Can we reduce false alarms?

Sending false alarm signals is one of the biggest drawbacks for monitoring companies. These not only entail expenses for NDEs but also for the police, which in many countries is the one that responds to these events, failing to attend cases that may actually be happening. In the United States and Canada, where these incidents occur the most, the media have become channels of denunciation of cases in which police officers have had to leave their obligations to respond to false calls from alarm centers.

In Latin America this phenomenon occurs in smaller quantities unlike the countries mentioned above, however there are no media that denounce when these events occur, since it is believed that it is a direct responsibility of the GCED and as such does not have much importance in the community.

This allows us to observe the lack of control and regulation in the region, since in the other countries there is legislation that regulates false alarms. But this circumstance also suggests the lack of teamwork of suppliers and users to ensure the proper functioning of the systems, in addition to the lack of cooperation between police forces and NDEs; because for there to be attention to an alarm you first have to verify that in fact you are facing a case of intrusion.

For U.S. authorities, for example, most of these phenomena are caused by failures in communication and coordination between the user and the monitoring station, or by user actions or omissions.

The most frequent causes of these incidents of false alarms according to experts are the incorrect use of codes, lack of training to authorized users, discharged battery systems, unsecured windows or doors after the system has been assembled, pets, failure to notify the ECM of planned openings or closings and not requiring the company to Alarms notify people in the contact list before calling the police.

The figures of the impact of false alarms are surprising, for example, in April of this year, the police of Viginia Beach (a small city in the United States), announced that 22 thousand calls are received annually informing the entry into operation of an alarm system, which represents an average of 60 a day, figure much higher than the averages of calls for other causes.

On the other hand, in Latin America some less alarming data are presented, but as such multiple false alarms are reported to which they go, not the police, but the monitoring companies and if as such this was not a false alarm then the police are contacted.

This phenomenon occurs in all Latin American countries due to the lack of knowledge and application of technical standards that are in place in the territory. However, in some countries such as Venezuela, monitoring stations apply programs to reduce false alarms, which has resulted in an economic benefit for them, since the phenomenon has its impact not so much on the value of the occurrence of the event but on the false dispatch of verification personnel.

On the other hand, in Argentina between 80 and 85% of the alarms that arrive at a central station are false alarms, but also a large percentage of these are the responsibility of the user due to the misuse they make of the systems. In countries such as Colombia, Mexico and Brazil the number of false alarms is very high, since they present 99% of the events that are received in the plants.

Therefore, training is being carried out for users, and work is being done on the issue of legislation. In Argentina, a law is being created for the use of alarms and procedures for ECMs, in addition to training for installers. Similarly, in Chile, actions have already been initiated to carry out a regulatory process as well as in the Dominican Republic.