11-16-2009, 05:05 PM
Wow...great job PBC law enforcement! Extra special credit goes to PBSO!! For more comedy, read the comments below the PBP article.... :snicker:
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/crime/home-alarms-a-false-sense-of-security-59710.html
When the alarm company said it was sending sheriff's deputies to Randi Dorfman's house one night in February, she sat back, relaxed and waited.
They were coming as a precaution, after all. Her husband had tripped the alarm, then forgotten the verbal password when the company called.
The suburban Lake Worth couple waited 15 minutes for a patrol car to arrive. Then 20. Then a half-hour.
By the time Palm Beach County sheriff's deputies showed up at the door, a full hour had gone by. By then, the Dorfmans were in bed.
"We were asleep and the bell rings," she recalled. "They said there was an accident and that was why they were late."
The long wait made her wonder: What if a burglar had been in the house?
Each year, tens of thousands of Palm Beach County residents pay hundreds of dollars to companies that monitor their home and business alarms, ready to send police at the first sign of trouble.
But the sense of security they peddle can be illusory, a review by The Palm Beach Post found. Local police agencies, inundated by tens of thousands of false alarms a year, are far slower to respond to security alarm calls than active crimes.
The county's largest law enforcement agency, the sheriff's office, takes an average of 15.5 minutes to show up at the scene of activated security alarms, according to a Post analysis of more than a year and a half of dispatch records.
Three other large police departments surveyed — in West Palm Beach, Palm Beach Gardens and Boca Raton — respond more quickly but still take a combined average of nine minutes.
It can be a long time to wait if a burglar is in the house, and for thousands of Palm Beach County residents each year, the wait is far longer.
In the 20-month period surveyed, The Post found more than 5,000 cases when officers took more than a half-hour to respond to activated security alarms, the majority of them in unincorporated portions of the county patrolled by the sheriff's office.
Companies quiet on issue
The security alarm industry is aware of the wait times, which experts say are similar around the country. But you're not likely to hear about them from an alarm company salesman.
Boca Raton-based ADT Security Services, the nation's largest home alarm company, says it gives its customers no figures for expected response times and does not track them nationally or locally.
Broadview Security, formerly Brink's Home Security, says its salespeople stay mum on the issue since there is no way to know when an officer will arrive.
"We can't even say the police are responding," Broadview spokesman Dave Simon said. "An alarm signal coming to us is no indication that the police are coming to the house."
The sheriff's office's response time is quicker in the municipalities it patrols — averaging as little as seven or eight minutes in towns such as Lake Worth and Royal Palm Beach — but the waits in the unincorporated county are considerably higher. There, the typical delay is 18 minutes.
Alarm industry officials agree it's a long wait, especially when considering that alarm companies wait minutes to contact the home or business owner before dialing 911.
But experts say response times in Palm Beach County generally reflect estimated national averages — and maintain they are low enough to act as a deterrent to thieves.
Customers typically pay between $25 and $40 a month for monitoring companies to call police when their alarm is activated. An industry spokesman argued that just the threat that officers might respond more quickly than normal is enough to deter plenty of burglars.
"We accept there's a percentage they (local police) get to very fast and a percentage they don't get to fast at all," said Ron Walters, director of the Security Industry Alarm Coalition, a national industry group . "There's always the threat that they'll be there faster. There's no way for anybody to know how quickly they'll respond."
Sometimes, of course, cops do respond extraordinarily fast. The Post's analysis showed that 12.5 percent of the time, officers responded in less than four minutes.
But such cases are the exception.
Just as common are long waits like that of Paul Grewenig, who admits he had few expectations for his alarm system when he moved into a gated community west of Lake Worth.
Even so, he was surprised to find one day in April that sheriff's deputies took 45 minutes to respond to an alarm call at his house while he was out of town.
As in Dorfman's case, it was a false alarm — a malfunctioning motion sensor, he said.
