• Verified Alarm Response Policy
• Reason for Verified Alarm Response
• Frequently Asked Questions

Frequently Asked Questions Regarding Verfied Response Policy

Why are the Fremont Police no longer going to respond to my alarm if it activates?

Contrary to what the press and media have often reported this is not a fiscal issue, by that we mean the costs of responding to alarms is money that would be spent by the police department regardless of whether we respond to alarms or not. We would spend the resources responding to other types of crime and service calls from the community in any event.

In 2004 we had 23 actual burglaries out of 7,000 alarm calls last year that is a 99.7% false alarm rate.

This decision was made due to staffing levels. There are 85 cities in the U.S. with populations greater than 200,000 we are at the bottom of the list in staffing not by just a little but significantly lower (to meet the average we would need 552 police officers).

To make it more fair we looked at U.S. cities between 200,000 and 400,000 population which takes New York, Chicago, Los Angeles etc. out of the equation, to get to the average of the 44 cities with a population similar in size to Fremont we would need 428 officers.

Looking at cities in California with a population of 200,000 or more again we are at the bottom, to get to that average we would need 336 officers. There are 8 cities in Cal. with populations between 200,000 and 400,000 thousand just to get to the average number of officers for those cities which most closely mirror Fremont we would need to hire 222 officers.

We even looked at Alameda County and excluded Oakland due to its size and Piedmont which has 2 officers per thousand, and found the average in Alameda County to be 1.37 officers per thousand which means we would need to hire 287 officers. FREMONT HAS 188 authorized officer positions. This figure is the lowest in the nation, state and county. All this information can be verified in FBI Crime in the United States 2003, published by the U.S. Department of Justice. The 2004 edition will not be published until Sept. of this year but the figures are not going to change very much if at all according to the many chiefs we have talked to.

We also point out that Fremont is geographically the same size as the cities of Albany, Berkeley, Emeryville, Oakland, Piedmont and San Leandro all put together and we are forced to protect this land area with as little as 8 police officers on duty.

We often point out that we also have 12 officers out on injured on duty status with various forms of surgery and have another 12 officers in entry-level training taking our actual numbers down to 164 officers. A typical law enforcement agency protecting a population and geographical area our size would need a minimum of 212 officers. It is like a baseball team with 9 players. If three get injured, quit, or for any reason cannot be at the game you play with 6, not 9. You try to cover the outfield with 2 instead of three, and it just gets worse if 4 or 5 players are missing.

If we don't have enough officers why not charge for false alarms and use the money to cover the costs of responding to false alarms?


We do charge for false alarms, last year the revenue from false alarms totaled less than $40,000. This is hardly enough to hire police officers. We adopted the alarm industries solution to false alarms called the Model States/Model Cities ordinance back in 1999. This ordinance provided for fines after two false alarms in a year, and required a permit, which initially costs $40 and is renewable every two years for $20. Unfortunately we don't have a clue how many alarm systems are in Fremont. The alarm industry refused for four years to even provide us with a customer lists, claiming proprietary interests. They successfully passed legislation in 2003, which protected their customer lists from any abuse by law enforcement and with that assurance we got four companies to provide us with a list of customers. One companies list was completely out of date. One company has been proactive in the last several months in providing alarm permit applications to customers and forwarding completed applications and checks for permit fees to the City. The industry claims that on average in the United States 20% to 24% of the residential structures are alarmed, for Fremont that would mean between 13,000 and 16, 000 homes. We have less than 6,000 residential permits on file.

Under the ordinance the City, not the alarm industry is required to issue permits, track all alarms to determine if a false alarm call does have a permit and if not then contact the property owner and somehow get them to apply for and pay for a permit. We are also responsible for tracking all false alarms, making sure that each customer gets their complementary two false alarms. The officers responding to an alarm have to determine who the property owner is since no one is home and then provide our alarm abatement officer with this information, if a citation is warranted then the officers issue one. If the person contests the citation we have to provide for the hearing. If they don't pay we have to figure out how to collect the fine. The alarm companies do none of the work involved with false alarms.

Finally it is not City policy or practice to hire employees, especially police officers who take a full year to train on an unreliable revenue stream.

Why not charge for all false alarms, and charge a larger fee for the permits that would generate more revenue and you could hire more officers?


Again, all the work is on the Police Department. We talked to the Chief of Vacaville Police Department, which adopted the newest alarm ordinance championed by the alarm industry. Vacaville attempted to go with Verified Response but they ended up with community meetings, and the design of a new ordinance. According to the Chief no alarm company has given him a customer list as of March 2005 and the ordinance was been in effect a year for now.

More importantly we don't believe the City is willing to hire police officers behind a revenue stream that is unpredictable or unstable.

Why not charge alarm companies for the false alarms?


