About a year ago, I
reported on the impact of Lincoln’s revised false alarm ordinance. At the time, however, the new law had only been in effect for six months. We now have a full year operating under the new ordinance. Here is the trend over the past decade—beginning in 2002, which also happened to be our peak year for false alarms.
The number of false alarms has declined by 45%. The number of addresses with five or more false alarms during the calendar year has decreased by 82%. This has occurred despite the fact that Lincoln's population during the past 10 years has increased by about 54,000. These are certainly impressive results.
5 comments:
It would seem the new policy has had an effect. Still, it seems like a lot of false alarms. I know the reasons for some of them, and too frequently they are due to human error (carelessness, ignorance, apathy, whatever). Would you have any idea on how many businesses/residences actually have alarms? It would be interesting to know what percentage of the installations have problems.
The false alarm rates obviously dropped because of the new law. The unanswerable question is how did the false alarm rates drop.
Did they drop because people got the alarms fixed?
Were some of the problem alarms removed and now those homes/businesses have no alarm?
I hear a lot of alarms get canceled so the false alarm does not count. Is this happening more? If you recall when the Scheels burglary happened, the Manager canceled the alarm and the burglary was not discovered until some time later.
I'm sure there is a certain combination of all of these but there is no way to know for sure.
The real problem with alarm systems is that alarm companies are contracting with consumers for a service that they don't provide.
Director, I would love to see your numbers for last year in my jurisdiction. Our deputies responded to more than 1700 alarms just last quarter. Of those, only 3 were valid alarms.
Do you have numbers of valid alarms last year?
I'd like to see the percentage of false alarms that originate with a trip in a motion detector circuit.
We have had our alarm for a number of years. There was a time before the ordinance where our alarm company would call me on my cell and then after talking I would make the decision to have them call the police. The it switched to the alarm company calling the police and then calling me. After the ordinance and first false alarm, I switched the calling order to call my cell first so I could make the decision whether to have them call the police. Obviously if they cannot reach me they immediately call the police. My guess a whole bunch of others have done the same.
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