But in his mind it underscored the long wait he would likely be up against if someone were to break in.
"Even 10, 15 minutes is a long time to wait if people rob your home," Grewenig said. "It's not really helping you if they're coming after 45 minutes."
Calls aren't top priorities
Although alarm monitoring companies aren't likely to tell their customers, getting to a security alarm call is rarely an officer's top priority.
In fact, dispatchers intentionally categorize alarm calls as lower-priority calls than most other crimes.
If someone calls 911 to report a break-in witnessed firsthand, for example, that call would be dispatched to a sheriff's deputy as a "priority 1" call, requesting a near-immediate response by the deputy.
When an alarm monitoring company calls 911 to report an activated alarm, however, that call is dubbed a "priority 3," and generally gets an immediate response only if a deputy does not have any priority 1 calls pending.
"Part of what comes into play is what else is going on in the county," said Tom Cunningham, section manager for the sheriff's office's communications division. "In general, high-priority incidents take precedent."
The major reason for the lower status is the staggering numbers of false alarms.
Industry officials say improved technology means fewer bad alarms, but as security systems grow more popular, local police are bombarded daily with bad calls.
In a 20-month period beginning in January 2008, the sheriff's office alone fielded more than 70,000 alarm calls, the vast majority of them false alarms.
The numbers are so high each year that the sheriff's office now requires alarm owners in the areas it patrols to register their systems and pay annual $25 permit fees for deputies to respond to alarms at their address.
Broadview Security, like most alarm monitoring companies, tries to contact the home or business owner before contacting police.
If the owner can somehow confirm that the house or office is being burglarized, Broadview's dispatchers can report it to police as a burglary in progress, prompting a quicker response time.
But far more common is for the call to be sent to 911 dispatchers as an alarm call, sending it toward the bottom of the department's priority heap.
"If there's three homicides in an area and 10 vehicles are going to them, you're not getting a response for two and a half hours," Simon said.
"The good thing," he said, "is that the burglar doesn't know that."
They do now!!! Ummm...Radio Shack scanners, anyone?? :devil:
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/crime/home-alarms-a-false-sense-of-security-59710.html
When the alarm company said it was sending sheriff's deputies to Randi Dorfman's house one night in February, she sat back, relaxed and waited.
They were coming as a precaution, after all. Her husband had tripped the alarm, then forgotten the verbal password when the company called.
The suburban Lake Worth couple waited 15 minutes for a patrol car to arrive. Then 20. Then a half-hour.
By the time Palm Beach County sheriff's deputies showed up at the door, a full hour had gone by. By then, the Dorfmans were in bed.
"We were asleep and the bell rings," she recalled. "They said there was an accident and that was why they were late."
The long wait made her wonder: What if a burglar had been in the house?
Each year, tens of thousands of Palm Beach County residents pay hundreds of dollars to companies that monitor their home and business alarms, ready to send police at the first sign of trouble.
But the sense of security they peddle can be illusory, a review by The Palm Beach Post found. Local police agencies, inundated by tens of thousands of false alarms a year, are far slower to respond to security alarm calls than active crimes.
The county's largest law enforcement agency, the sheriff's office, takes an average of 15.5 minutes to show up at the scene of activated security alarms, according to a Post analysis of more than a year and a half of dispatch records.
Three other large police departments surveyed — in West Palm Beach, Palm Beach Gardens and Boca Raton — respond more quickly but still take a combined average of nine minutes.
It can be a long time to wait if a burglar is in the house, and for thousands of Palm Beach County residents each year, the wait is far longer.
In the 20-month period surveyed, The Post found more than 5,000 cases when officers took more than a half-hour to respond to activated security alarms, the majority of them in unincorporated portions of the county patrolled by the sheriff's office.
Companies quiet on issue
The security alarm industry is aware of the wait times, which experts say are similar around the country. But you're not likely to hear about them from an alarm company salesman.
