Police and law enforcement agencies across North America want to work ‘smarter’. Working ‘smarter’ means working on the important issues that make a difference to the Policing mandate in a community. Working ‘smarter’ also means not wasting valuable Police time and resources responding to non-critical issues, such as false alarms!
In the USA, police respond to more than 36 million burglar alarm activations a year, at a cost over $1.8 billion. Most of these alarm activations are from conventional motion sensor/glass break sensor/door contact burglar alarms, and the vast majority of the conventional burglar alarm calls are false. The false alarm rate is reported to be as high as 98%, or in other words, only 2% of burglar alarms are real alarms – and most of that 2% are alarms from verified response alarm systems from Sonitrol. Couple this with the fact that conventional burglar alarms can account for 10-25% of all calls to a police department, and you can see why this is such a dilemma. Conventional alarms have a very high false alarm rate and waste a lot of valuable police time.
Commercial properties and businesses tend to have an even higher false alarm rate than residential systems because more people tend to share responsibility and cleaning staff are always changing and they need to know multiple alarm codes and system operation for the conventional alarm systems and the security systems can be more complex.
Studies show that the conventional alarm, false alarm rate for commercial users is as much as three times higher than the false alarm rate of residential users. Therefore business owners need to take false alarms seriously and make sure their conventional security system is not responsible for wasting police time. In fact we recommend business owners don’t use conventional alarms at all … they should use only Sonitrol VERIFIED systems.
Independent studies have shown that the most effective burglary-deterrence measure is a Sonitrol verified security system.
In addition, municipalities and police organizations have exhausted the other response mechanisms to stop false alarms. Check out the website for your local law enforcement service and you’ll likely see a range of “False Alarm Reduction” policies. These include registrations, fines, escalating fines, reduced response times and verified response only. These measures show that the police are trying to reduce false alarms but studies have shown that these responses are limited in effectiveness to stop false alarms.
The most effective response to a burglar alarm in order to prevent a false alarm is a Sonitrol verified security system that has audio and/or video surveillance, so that any intrusion can be verified by our monitoring station, and then police will respond priority one. Sonitrol’s monitoring staff make sure that all alarms are first verified by a security expert at our central monitoring station before the police are notified … and then the police always respond with an average response documented at 3.5 minutes. With this quick response time Police have apprehended over 170,000 criminals in the act.
At Sonitrol we only provide the number #1 security solution – the most effective response to false alarms is a VERIFIED RESPONSE, confirming in real-time that criminal activity is taking place with live audio and video verification.
But beware of imitators. Watch out for security companies that provide ‘enhanced call verification’. This is not the same as ‘VERIFIED RESPONSE’. ‘Enhanced call verification’ still uses conventional alarm technology, but just means that these security companies will “try and call” the property owner before they notify the police. Of course if the property owner is busy or unreachable, there is no way of knowing if his property is being burgled.
Sonitrol Tri-County can provide your business with the best verified response alarms available as part of your overall cost effective security system, including fire alarms, and access controls.
