COLUMN ONE : Alarming Problems in Security : As alarm systems proliferate, false calls are infuriating police and fire personnel. More and more cities are issuing stiff fines and refusing to respond.

Logic dictates that it could happen at any time, but by some immutable law of nature they always seem to go off about 2 in the morning, just as you’ve nestled into that first really sound slumber in weeks.

“AH-OOOOOO-GAH! AH-OO OOOO-GAH! AH-OOOOOO-GAH!” Or perhaps, depending on the model, “oooOOOOWAAAAAA! oooOOOOWAAAAAAA! ooo OOOOWAAAAAAA!” sort of a high-tech throwback to those wee-of-the-morning reveilles when Junior was going through his colicky stage.

If you’re slowly being tortured by the wind or cats or mice or poltergeists or whatever it is that strikes up the car-alarm symphony in your otherwise somnolent neck of the woods, then think how the police feel as they scamper from one howling burglar alarm to another--almost every one of them false.

“They are driving the police crazy in some districts,” said Joe Giloley, the official in charge of alarm regulation in Montgomery County, Md.

With dizzying speed, hospitals, stores, high-rises and homes, as well as private automobiles, are being wired with sophisticated fire detection and security systems. This technologically driven boom is affording a measure of protection and peace of mind, but certainly not of peace and quiet, especially for public safety workers.

Police and fire officials across the United States and Canada say they are drowning in unsubstantiated alarm calls. In the Chicago suburb of Evanston, oversensitive automatic alarms sent firefighters and all their equipment racing to the local hospital more than 120 times in 1990, and they never found so much as a puff of smoke. In the first six months of this year, Evanston firemen were summoned 33 times by false alarms at a retirement home. In a third of those alarms, the culprit was burnt toast.

Burglar alarm systems are far more common and cause even bigger headaches. Officials in Houston estimated that the Police Department had wasted nearly $16 million chasing down 99,000 false alarms in the first nine months of this year alone.

Most cities report that at least 95% of burglar alarms turn out to be false, triggered either by human error, faulty equipment or bad weather. In some jurisdictions, the rate tops 99%. “It’s like Ivory soap,” said Chicago police patrolman Brant Kustwin, flipping the old commercial standard of purity on its ear.

Authorities are beginning to fight back. Many cities now impose penalties for overactive alarms. In San Diego, for example, the third false alarm in a 30-day period brings a $25 fine. After that the price goes up, from $50 to $200 per infraction.

Los Angeles alarm users can get away with four false alarms in any 12-month period, but are slapped with a $65 fine for each one beyond that. The penalty, instituted in 1987, hasn’t cured the problem, but it seems to have helped. In 1985, the roughly 60,000 alarm systems registered in the city generated 146,000 calls, of which 97.5% were false, according to the Los Angeles Police Commission. By last year the number of operating systems exceeded 91,000, but the number of calls had dropped to just under 130,000, approximately 96% of which were false.

Illinois lawmakers recently outlawed a particularly error-prone type of alarm system that automatically generates a 911 emergency call when triggered.

Police in Portland, Me., still check out all burglar alarms, but they no longer speed to the scene. The reason: Officers were getting into too many accidents on what often turned out to be wild-goose chases. “We felt this was crazy, for the civilian population out there to have us racing back and forth to alarms, the majority of which are unfounded,” said Michael Chitwood, Portland’s police chief.

Indeed, in Waterbury, Conn., two firefighters were killed and two others were injured last year when their firetruck slammed into some trees on the way to what turned out to be a false alarm. One of the survivors is suing the companies involved in selling and monitoring the alarm equipment in question. The defendants are expected to argue that faulty brakes on the fire engine, not the alarm, caused the accident.

Starting last year, officials in Toronto began taking what is probably the toughest stand against false alarms in North America: No more than three false alarms will be tolerated from a particular location in any given year. After a fourth false alarm, police will not respond to any further alarm for the next 365 days.

The policy carries especially severe repercussions for jewelry stores, stereo shops and other high-risk businesses, which must have alarm systems to get insurance. In 1990, there were nearly 4,900 such service suspensions. Meanwhile, the number of alarm activations fell to 74,705 from a high of 130,035 in 1988.

“We finally said enough was enough,” explained Sgt. Ted Hilton, alarm response coordinator for the Toronto police. “. . . Something serious could be happening where people are in legitimate need of police, and we have nobody available because they’re running around chasing all these false alarms.”

Montgomery County, Md., officials say they plan to float something like the Toronto plan before the nine-member County Council sometime this month. They’re also considering an innovative proposal that burglar alarm signals be linked to the 900-area-code toll call network. That way, any time an alarm sounds, be it false or real, the alarm user would be automatically charged. Fees could range from $25 to $35 a call.

False alarms have been the bugaboo of security ever since there have been security systems, however primitive. As far back as a century ago, Mark Twain, in his whimsical short story, “The McWilliamses and The Burglar Alarm” captured the unnerving phenomenon in terms many a frazzled homeowner of the 1990s could understand:

“Every morning at 5 the cook opened the kitchen door, in the way of business, and rip went that gong! The first time this happened I thought the last day was come for sure. I didn’t think it in bed--no, but out of it--for the first effect of that frightful gong is to hurl you across the house, and slam you against the wall, and then curl you up, and squirm you like a spider on a stove lid, till somebody shuts the kitchen door.”

