Posted on 09/30/2007 9:28:04 AM PDT by Daffynition
Fontana police say they respond to the boy who cried wolf more than 8,500 times a year.
But in their scenario, the cry comes in the form of a burglar alarm that summons officers to a house or business where, 99 percent of the time, they don't find any prowler.
Police Chief Larry Clark says responding to alarm calls monopolizes officers' time so much the Fontana Police Department will try a new tactic starting Monday. It's called "verified response," and he hopes the policy will free up his force to serve all of Fontana's 183,000 residents throughout the city's 36 square miles.
"Unless the alarm is verified by audio/video, private security or eyewitnesses, the Police Department will not routinely respond to the alarm," says a July 24 letter that Clark sent to residential and business alarm owners.
"What we're trying to do with this policy is to put the responsibility on the alarm companies and the alarm owners," said police Capt. Alan Hostetter. "We truly have been placed in the role of security guards for decades now."
Clark said the verified-response policy has some key exceptions.
"Rest assured that manually activated panic, robbery/hold-up, medical or duress alarms ... will continue to be treated as high-priority calls for service by the police department," his letter said.
Fontana police don't know the exact number of burglar-alarm systems citywide because alarm companies and customers often don't obtain the required city permit. They liken it to the scores of pet owners who never get a city license for their dog or cat.
The Police Department sent about 600 letters to Fontana alarm customers, whose addresses they obtained because officers had been sent there on alarm-activation calls.
But thousands of other alarm customers heard about the coming change via letters from their alarm companies, Hostetter said.
Many alarm companies are taking the position that the new policy amounts to Fontana police abdicating their responsibility to protect.
The Police Department's stance is that the alarm companies are selling their customers a defective product, one prone to accidental triggering, often monitored at computerized centers in distant cities or out of state.
Fontana police contend law enforcement agencies all over the country have been forced into the role of alarm companies' errand boys. They say many firms forward alarm activations to the local police agency rather than dispatching their own security personnel as the first responders.
"The monitoring and response portion of the alarm is not very effective and costs a lot of money," Hostetter said. "Nobody really takes them all that seriously, because almost all of them are false."
Police departments have no firm way of knowing whether some of those "false alarm" calls were valid because sometimes the alarm's noise might scare off an intruder before police reached the home or business.
A suit against the Police Department filed Monday in San Bernardino County Superior Court makes that argument.
"If an alarm actually scares off a would-be burglar at unoccupied premises, who leaves no evidence of criminal activity, the police officer later arriving at the scene will incorrectly classify the true alarm as 'false,' " reads the lawsuit, filed by the Inland Empire Alarm Association, an industry trade group.
"For burglars, the (verified-response) policy amounts to a declaration of 'Open Sesame.' The burglar ransacking an unoccupied city home will not be deterred by an alarm system. He knows the police will ignore the report it receives of the alarm he triggered," the lawsuit said.
Fontana police counter they're not trying to discourage people from installing alarm systems -- even the imaginary kind. "There are lots of people in the city who only have signs and stickers. You can go on the Internet and buy them," Hostetter said.
"The signs, the stickers, the noise -- it's all a deterrent. But right now, the number of false alarms that we're responding to is detrimental to the community at large," Hostetter said. "The vast majority of our residents don't have alarms."
On Thursday, San Bernardino County Superior Court Judge Brian McCarville denied the alarm industry's request for a preliminary injunction that would have prevented Fontana from implementing its policy. Another hearing on the lawsuit is scheduled for Oct. 16.
Clark said earlier this month that fines don't make much of a dent in the volume of alarm calls.
In Fontana, alarm customers are allowed three "false" activations in a 12-month period. They are sent a warning letter at the time of the third activation and fined $63 for the next activation, Hostetter said.
That policy took effect in 2001, when Fontana police received 11,000 alarm calls. The fines, Hostetter said, helped bring the yearly total down to about 8,500.
"It had a beneficial impact, but it didn't solve the problem by any means," Hostetter said.
Alarm industry representatives are angry that such a widespread change didn't get a public debate.
The Fontana Police Department adopted verified response as an internal policy change, rather than as a procedure presented for City Council -- and residents' -- review, said Steve Sopkin, president of Mijac Alarm, a Rancho Cucamonga firm with 5,000 accounts, about 200 of them in Fontana.
