Salt Lake Police Cut False Alarms By 90 Percent
U.S. police responded to approximately 38 million alarm activations in 1998, at an estimated annual cost of $1.5 billion. Most of the activations were burglar alarms, which proved to be between 98-99% false.
In the United States alone, solving the problem of false alarms would by itself relieve 35,000 officers from providing an essentially private service.
The Salt Lake City Police Department has solved this burden on its department with the Verified Response Alarm Program.
Alarm companies are required to verify an automatic alarm signal via an eyewitness before an officer is dispatched. Should the private guard discover an open door or broken window, an officer is dispatched to the scene as a high priority.
Citizens are receiving much faster response to their alarm signals from private guard companies for an additional $5.00 per month to their monitoring account. Police officers can now be redirected to actual public safety needs. Officers are no longer responding on alarms caused by cleaning crews, kids, cats, dogs and balloons. Police continue to respond to the human activated alarms such as robbery, panic and duress.
The department experienced a decrease in high priority calls for service response times and burglaries decreased during the first year of implementation in 2000. Burglaries the second year increased by 3%.
An in-depth study of 2001 burglary cases revealed some shoplifting and larceny cases were included in the burglary count. Burglary cases separated from these other cases for 2001 indicated a 1.9% decrease.
Salt Lake City was a winner in the Herman Goldstein Award for Excellence in Problem Oriented Policing and the International Chiefs of Police – Webber Seavey Award in 2001 for the Verified Response Program. The city is also a semi-finalist in the “Innovations in American Government” award sponsored by Harvard University.
Las Vegas Metro Police Department began Verified Response in 1991 and also achieved a 90% reduction in alarm responses.
False alarms are a national problem for police, with some departments utilizing 25 to 30% of patrol resources on calls, which are predictably 98 – 99% false.
Eight other cities currently practice Verified Response, fifty-three cities are moving in this direction, and a national awareness has begun with police departments to shift the burden of false alarms to the industry that created the problem and has the ability to solve it.