The Causes of False Alarms

As a corollary, if the efficiency of police-calling alarms could be improved, the opportunity for the police to arrive in sufficient time to make an arrest (since they wouldn't have been sent elsewhere in pursuit of a false alarm) would also be greatly increased.

Indeed, costing this out we estimated that no less than £350 million of public and private sector monies has been wasted each year on responding to false alarms. Ultimately, the fear persists that the police will assess their proportion of this waste against other priorities and not provide any 'first response' to alarms. A change which, it's widely felt, both the security industry and its customers must make every effort to avoid.

Our task, then, was to identify the true causes of false alarms and seek to establish further strategies for elimination. A process which, although it has been underway for many years, still has some considerable way to go.

While we in the UK are most unhappy with the present situation, research shows that we are, by comparison, the country that takes this issue most seriously and has experienced most success in reducing false alarms.

In the USA, for example, false alarm rates are quoted in the 95-99% range, thereby illustrating the relative quality of our own procedures (which themselves are certainly in need of improvement). During the year 2000 alone there were 36,000,000 false alarm activations in the States. Given the patchy response policies of different county, state and federal (not to say legal and police) structures, this makes the Americans' management of the false alarms issue several orders of magnitude more complex than our own.

The review section of Gill and Hemming's report addressed the issue of systems complexity. While simple systems typically produce fewer false alarms than do complex ones, the relevance of this comparison needs to be understood. High value or multi-user facilities (such as schools or religious buildings) may generate a relatively high number of false alarms, but it's to these premises that the police are more likely to respond quickly, regardless of whether the alarm may be false.

There's no index of complexity – and thorough design will tend towards complexity – against both value and sensitivity, and consequently no universal yardstick by which the alarm efficiency of one system can be measured against another.

Penalising the end user
There is a body of opinion that the arrangement of penalising users of systems which generate too many false calls by withdrawing police response may be punitive and non-productive. One study showed that 'bells-only' systems were 75% as likely to result in a police response (albeit not through an Alarm Receiving Centre) as signalled alarms, a figure which would not only drive up the number of police responses to false calls but at the same time undermine the figures on such calls which generally refer to signalled systems.

On the sliding scale of crimes – and given an overall prison population of 60,000 – the electronic alarms sector of the industry provides security professionals with a constant and significant opportunity to reduce crime, the fear of crime and to beat the

Another study showed that police responded to alarms which were off-response if they weren't too busy, or believed the premises to be sensitive. Thus, the research exemplifies the difficulty in establishing what actually constitutes a waste of police time as opposed to those situations whereby the police feel (in a near infinite variety of situations) it's their duty to respond.

One interesting nugget in Gill and Hemming's report is a review of Salt Lake City back in 2000 where the police decided not to offer first response, primarily to save on costs.

In essence, three developments occurred. The first was that the police responded only 720 times in a six-month period, compared with 10,200 responses in the previous year (apparently saving themselves $400,000). The second was that the burglary rate seemed to drop by 24%. The third centred on an improvement to the arrest rates (ie 720 targeted responses captured more criminals than 10,200 blanket responses).

ACPO representatives will probably read this section of the report again and again.

The industry's success rate
In overall terms, the UK police-industry approach has reduced the average number of false alarms per system per annum from 3.8 in 1977 to 0.9 come 2001 (a success undermined only by the increase in the sheer numbers of systems in operation).

The police spend a great deal of their time apprehending serious and dangerous criminals in other areas. They also spend a great deal of time investigating petty offences. A call to a signalled alarm still offers an opportunity to make an arrest of a determined criminal committing a premeditated crime, and even with the low strike rate this still nets several thousand criminals each year.

Within the detailed case studies framing 'The Causes of False Alarms', the three main causes were found to be user error (principally during entry and/or exit procedures), equipment failure (primarily in the form of faulty movement sensors) and line faults.

Gill and Hemming's report also points the way forward – towards a more detailed study of the real impact of confirmation technology and DD243, which together seem to be having very positive effects on false alarm figures.