This Is No False Alarm--L.A. to Pay for Billings

The City of Los Angeles will soon start mailing letters to about 10,000 people, and later issue thousands of checks totaling as much as $750,000, to make amends for wrongful billings by the Police Department for false alarms over the last two years.

And the reason for the over-billings, Police Cmdr. Matthew V. Hunt said, is rooted in a wrongheaded decision made two years ago by someone within the Police Commission staff regarding false-alarm billings.

The letters, expected to be mailed within two weeks, will ask people who had alarm permits between Aug. 1, 1983, and Aug. 8 to review their records and contact the department if they believed they were improperly charged for false alarms.

“The credibility of the Police Department and of the city is of the utmost importance,” said Hunt, the department liaison to the commission. “I have no doubt the investigation will clearly determine who was responsible.”

15,000 Bad Bills

When the massive wrongful billing problem surfaced in August, the commission voted unanimously to shut down the billing system and ordered an investigation, corrective action and refunds. The projected refund of $750,000, reflecting as many as 15,000 wrongful billings, is an “upper-level estimate,” he said.

Under police policy, alarm permit-holders are entitled to four false-alarm responses a year by officers at no charge. After the fourth such alarm, the permit-holder is billed $50 for each false alarm. But during the last two years, Hunt said, permit-holders were getting billed even when the alarm proved valid or had been tripped by “an act of nature,” such as a storm.

Hunt said when computer terminals were installed in patrol cars in August, 1983, many officers apparently entered incorrect codes regarding their responses to alarms. Historically, studies have shown that 95% to 97% of all alarms are false, Hunt said, but the officers were reporting that only 65% were false and 35% were valid.

“When you go from a massive manual system to a massive computer system, there are problems,” Hunt said.

But the billing system was still manual. And rather than charge for the false alarms reflected in the computerized reports, the commission staff started billing permit-holders for all of those false-alarm reports beyond the fourth that year.

Hunt said staff members apparently reasoned that permit-holders who were over-billed would contact police and then receive a refund.

“We do have a liberal waiver policy,” Hunt said, “where people call in and we audit accounts and determine if there was a problem . . . such as the owner will find that there was evidence of a break-in that the officers didn’t observe. With that kind of information, the policy has always been to credit their account.”

Besides the notification letters, the commission has authorized a special staff and phone number to aid in the refund process.