These days they don’t use gongs but sirens, infrared motion detectors, heat sensors, vibration monitors and a host of other computerized devices often hooked into a central monitoring station run by an alarm company, which then funnels calls to the police on a special dedicated phone line. One Arizona company uses super-sensitive microphones to eavesdrop on any improper after-hours noises. As with the VCR, the Walkman and the cellular phone, the more these systems proliferate, the cheaper they get. Therein lies part of the problem.

With crime rates soaring, the private security industry is on a roll. No one has a good handle on the number of systems out there, but by some estimates the industry is doing more than $9 billion a year in business and growing by more than $1 billion annually.

The National Burglar and Fire Alarm Assn., an industry trade group, represents about 13,000 companies. Some systems carry a price of $5,000 or more. More modest ones can be had for a few hundred dollars and the monthly monitoring fee, typically $20 to $30. Some hardware and appliance stores offer crude anti-theft apparatuses for as little as $50.

Melody Magnus of the Washington-based alarm group claimed--and many law enforcement experts agreed--that top-of-the-line security firms have fine-tuned equipment in recent years to minimize alarms caused by breakdowns, storms or animals mistaken for human intruders. But a lot of old equipment remains on the market, not to mention the cut-rate stuff peddled by legions of “trunk-slammers,” industry slang for fly-by-night home security salesmen.

Yetty Arp found out about trunk slammers the hard way eight years ago, when her Atlanta home was easily broken into just weeks after she bought a security system. Later, she learned that the installer had been fronting for a burglary ring.

Virtually all analysts agree that the biggest problem with alarm systems is not the systems themselves but the way people use and abuse them. The system protecting one Dallas business kept going off, over and over again, until someone realized that an advertising banner suspended from the ceiling was flapping back and forth every time the air conditioning kicked on, and this was triggering the motion detector.

In North Little Rock, Ark., technicians investigating the source of another recidivist alarm discovered a spider had spun its web near a sensor. Every time a little arachnid waddled by, all hell broke loose.

Helium balloons are also high on the stupid-alarm-tricks list, as are family pets, maids and store clerks who aren’t entrusted with deactivation codes and groggy homeowners who forget to turn the system off before they open the front door to pick up the morning newspaper.

Jerry Germeau, a detective in charge of false alarm prevention for the Seattle police, estimated that two out of three false alarms could be blamed on human error. Some of his favorite excuses:

--”My stupid bartender forgot the (deactivation) code.”

--A preoccupied employee opened the store and rushed to the bathroom without turning off the system.

--A large potted plant inexplicably fell over and set off the alarm.

--The alarm was activated by solar flare-induced cosmic interference.

Police in Dallas said the favorite excuse there is gigantic Texas cockroaches.

It is true that many people install alarms and then are plain baffled by all the buttons and codes on the control panels. Tom Carter, a former alarm installer in Georgia, said children reared on video games and computers seem to be far more adept at handling the systems than adults. “People panic when their alarms go off,” he said. “A lot of elderly customers totally freak out.”

The fumble-fingered-human factor is one reason the Denver Fire Department has urged that community’s City Council not to institute a schedule of fines for false alarms on safety systems that are required by law, such as those in skyscrapers or public buildings. “A problem with fine schedules is that people figure out that they are going to get fined, so they disable the system,” Assistant Fire Chief Tom Abbott said.

Though the feeling is far from universal, some law enforcement personnel say the number of false alarms only serves to show what a waste of money most home security systems are. Stuart Thompson, a sergeant with the Little Rock police, said most burglars can kick in a door, grab a TV and other loot and be gone before police can respond to an alarm. The most effective part of any system, he said, is the siren, which might scare off the crook. “A dog in a yard or a good neighbor will do that as effectively,” he maintained.

But Andrew Buck, a Temple University economist, disagreed. In a recently completed study, Buck and a fellow researcher analyzed burglary patterns in three economically diverse Philadelphia suburbs. They found that homes without alarms are up to three times as likely to be burglarized as homes with them.

From Buck’s point of view, the debate over alarms should not be over their deterrent value, but whether crime-fighting agencies can keep up as the number of systems in operation continues to mushroom. “You have to ask the question, can the police departments continue to deal at all with them, or are we going to have to set up a different way of responding to alarms?”

Advocates of stiff fines or service suspensions hope that such measures will not only scare alarm users into being more responsible but also prod alarm companies, afraid of losing business, into making their systems idiot-proof. In direct response to the crackdown in Toronto and a few other Canadian cities, one Toronto-based security firm recently introduced a system for stores and offices that makes it impossible for an employee to open the shop without first turning off the alarm.

Such innovations might work, but Sgt. Norm Miles of the York Regional Police Department, north of Toronto, said he came up with a better, and cheaper, way of reducing false alarms--at least in commercial establishments--back when he was pounding a beat.

Miles said he would case the parking lots of companies that had chronic alarm problems and take down the license plate numbers of the cars in the spaces reserved for top executives. “I’d find out where they lived and then, when the alarm went off at 3 in the morning, I’d phone the president of the company personally and say, ‘Get down here and fix your bloody alarm,’ ” he said with a chuckle. “It worked real well because they’d get really upset.”

Researchers Lianne Hart in Houston, Doug Conner in Seattle, Tracy Shryer in Chicago, Edith Stanley in Atlanta, Ann Rovin in Denver and Anna Virtue in Miami contributed to this story.