Cracking Down On False Alarms

Newtown’s Police Department has released a draft update of the town’s security alarm ordinance that attempts to address an expensive and time-consuming burden on the local police department that has a direct impact on local taxpayers. A key component of the proposed ordinance is a schedule of increasing fines, imposed after the first three false alarms, starting at $25 and ranging up to $150 per false alarm for chronic offenders. This attempt to crack down on false alarms is a welcome development, but it may not be tough enough.

In the past 25 years, the security alarm system industry has managed to leverage a taxpayer supported municipal service — police protection — as a retail product. Residential and commercial security alarm systems in and of themselves are essentially worthless until someone responds to the emergency. So the real value of the industry is provided and paid for by taxpayers — most of whom do not themselves own security systems. In addition, every time there is a false alarm, two police units are diverted for 20 to 40 minutes, removing them from traffic patrol and other public safety duties that do have real value for taxpayers. In essence, this system represents the direct transfer of town resources to a private industry and its customers.

It is no small problem. For 2007, the Newtown emergency dispatch center reported 1,883 responses to burglary, hold-up, and panic alarms. Just five of those calls were for actual crimes in progress. That is a false alarm rate of 99.7 percent. Any other product that failed to accomplish its intended purpose more than ninety-nine times in a hundred would be quickly buried by market forces, but since municipalities absorb most of the costs of that failure rate, the system continues.

In addition to tougher fines, the proposed update to Newtown’s security alarm ordinance establishes explicit procedures and definitions designed to assign greater responsibility to security system vendors and owners for proper use and maintenance of commercial and residential alarms with the goal of reducing the number of false alarms requiring a municipal emergency response. The draft ordinance has been endorsed by the Police Commission and has been forwarded to the Legislative Council for review, possible revision, and eventual adoption. The only change we would like to see in this ordinance would the imposition of fines from the very first false alarm. We cannot think of any reason for the town to subsidize any part of this commercial service.