Boca Raton-based ADT Security Services, the nation's largest home alarm company, says it gives its customers no figures for expected response times and does not track them nationally or locally.
Broadview Security, formerly Brink's Home Security, says its salespeople stay mum on the issue since there is no way to know when an officer will arrive.
"We can't even say the police are responding," Broadview spokesman Dave Simon said. "An alarm signal coming to us is no indication that the police are coming to the house."
The sheriff's office's response time is quicker in the municipalities it patrols — averaging as little as seven or eight minutes in towns such as Lake Worth and Royal Palm Beach — but the waits in the unincorporated county are considerably higher. There, the typical delay is 18 minutes.
Alarm industry officials agree it's a long wait, especially when considering that alarm companies wait minutes to contact the home or business owner before dialing 911.
But experts say response times in Palm Beach County generally reflect estimated national averages — and maintain they are low enough to act as a deterrent to thieves.
Customers typically pay between $25 and $40 a month for monitoring companies to call police when their alarm is activated. An industry spokesman argued that just the threat that officers might respond more quickly than normal is enough to deter plenty of burglars.
"We accept there's a percentage they (local police) get to very fast and a percentage they don't get to fast at all," said Ron Walters, director of the Security Industry Alarm Coalition, a national industry group . "There's always the threat that they'll be there faster. There's no way for anybody to know how quickly they'll respond."
Sometimes, of course, cops do respond extraordinarily fast. The Post's analysis showed that 12.5 percent of the time, officers responded in less than four minutes.
But such cases are the exception.
Just as common are long waits like that of Paul Grewenig, who admits he had few expectations for his alarm system when he moved into a gated community west of Lake Worth.
Even so, he was surprised to find one day in April that sheriff's deputies took 45 minutes to respond to an alarm call at his house while he was out of town.
As in Dorfman's case, it was a false alarm — a malfunctioning motion sensor, he said.
But in his mind it underscored the long wait he would likely be up against if someone were to break in.
"Even 10, 15 minutes is a long time to wait if people rob your home," Grewenig said. "It's not really helping you if they're coming after 45 minutes."
Calls aren't top priorities
Although alarm monitoring companies aren't likely to tell their customers, getting to a security alarm call is rarely an officer's top priority.
In fact, dispatchers intentionally categorize alarm calls as lower-priority calls than most other crimes.
If someone calls 911 to report a break-in witnessed firsthand, for example, that call would be dispatched to a sheriff's deputy as a "priority 1" call, requesting a near-immediate response by the deputy.
When an alarm monitoring company calls 911 to report an activated alarm, however, that call is dubbed a "priority 3," and generally gets an immediate response only if a deputy does not have any priority 1 calls pending.
"Part of what comes into play is what else is going on in the county," said Tom Cunningham, section manager for the sheriff's office's communications division. "In general, high-priority incidents take precedent."
The major reason for the lower status is the staggering numbers of false alarms.
Industry officials say improved technology means fewer bad alarms, but as security systems grow more popular, local police are bombarded daily with bad calls.
In a 20-month period beginning in January 2008, the sheriff's office alone fielded more than 70,000 alarm calls, the vast majority of them false alarms.
The numbers are so high each year that the sheriff's office now requires alarm owners in the areas it patrols to register their systems and pay annual $25 permit fees for deputies to respond to alarms at their address.
Broadview Security, like most alarm monitoring companies, tries to contact the home or business owner before contacting police.
If the owner can somehow confirm that the house or office is being burglarized, Broadview's dispatchers can report it to police as a burglary in progress, prompting a quicker response time.
But far more common is for the call to be sent to 911 dispatchers as an alarm call, sending it toward the bottom of the department's priority heap.
"If there's three homicides in an area and 10 vehicles are going to them, you're not getting a response for two and a half hours," Simon said.
"The good thing," he said, "is that the burglar doesn't know that."
They do now!!! Ummm...Radio Shack scanners, anyone?? :devil: