direct to dispatch.
ADT and others today, send them through their own dispatch centers and make at least an attempt to verify they're real (by calling the responsible party's number and checking) before the alarm is ever even reported to LE nowadays.
It's really rare for LE or FD to be contacted within the first ten minutes of any alarm unless it's a Class 1 Fire Alarm or a certified system. Certifying a cheap $100 system in a house is silly and those will still go through an alarm company dispatch center before they require any "additional staff" at the PD.
The money-making system behind it nowadays is mostly just that. Almost all jurisdictions here only handle the burglary alarms without a confirmation phone call that someone or something is definitely happening, on a workload-permitting basis.
I've listened to a couple larger jurisdictions here dispatch them out up to four or five hours after they went off, on a busy night.
Anyone who thinks PD is coming to stop the bad guy if there's even a single automotive accident to be handled, in any larger municipality, is fooling themselves on the usefulness of an alarm system.
FD, is a significantly different story, but as you've pointed out, false alarms for FD aren't given much leeway. If they're consistently happening, the fines go up steeply after the first occurrence.
Conversely, if it's a Class 1 Alarm in commercial space that's required for occupancy and your phone lines for monitoring it fail, many jurisdictions around here mandate that an odd-duty firefighter be hired for "fire watch" round the clock at a horrendously high hourly rate.
FD takes alarms much MUCH more seriously than PD unless someone has hit a panic button. They have no problem ignoring them to hours until the queue is empty and someone has time to drive by and take a look.
Methinks you've been drinking someone's koolaid by the looks of the response. Even the largest jurisdictions don't need to add much in the way of manpower to ignore most home alarms. And they know the insurance company will pay for whatever was stolen, if it's real.
Property loss isn't a high priority fore many busy city PDs and hasn't been since I was a little kid. Even non-injury auto accidents are down to "fill out your own 'police' report online and print it out for your insurance company" around here.
I figure best case on any home alarm is about an hour response time, and four or five isn't uncommon on a busy night. The only way anyone is speeding that up is with a human safety panic button.
