Re: False alarms

["Bob Worthy" <securinc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

"Nomen Nescio" <nobody@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:5c8a77958835810e8ad1a388e93f6ec8@xxxxxxxxxxxx
> Bob Worthy said:
>
> >Enhanced Call Verification is the fastest proven method to reduce
dispatches
> >to date.

> I've always thought enhanced verification was a pretty lame way to reduce
> false alarms.
>Yes, it will reduce false alarms, but for all the wrong
> reasons.

Read my last sentence. ECV reduces **dispatches**, unnessary dispatches. It
does not reduce false alarms, false signals, or what ever they may be
called.

>It treats symptoms, rather than the underlying problem.

Agreed

> For those who are unfamiliar with enhanced verification, it consists of
> having the central station call people until it can find someone who says
> not to dispatch the police.

Close but not exact. There are two numbers called. Premise and then either a
second line,  or cellphone and if neither exsist, the premise number a
second time. (Anyone can come up with the reason why this will work to
eliminate an unnessary dispatch.) Then dispatch. We are not calling everyone
on the contact list. That is done after dispatch.

 Sooner or later, the central will often find
> someone who will do that,

That someone is at the premise or is the owner's cellphone

and all too often, that "someone" is not in any
> position to know whether the alarm is false or not.

Again, that someone is in control of the property and knows the property and
the activity at the property better than we do. They know that they have
guest, they know what time their kids get home from school, they know what
day and time the maid gets there, etc. If they have just left the house,
they tell us don't dispatch and turn around to close that interior garage
door that popped open, eliminating an unnecessary dispatch. The next day, if
they are at work and know there should be no activity, they tell us to
dispatch. False alarm, probably, attempted burglary, maybe. End result, cut
unnessary dispatches by 50%.

At which point, the
> central station cheers and says, "Another false alarm prevented!

More like "another unnecessary dispatch prevented"

> Look at
> what a good job we're doing."

And law enforcement recognized that by looking at the numbers. Last month
400 unnecessary dispatces, this month 200 unnessary dispatches.

> Intelligent filtering, or just precision guesswork?

Or acting on the instruction of the customer?

> Let's face it, if the
> central station does not dispatch on an alarm, for whatever reason, 99% of
> the time they will have made the right decision.  So does enhanced
> verification really work?  Consider these enhanced verification scenarios:
>
> 1.  Burglar alarm signal from a residence during the daytime.  No answer
at
> the premises, so the central calls the owner's cell phone and asks whether
> they should call the police.  The homeowner says, "No, it's probably the
> housekeeper."  The owner isn't at the premises.  He has no way of knowing
> whether it's the housekeeper or not.  But by choosing not to call the
> police, odds are 99% he's made the right decision.  So long as he isn't
> really getting robbed, everybody's happy.

People are instructing the industry to do this without ECV. How many times
is the premise called, then dispatched, then contact call to persons cell
only to be told to cancel dispatch. All that is happening with ECV is that
the normal procedures, that has been in place for years, have been
reconfigured to call the cell prior to dispatch instead of immediately
following dispatch.
>
> 2.  Nighttime burglar alarm call from a business.  The central calls the
> owner, gets no answer, and calls the next name on the list, who is an
> employee.

That is poor security management to start with. An employee should never
ever have the ability to cancel an alarm unless they are the manager, at
which point he/she will take the responsibility. An employee could be
setting things up for internal theft.

>  The employee tells the operator, "No, don't call the police, the
> owner raised hell when he got his last false alarm bill from the city.
> Call me if it goes off again."  The central cheerfully chalks up another
> success story for enhanced verification.

That direction comes from the alarm company, not the CS. They act on the
alarmcos/customers directions. If that is the direction, it is wrong to
start with. If the CS is the alarmco, then they need to re-evaluate their
own policy with the customer.
>
> Finding excuses not to dispatch is not false alarm reduction.

Again, I agree. But lets take a short walk down memory lane. I am not going
to go through all the blood bath debates about "no response" across the
nation between the industry and public safety. However, this issue was
hemorrhaging and the bleeding needed to be stopped an stopped now. How
is/was this going to get accomplished. It wasn't until there was alot of
investigation into verification and dispatch history, putting this together
with crime statistics from the IACP and a near year long testing program by
two of the larger national CS. Does the industry have an immediate fix for
the false alarm issue. Absolutely not. You cannot fix the errors of 130
years over night and you will never get rid of unresponsible human beings,
whether they are the alarmco and their employees or the customers. Example:
How do you fix a situation where the Jones, a model customer for years, just
got a new cat. They went away for the weekend, leaving the cat in the home
with plenty of food and water and a clean litter box. They didn't even think
about the motion detector. Do we dispatch on that motion the first hour
after they have left. Or do we call them on their cell prior to dispatch,
only to learn about the cat, and are able to put that zone in test, until
they return. Hence, no dispatch. This did not correct the false alarm
problem. Adding a pet immune motion or getting rid of the cat would do that,
but it helped stop the bleeding by not sending the police.
As the industry learns more, more can be done, such as the CPO1 standards.
The more that public safety knows about where they can get assistance from
the industry (SIAC, Alarm Associations, FARA, etc.) and what options are
available, the more they are willing to come to the table. EHV is not a
false alarm fix and was never meant to be, but it has proven to reduce
unnessary dispatches. Are the dispatches, they go to, going to be false? You
can bet they are 99% of the time. But if they are going to 30-40-50% less
calls than they were last year and they are not going to the same building
25 times in the same weekend, than I say the hemorrhaging has been slowed
enough to continue working on the wound without being threatened by "no
response". Of course there are pros and cons and there will be supporters
and opponents. Fining people, whoever they are isn't the fix. No response
isn't the fix. There is no one item that is the fix. It will take a
combination of items to accomplish what is either acceptable or fool proof
enough to get around all the "stupid human tricks" ECV is an important
number to that combination.