Intruder Alarms: An alarming situation?

Statistics relating to intruder alarms for the year 2003 just published by the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) show a healthy decrease in the number of false alarms recorded (which are down by 12%, in fact), a small upturn in the number of genuine alarms (1%) and a recorded increase in remote systems with a police URN of 11%.

Surely this must be good news for the industry? If the latter figure is a measure of growth then it's clear the market for intruder alarm systems must be expanding. At the same time, the efficiency of those systems (as measured by the ratio of false to genuine activations) seems to be steadily improving.

Although I've only recently taken on the chair of the ACPO Security Systems Working Group – and with it the national policy lead for the police service on intruder alarms – I've been a police officer for many years now. Early in my service, I well remember that the activation of an intruder alarm would punctuate what might otherwise be a relatively routine night shift with a burst of adrenaline as we'd make haste to attend the scene, unsure of what we would find on arrival and whether or not a burglar would run straight into our arms.

Of course that scenario never materialised, and over time an alarm activation was met with prompt police attendance but more than a little scepticism about the benefit to be gained.

Policing is changing
Nowadays, having responsibility for operational policing in a geographically large county experiencing rapid population growth, the very same issue takes on an altogether different significance. Policing is changing, and the traditional assumptions about what it is we do have to be challenged.

The advent of a – most welcome – tighter performance regime within the service, and greater awareness and information about the costs of various aspects of policing activity mean that I have to conduct a cost/benefit (or, if you'd prefer, a 'bang per buck') analysis of my officers' deployment.

What I – and at least 42 counterparts in England and Wales – have found on doing this is that the alarms industry incurs a major cost in terms of policing. One relatively small force has assessed the cost of attending false alarms at £800,000 in a single year. Well over 0.5% of that force's annual budget, in fact. How many businesses would tolerate wasteful overheads of this nature? Of course, this is an oversimplification of the issue. There are genuine alarm activations, and last year nearly 3,500 (0.6%) of them resulted in an arrest (or arrests) being made. Also, security systems have value in deterring crime and providing reassurance. Legitimate policing outcomes, then, but very difficult to quantify.

Police forces under pressure to tackle unprecedented levels of gun crime and terrorist threat, and deliver against a variety of targets, are fully entitled to question whether the performance of the alarms industry is as good as it could be. Customers that invest considerable sums in systems which may then be disconnected for a variety of reasons may feel the same way.

As a chief officer with a diverse range of responsibilities, I'd feel a whole lot better about attending alarm activations if the chances of those activations being genuine were significantly increased (from one in nine in 2003, I would suggest, to one in two by 2006).

Is this impossible? Frankly, I don't think so. CCTV will surely replace audio as the most commonly used confirmation/monitoring technique. Standards can be raised. Alarm Receiving Centres – which obviously play the pivotal role in delivering false or genuine alarms to the police service – are of varying quality. If they all performed to the standard of the very best, the police service's ingrained scepticism about the value of responding to alarms would be eradicated.

Added value to the client
Efficient and effective collaboration between the police service and the industry – with the clear goal in sight of achieving a 50% genuine alarm ratio come 2006 – would deliver a service to the general public by reducing the wasteful deployment of police officers.

It would also provide added value to the customer by reducing the chances of their system being removed from police response while ensuring that the systems they purchase are more effective. The deterrent and reassurance values of security systems can only be improved through such an approach.

Our alarm statistics for 2003 are good news because they do indeed show a steady improvement in the situation. In order to build co-operation between us in the trying years to come, what we need is a major step change in the working relationship between the police service and the security systems industry.

For the public, this would result in better value services. For the customer, there'd be a better product. For the police service? Greater efficiencies. And for the industry? A higher value service to the customer with the potential for higher profitability. That's what you might call a win-win scenario.