The alarm industry will fight this. It would set a precedent in California that they will not agree to under any circumstances. They threatened us with litigation when we talked to them about it in the summer of 2004. In Milwaukee when some Council members proposed an alternative to verified response that being the alarm companies would be fined and they could collect the fine from the customer the response was: "Mike Horgan, President of the Wisconsin Burglar and Fire Alarm Association said the industry agrees that tougher fines are needed, but does not want to be responsible for collecting the money. It would be similar to saying (when) we ticketed someone for speeding, we're going to fine the car dealer." We would add here that most alarm companies do not even track their own customer false alarm rates unless it is an equipment failure and they have to make a service call for which they charge a fee. The alarm industry would need to establish an entire new division to their workforce to track and charge for false alarm fees and this is something they are not willing to do.

Is my homeowners insurance is going to increase?


This is another allegation from the alarm industry. We have copies of letters from State Farm Insurance, All State, Farmers Insurance, and B&B Insurance Inc. all of Utah indicating that no insurance rates will increase as a result of verified response. We also talked to a State Farm agent here in Fremont. He advised me that the official policy of State Farm is that if you have an audible alarm you get a 5% discount and if you have a monitored alarm you get a 10% discount. State Farm is not concerned with who responds to an alarm call. There is simply no truth to this statement, and the alarm industry knows that.

Are burglars now going to come to Fremont and steal us blind?


There are numerous agencies who practice verified response, some include:
• Las Vegas Metro Police Department
• Lane County Sheriff Department
• Arvada, Colorado Police Department
• West Valley, Utah Police Department
• Salt Lake City Police Department
• Taylorsville, Utah Police Department
• Henderson, Nevada Police Department
• Eugene, Oregon Police Department
• Victoria, British Columbia Police Department
• Murray, Utah Police Department
• Salem, Oregon Police Department
• Winnipeg, Canada Police Department
• Yakima, Washington Police Department
• Westminster, Colorado Police Department
• Breckenridge, Colorado Police Department
• Summit County, Colorado Sheriff's Department
• Broomfield, Colorado Police Department
• Lakewood, Colorado Police Department
• South Salt Lake City, Utah Police Department
• Burien, Washington Police Department
• Milwaukee, Wisconsin Police Department
• Bellingham, Washington Police Department
• Aurora, Colorado Police Department

None have seen any significant increase in the rate of burglaries. Salt Lake City which is touted by the alarm industry as having a 20% increase in burglaries showed a 6.9% increase between 2000 and 2003 (last year figures are available from the FBI). They started verified response in 2000. Also remember they hosted the 2002 Winter Olympics. During this same period of time, 2000 to 2003 Fremont burglary rate increased 6.4% and we were responding to alarms. Yakima, Washington PD in the first six months of verified response saw a 14% decrease in burglaries.

There is no correlation between alarms and burglaries. Alarms, as proven throughout the United States only indicate a problem with the alarm! It is not an indication of a burglary since 98% nationwide are false alarms.

Our burglary rate is impacted more by the lack of time officers have to do proactive police work than any alarm response program. We don't have the time to do investigative vehicle and pedestrian stops, to follow up on parolees and probationers who have search and seizure clauses or to do much in the way of preventative patrol. The time spent last year responding to and searching locations where false alarms were activated equaled over 4,600 hours of time that could have been spent in more productive police work that would have a direct impact on our overall crime rate. Our arrests for 2004 were down by 1,200 over the 2003 that has a direct impact on crime. The claim that Fremont will be carried out on the backs of burglars is nothing more than a scare tactic used by the alarm industry.

Crime has numerous causal factors including:

• Population density and degree of urbanization
• Composition of population particularly youth concentration
• Stability of population including resident's mobility, commuting patterns.
• Modes of transportation and freeway systems
• Economic conditions, including median income, poverty level, and job availability.
• Cultural factors and educational, recreational and religious characteristics.
• Family conditions with respect to divorce and family cohesiveness.
• Climate
• Effective strength of law enforcement agencies.
• Administrative and investigative emphasis of law enforcement.
• Policies of other components of the criminal justice systems (D.A., judges, probation, prison system)
• Citizen's attitude towards crime
• Crime reporting practices of citizens. The assumption that crime will increase if public response is not provided to private alarm systems is absurd.

Alarm systems are in two parts, 1) the alarm system; 2) remote monitoring of the alarm system. The basic system consists of all the window and door sensors, interior motion sensors, controllers, local bells/lights/sirens, etc. This is where the signs and decals and evidence of an alarm system offer the greatest detection and deterrence 100% of the time. The alarm industry recommends that every household and business have a basic local alarm system. "Monitoring" is a secondary add-on service that is intended to report malfunctions or abnormal conditions for alarm company repair and service. Several decades ago, when the alarm industry was experiencing fast growth, it became too costly for the industry to respond to increased number of trouble calls, and by calling them "burglar alarms" the industry could get the police to make those first response calls; and it also added greater perceived value for higher fees to the consumer, at no cost to the alarm company. The rest is history.

