Webmaster
08-29-2007, 10:38 AM
EIJIRO KAWADA
The News Tribune
Published: August 29th, 2007 01:00 AM
The burglar alarm went off four times at Lisa Jones’ house in the Riverside area in February and March. On all four occasions, she found evidence that someone had tried to break into her house.
But Jones works nights, and she didn’t call Pierce County sheriff’s deputies back to her house when she got home since nothing important was taken.
If she’d done so, and filed a police report, she might have saved herself a pile of cash.
In late March, a bill from the company that monitors Jones’ alarm system said she owed the county $1,000 in fines for false alarms. Pierce County collects $250 for every false call that county deputies answer.
“The fine was a little too high,” Jones said Tuesday in front of Pierce County Council members.
The County Council is considering a proposal to reduce the fine to $100 per false alarm after seeing that the hefty penalty it adopted in 2005 hasn’t been effective in reducing false calls.
One thing it did produce was a rash of complaints from residents, who paid about $380,000 in such fines in 2006.
Meanwhile, about 99 percent of all burglar alarms recorded in Pierce County are false, and there were 6,439 of them in 2006, said Jim Jenkins, patrol commander for the Sheriff’s Department. About a quarter of those resulted in a response by deputies.
“We try to put our energy on things that are actually occurring, and false alarms are not crime,” Jenkins told the County Council’s Public Safety and Human Services Committee on Tuesday.
Anticipating an outpouring of public comment on the proposal, the committee decided to postpone action on the item until Sept. 25.
When the county first addressed false alarms in 2005, residents opposed an original proposal that would have required a “verified response,” meaning someone had to witness the crime before deputies were sent to the scene.
The Sheriff’s Department estimated it was spending an average of $273,900 annually responding to false alarms.
That original proposal was discarded, and the county eventually adopted the $250 fine, hoping that alarm companies would improve their systems to avoid paying the fines.
However, it appears alarm companies just passed the fines on to their customers, and the number of false alarms hasn’t decreased.
Under the new proposal, the county will require “verified response” instead of the expensive fines. But this time, “verified response” doesn’t mean that someone first has to investigate the scene.
The county will require an alarm company requesting dispatch to do one of the following:
• Contact the alarm site and speak to a person.
• Confirm the alarm with live video or audio monitors.
• For a newer system designed to reduce false alarms, confirm that at least two independent alarms have been triggered.
• For an older system, confirm that two or more alarm signals were triggered over a certain period of time.
Jenkins said setting such a rule for older systems should reduce the number of false alarms.
Under the new rule, deputies will stop responding to a site after three false alarms, although there will be an appeal process to reinstate law enforcement response.
Pierce County hasn’t and won’t require verification of alarms by a resident because that could put a person in harm’s way.
“All it takes is one person to be in a wrong place at a wrong time,” said Councilman Terry Lee, R-Gig Harbor.
In reality, however, that seems to happen.
In Jones’ case at her Riverside home, her daughter, who was contacted by the alarm company, got to Jones’ house before deputies on all four occasions because the Sheriff’s Department is spread thin.
Sheriff Paul Pastor said his department would address the issue.
“We don’t want people responding before us,” he said. “Maybe we haven’t done enough education.”
WHO: Pierce County Council’s Public Safety and Human Services Committee
WHAT: Action on a proposed ordinance on dealing with false alarms. The full County Council will consider final adoption of the proposed ordinance later this year.
WHEN: 10 a.m. Sept. 25
WHERE: Room 1045 of the City-County Building, 930 Tacoma Ave. S., Tacoma
from: http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/local/story/143175.html
The News Tribune
Published: August 29th, 2007 01:00 AM
The burglar alarm went off four times at Lisa Jones’ house in the Riverside area in February and March. On all four occasions, she found evidence that someone had tried to break into her house.
But Jones works nights, and she didn’t call Pierce County sheriff’s deputies back to her house when she got home since nothing important was taken.
If she’d done so, and filed a police report, she might have saved herself a pile of cash.
In late March, a bill from the company that monitors Jones’ alarm system said she owed the county $1,000 in fines for false alarms. Pierce County collects $250 for every false call that county deputies answer.
“The fine was a little too high,” Jones said Tuesday in front of Pierce County Council members.
The County Council is considering a proposal to reduce the fine to $100 per false alarm after seeing that the hefty penalty it adopted in 2005 hasn’t been effective in reducing false calls.
One thing it did produce was a rash of complaints from residents, who paid about $380,000 in such fines in 2006.
Meanwhile, about 99 percent of all burglar alarms recorded in Pierce County are false, and there were 6,439 of them in 2006, said Jim Jenkins, patrol commander for the Sheriff’s Department. About a quarter of those resulted in a response by deputies.
“We try to put our energy on things that are actually occurring, and false alarms are not crime,” Jenkins told the County Council’s Public Safety and Human Services Committee on Tuesday.
Anticipating an outpouring of public comment on the proposal, the committee decided to postpone action on the item until Sept. 25.
When the county first addressed false alarms in 2005, residents opposed an original proposal that would have required a “verified response,” meaning someone had to witness the crime before deputies were sent to the scene.
The Sheriff’s Department estimated it was spending an average of $273,900 annually responding to false alarms.
That original proposal was discarded, and the county eventually adopted the $250 fine, hoping that alarm companies would improve their systems to avoid paying the fines.
However, it appears alarm companies just passed the fines on to their customers, and the number of false alarms hasn’t decreased.
Under the new proposal, the county will require “verified response” instead of the expensive fines. But this time, “verified response” doesn’t mean that someone first has to investigate the scene.
The county will require an alarm company requesting dispatch to do one of the following:
• Contact the alarm site and speak to a person.
• Confirm the alarm with live video or audio monitors.
• For a newer system designed to reduce false alarms, confirm that at least two independent alarms have been triggered.
• For an older system, confirm that two or more alarm signals were triggered over a certain period of time.
Jenkins said setting such a rule for older systems should reduce the number of false alarms.
Under the new rule, deputies will stop responding to a site after three false alarms, although there will be an appeal process to reinstate law enforcement response.
Pierce County hasn’t and won’t require verification of alarms by a resident because that could put a person in harm’s way.
“All it takes is one person to be in a wrong place at a wrong time,” said Councilman Terry Lee, R-Gig Harbor.
In reality, however, that seems to happen.
In Jones’ case at her Riverside home, her daughter, who was contacted by the alarm company, got to Jones’ house before deputies on all four occasions because the Sheriff’s Department is spread thin.
Sheriff Paul Pastor said his department would address the issue.
“We don’t want people responding before us,” he said. “Maybe we haven’t done enough education.”
WHO: Pierce County Council’s Public Safety and Human Services Committee
WHAT: Action on a proposed ordinance on dealing with false alarms. The full County Council will consider final adoption of the proposed ordinance later this year.
WHEN: 10 a.m. Sept. 25
WHERE: Room 1045 of the City-County Building, 930 Tacoma Ave. S., Tacoma
from: http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/local/story/143175.html