Alachua County False Alarm Reduction Unit Nets Big Savings,

Better Safety for Citizens (Download the article - pdf format)

By Sheriff Steve Oelrich, Alachua County Florida

(Published by the Florida Sheriffs Association - May/June 2003 and National Sheriff's Association - Sheriff Magazine)

As sworn law enforcement officers, we know that a few seconds of response time on alarm calls can mean the difference between catching a violator or letting a criminal go free. But as many as 99 out of 100 alarm calls in Alachua County, Fla., are false alarms.

False alarm calls cost time for law enforcement and they cost taxpayers money. But more importantly, they divert law enforcement officers from real emergencies and have the effect of encouraging complacency when answering calls. That’s something that could one day cost a life.

In Alachua County, though, we established a program that succeeded in reducing false alarms by 56 percent. By combining new computer technology and old-fashioned common sense,  Alachua County's False Alarm Reduction Unit is saving time for deputies and saving dollars for county taxpayers. Better public safety response for our citizens, and safety for our deputies, are our primary goals.

We’ve accomplished this by helping educate alarm users while also providing effective incentives to eliminate repeated false activations. It is a two-pronged approach designed to get at the root causes of the false alarm problem.

According to a report by a coalition of alarm industry sponsors and the International Association of Chiefs of Police, 80 percent of false alarms are triggered by 20 percent of the alarm users, and the major source of false activations is user error.

We believe that our focus on education, combined with escalating penalties for repeated activations, is what has made Alachua County a leader in addressing this problem.

As agencies all over the nation—from the largest communities to the smallest—try to find ways to cope with the problem of false alarms, they have increasingly turned to local ordinances. But while ordinances have been proven to be effective in reducing false alarms calls, many agencies are finding it impossible to properly enforce the ordinances because they lack the ability to track repeat offenders and bill them.

That’s why we created a new way of doing business. Our False Alarm Reduction Unit enforces both the city’s and the county’s ordinance, and since 1999, alarm calls in the City of Gainesville have dropped from more than 12,000 to less than 5,500. In the unincorporated area, they are down from more than 9,000 a year in 1999 to less than 4,000. While many agencies are happy to experience a 20- to 30-percent drop in false alarms after enacting an ordinance, we’ve seen a reduction of 56 percent. Here’s how we did it:

• Under the leadership of False Alarm Reduction Unit Director John Moorhouse, Alachua County teamed with Purvis Gray Technology Group, LLC, a division of Purvis, Gray and Company, CPAs, to develop a new computer system that integrated the information from all the alarm systems registered in the county.

• The computer (False Alarm Reduction System) tracks alarm call responses received through the Computer Assisted Dispatch or CAD system, and also the citations for false alarms issued under both county and city ordinances. It is essentially a one-stop streamlined registration and billing system to track alarm calls and cite the repeat offenders who account for most of the problem.

• The graduated schedule of fines set up by the ordinances includes one “free” call per year. After that, there’s increased fines for repeat offenders, hoping they will implement procedures to reduce false alarms.

• In addition, the False Alarm Reduction Unit offers free monthly classes to educate alarm system users on provisions of the False Alarm ordinances and proper maintenance and use of their alarm systems.

• Using our software (False Alarm Reduction System) to simultaneously register alarm users and track the calls has been key to administering this system. Though the ordinance has been in place for two years, our agency never had a system that could keep the alarm records and generate the billing information at the same time.

The end result is improved public safety, quicker response time to legitimate calls, and significant savings for taxpayers. The proven effectiveness of our False Alarm Reduction Unit is an example that false alarms can be substantially reduced, leaving more availability for law enforcement to handle our ever increasing call load. Better service to our citizen customers is what this program is all about.