We would never say that burglaries would not go up when we go to verified response any more than we would guarantee that burglaries will go down if we adopted a more stringent false alarm ordinance, just as the alarm industry will never admit that having an alarm will cause the apprehension of a burglar.

You need to learn from the private sector how to manage in a down economy.


First the private sector would dump a program that cost them $680,000 annually in productivity time with a return of less than $120,000 annually. Secondly if they could make it work for the overall good of the company they would outsource this program. Tell us of any other industry that makes a profit from selling a product, collects a monthly profit from that product, where their product only operates correctly 2% of the time, and where another entity, who does not share in the profit from the product's sale and operation, is required to provide free services to support that product? This has been my response to anyone who talks to me about running the PD like a private business. Besides the obvious fact that we don't sell a product but instead a service, and in a down economy our customers don't reduce their service demands because they have less money to spend so making the comparison is like apples to oranges.

Are people going to die as a result of the police not responding.


Intrusion alarms are designed to protect property not people. Alarms featuring panic buttons, duress or robbery buttons are alarms systems to protect people and we will still respond to those types of alarms and they will be a high priority response for the police department.

I pay taxes for this service and I expect that my tax dollar will be spent responding to my alarm.


The reality is, if we take the alarm industries statistics that between 20% and 24% of the 68,000 residential structures in Fremont have an alarm system. That means that between 51,700 and 54,400 homes are not alarmed. Those homeowners are basically subsidizing a minority number of homeowners with an extra police service that they do not themselves receive. We were never asked if we wanted to participate in this effort it simply evolved. When you look at it from one perspective the alarm industry, by default, is contracting government services without approval, which is unlawful. Police response to private alarm systems is not a legal mandate of the City, nor is police response to private alarm systems a right of any taxpayer/citizen group. Owning and operating an alarm system is a private contract, with a private for-profit firm, for a private service. Requests for alarm response are the only calls for police services when police have zero screening of the call. All other calls for police assistance have interaction screening between the police dispatcher and the caller.

As a home and/or business owner you will not see any difference in alarm response. Our current response time average is 21 minutes. Our new policy requires the alarm industry to respond via contracts with private security firms. All of the firms we surveyed indicated a response time of 20 minutes or less. If they find a burglary occurred or in-progress they will call us and we will respond. As it is for the past year we have consistently not responded to alarm calls on at least one shift a day because our staffing levels fell so low that we dropped Priority Three calls for service.

People question the value and effectiveness of private security. In the U.S. there are 1.4 million private security guards vs. 700,000 police officers and sheriff deputies. You don't see an armed police officer at Wells Fargo Bank, or Costco or Home Depot. There is a role that private security can play in the area of false alarms. We also have indicated that we will train selected security guards from each company hired by private security and they in turn will train the remaining guards. It is called train the trainers. We have a complete lesson plan, which we obtained from Salt Lake City PD and have qualified personnel in the department that can provide this training.

Why do i need a permit if the police aren't going to respond?


The permit allows an alarm system to be installed. The permit does not obligate the city to respond to alarms going off. Under the Verified Response procedure, certain high priority alarm features such as panic, duress and robbery features, and potentially unmonitored alarm systems will continue to require a permit. The permit supplies contact and other information to the City as needed.

What about the alarm industries new proposal to reduce false alarms?


The Alarm Industries new solution and what he touted as a success in Boulder, Colorado is called "Enhanced Call Verification." This means the alarm/monitoring company will make two phone calls instead of one. Currently if an alarm activates they call the home or business, if they don't get an answer they call the police department to report what is essentially a malfunctioning alarm. Of course the industry could have been doing this for the past ten years but have not, and will not, until faced with verified response models. Even the alarm industry had to admit to at the community meeting that the alarm industry missed this because they didn't understand the popularity of cellular telephones.

What is really happening with enhanced call verification (ECV)? The central stations (most often not even located in California) are going to place a second call either a cell phone number provided by the alarm owner, or other parties rather than the police or private security. This also comes from the same organization, which encourages the adoption of escalating fees for alarm users. So if a citizen receives a call of alarm activation they are to make a decision whether to send the police or private security, although they have no more information than the central station! Or, does the citizen respond themselves to minimize the risk of being hit with another false alarm fee? The second problem for law enforcement is there is no way to verify that the monitoring company ever made the first call, yet alone a second call.

This is not something I wanted to do, but the reality is in the last quarter of 2004 we had 385 people go on line and report an auto burglary losses included laptops, cell phones, briefcases, credit cards etc. No officer responded, no evidence was collected, no investigation done and during that same period of time we responded to 1,750 malfunctioning alarms. This does not make sense? Obviously we could not have responded to all 385 auto burglaries, but we could have been doing real police work instead of running around check malfunctioning alarms.