False Alarms Signal Hefty Bills on Way

If you haven’t obtained a permit for your home or business alarm system in the city of Los Angeles, you’ve been getting a free ride on false alarms.

The permits currently allow for two false alarms per year. More than that and the city has been charging $80 per incident to help pay the cost of police response to more than 140,000 false alarms a year, a massive drain on officers’ time.

If you don’t have a permit, you’re supposed to get only one freebie a year and then pay a penalty of $80 per false alarm.

But police officials admit that the estimated 35,000 unlicensed systems in the city have not been penalized at all, either for lack of permits or multiple false alarms.

Until now.

As of this week, the free ride came to an end.

“We’re sending out bills, and some of them are pretty high,” said Larry Williams, head of the alarms unit for the Los Angeles Police Department. The bills are going to owners of unlicensed systems that had more than one false alarm in the last year.

In all, almost 5,000 bills are being issued for more than $1.15 million, Williams said.

“I don’t have information on what the highest bill is that we’re sending out,” Williams said, “but we do have some in the four-figure category.”

He said police are not planning, at least for now, on issuing citations for not having a permit.

“It’s a misdemeanor, but we haven’t charged anybody,” he said. “Our goal is to get those permits in place.”

The cost of getting an alarm permit is $31 for the first year and $30 for each additional year.

Williams said that even if the system is properly installed, chances are you’ll appreciate the fact that the department doesn’t charge for the first couple of false alarms.

“Best that we can tell, the average false alarm rate, per system, is 1.05 times a year,” he said.

That statistic is bolstered by the false alarm rate for systems at businesses, which is much higher than in home systems.

“One thing we see a lot is simply employee error in setting the alarm properly,” Williams said. “You have a retail business that has a bunch of high school students as employees, and at closing time they might be a little distracted.

“They close up without setting the alarm, and after they are down the street a bit, it goes off.”

Williams said a popular misconception is that the alarms are wired directly to police stations.

“The signal goes off at whatever monitoring service the alarm owner has,” Williams said.

“If the monitoring service can’t verify that the alarm was set off in error, they call 911 and alert the police.”

Because 96% of alarms are false, they get a low police priority. “The average response time to an alarm is about 55 minutes,” Williams said, clearly enough time for someone to make off with your VCR.

For more effective alarm protection, Williams suggested contracting with an alarm company that has its own response staff. Also effective are systems that have sound sensors, allowing workers at the monitoring company to hear what is going in a building when an alarm is triggered. If they hear something that indicates a robbery or burglary is in progress, they can get that information to the police and the response time will probably be much faster.

These extras, of course, can add greatly to the cost of an alarm system.

In the meantime, if you need information on preventing false alarms or on the permits, the LAPD alarm unit can be reached at (213) 485-2931.