The Seattle Police Department recently announced that, effective January 1st, they will become one of the largest major police departments to mandate that alarm companies must place two verification calls to customers before contacting police.
From the SPD release…
Alarm companies are also required to use enhanced call verification (ECV) for all burglary alarms. ECV is a monitoring procedure requiring that the alarm company, prior to making an alarm dispatch request, make a minimum of two phone calls. This is done by calling the location of the alarm first and then a secondary number determined by the subscriber, often a cell phone number. ECV is only required for burglary alarms, not hold-up or panic alarms. Beginning January 1, 2009, the Seattle Police Department will not respond to requests from alarm companies to dispatch officers to a monitored burglary alarm when the alarm company has not utilized ECV.
Given that just about every alarm is false, this policy makes a lot of sense for the police… unfortunately, it doesn’t offer anything to alarm owners other than serving to make their monitored alarm systems even less effective.
The branding of the two-call verification as ‘Enhanced’ allows alarm companies to try and hoodwink customers into believing that the practice is somehow an improvement, or at least in their favour. The reality is, ECV all but ensures that in the event of an actual burglary, noone will be able to respond in a meaningful amount of time to have any impact.
Using ECV, or doing anything between the time an alarm signal is received and the time someone is dispatched to attend, is a waste. While ECV will further reduce the number of false dispatches to the SPD (which is great for Seattle taxpayers) it still allows the alarm industry to continue the misleading practice of promoting ECV as something that is good for them.
The SPD should adopt a non-response policy.
Rather than making a policy change which helps (inadvertently) facilitate deceptive sales practices, why not just come out and say that because 98% of alarms are false, the police will no longer respond unless an alarm has been verified to be real?
Alarm companies would be forced to be much more honest with their clients about what will happen when the alarm trips. More importantly, the ability to get away with selling an incomplete service will dry up.
There is a pretty major lobby from the security industry to fight a move like that… but it’s the right thing to do.
Incidentally, the Vancouver Police policy actually goes a little further than Seattle in that the Vancouver Security Alarm System Bylaw No.7111 (s.27) says that “Before notifying the Police Department of an alarm incident… an alarm company MUST contact by telephone or other electronic means, in order to establish whether the incident is a false alarm”. The word ‘must’ was recently added to replace the word ‘attempt’.
The subtle difference is that in Seattle, the alarm company only has to attempt to reach a client at two different numbers, whereas in Vancouver the alarm company must reach them.
As the false alarm problem continues to plague police departments and police operating budgets get tighter, the eventual move is to finally adopt a policy that requires verification before the police can be called. That’s not good for the status quo in the alarm industry, but it will be good for pretty much everyone else… most importantly the consumer.
At least then the consumer can make an informed choice about what type of security they want for their home or business and not be under any false impression that the Police will be coming in the event an alarm sounds.