The department should have sought the expertise and input of the alarm industry about how to cut the number of unnecessary activations, Sopkin said.
But Fontana's new policy already has prompted Mijac Alarm to change its staffing and service.
"Currently, we don't have armed-guard response," said Sopkin, whose father started the company in 1971. "However, (beginning) Oct. 1, I will have armed-guard response for Fontana."
Mijac's security personnel will patrol within the city, and customers will pay an additional $15 per month for that enhanced service, on top of charges that range from $25 to $45 per month, Sopkin said.
Well, this would stop me from having an alarm, what good would it do you to have one if police aren’t going to respond to them. BTW, I thought most alarm companies verified the alarms by calling the residence when one goes off. If someone answers and says it was accidental, no harm. If no one answers,or answers and yells for help, cops are sent. How much more verification do they think they can get?
> In Fontana, alarm customers are allowed three “false”
> activations in a 12-month period. They are sent a
> warning letter at the time of the third activation
> and fined $63 for the next activation, Hostetter said.
Simple solution.
Unpermitted alarms get no public response.
Permitted unattended automatic alarms are charged
$63 per EVERY false alarm (or whatever it actually
costs to send the car).
Digital video cams and massive storage are so cheap
now that there’s no excuse for not have a video
record of whatever the alarm is monitoring.
Produce the video of the perp - fee is waived.
If we lived in a high risk area, I’d already have a
webcam on the roof I could monitor (or even control)
from my desk at work.
What I find interesting/troubling is that a security company mentioned at the end of the article is offering “armed-guard” response personnel [for an extra charge] ... so on top of the taxes you pay for police , one can get a “armed-guard” to check on your alarm call. **sigh**
Wow. Yet another instance of cops being useless. What are you going to do if not respond to alarms? Pull Rosco P. Coltrane stunts on unsuspecting motorists?
The solution here is EXTREMELY simple. You fine alarm owners $100 for a false alarm. Assuming a false alarm costs the police 30 minutes of time, $100 works out to $400,000 in annual salary - probably eight times what the cop actually costs the city.
I think that businesses are the ones being targeted in this article... and not the typical homeowner, IMHO. Some of those alarms are so sensitive that the wind can cause them to go off. I would have sensors installed by the entrances (not on them) which would go off if there were movements detected “inside” the premises. One of my friends has this type installed in their home.
***If someone answers and says it was accidental, no harm. If no one answers,or answers and yells for help, cops are sent. How much more verification do they think they can get?***
Not only that, but my alarm company phones, and to make sure it isn’t an intruder answering that it was a mistake, they insist that we give them our secret code.
> I think that businesses are the ones being targeted in
> this article... and not the typical homeowner, ...
Motion detectors are cheap and attractive, and when
installed by homeowners with pets, are a huge false
alarm problem - even when the owner thinks they’ve
adjusted the sensitivity to ignore the critter(s).
Technology provides the capability for the general
populace to generate sufficient FAs to overwhelm any
reasonably-sized police force.
If one person had more than 3 FA's a month.....I think I'd have them fined heavily enough that they'd either consider putting fido in a crate or that hiring a private security guard would be deemed more cost efficient. *chuckle*
Prior to the invention of these alarm systems, police didn’t respond to them either (I know that’s a well, duh! statement), but my point is, what did the police respond to before these alarm systems were invented?
Answer: People calling in and reporting prowlers, noises, breaking glass ect. i.e. “verified” reports.
The alarm systems have vastly increased the number of reports but the number of officers available to respond to them hasn’t increased at the same rate. Seems obvious that somethings got to change.
I think announcing a no response policy is the wrong choice, since it’s like declaring open season on business.
Higher false call fees would be one way as well as fining security companies that generate too many false or unverified calls due to either oversensitivity, poor maintenance or poor data screening, i.e. nobody watching the cams or making the calls, but just automated systems call the cops whenever an alarm goes off.
My comments were meant as a statement for NOT buying an alarm system. However, for cops to say they are not going to respond to existing alarms will cause criminals to target houses with alarms already installed, this is a no brainer and doesn’t take any great thought to figure out. The cops should have done this on the sly without making a public statement about it. No one thinks about unintended consequences anymore.
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