Of the 10,667 burglar alarms triggered at Colorado Springs homes and businesses last year, only 2 percent were legit.For the other 10,454 alarms, cops made dry runs, burning time they could have been spent on real needs.The problem of false alarms – caused by equipment malfunctions, poor installation or user error – is so great that in December, the department downgraded burglar-alarm responses in order of priority.That means officers go to trespassing calls before they respond to burglar alarms.Colorado Springs police have been grappling with false alarms for more than a decade.Measures adopted in 1997, the first step toward regulating the alarm industry, helped drive down calls from 18,000 a year.In 1997, false burglar alarms made up 10 percent of all calls for service. Last year, it was less than 4 percent.Still, for an agency that says it’s stretched, false alarms are wasted time.”We’re sending one to two officers to more than 10,000 calls for service in a year when it’s not a crime,” Deputy Chief Ron Gibson said. “We would prefer to free up those precious resources to respond to real criminal events.”The police want to tighten the rules on alarm users again and will discuss the issue at the City Council informal meeting Monday.Excluded from the discussion and the statistics are fire and human-activated alarms, such as business robbery alarms, home panic buttons and medical alerts.”We get a lot fewer false alarms on those, because they’re human activated,” Gibson said.Business and home alarms systems, though, are equipped with sensors, some of which can be triggered by a stiff breeze.”We get a real rash of false alarms anytime we have a weather system go through,” he said. “If you leave a window open, the curtains blowing around are going to cause a sensor to pick it up.”False alarms are those where officers respond and fail to find that someone has tampered with a door, broken a window or left some other sign of an intrusion.If a cop is dispatched and the owner discovers it’s a false alarm before the officer arrives, it still counts as a false alarm.That’s important, because current rules allow only two false alarms before a $25 fine is imposed for subsequent false calls.City budget officials said the department collected $46,150 last year in false alarm fees and billed another $4,800 that wasn’t paid. That means there were 2,038 alarms that resulted in a penalty fee, the equivalent of 19 percent of all burglar alarm calls.Gibson said the idea isn’t to generate revenue but to discourage false alarms. Despite the $25 fee, “We’re still realizing 98 percent of the alarms as false alarms.”An alarm owner is allowed four false alarms a year before being cut from the system. The number of discontinued owners last year was not immediately available.Gibson said false alarms don’t detract from the department’s response to Priority 1 calls, those involving a crime in progress or a life-threatening situation. But they impede officers’ interaction with citizens while interviewing for and investigating lower priority calls.”It’s impacting our ability to do community policing and spend time with citizens,” he said. “It’s not the way we want to do business. We have to leave a citizen who has called for a police officer and say, ‘Sorry, I have to go to a higher priority call.'”The department, dealing with a workload that grew by 20 percent per officer on average since 1997, deemed burglar alarms so distracting it dropped them a notch, from Priority 2 to Priority 3.Priority 2 calls are those involving a felony but no life threat, such as vandalism or criminal mischief in progress or checking the welfare of someone at a citizen’s request.Priority 3 are calls of “incidents that require a police response based on availability of units,” Gibson said, such as cold theft reports.The only lower priority is routine administrative duties, such as meeting with a citizen who’s providing additional information for a report taken previously.Gibson said the department has worked with alarm businesses, which support the department’s ideas, such as upping false alarm fees.”You don’t want to have to summon the police if they don’t need to be there. They have better things to be doing,” said Dave Simon with Brink’s Home Security, Irving, Texas, which has residential and commercial accounts in Colorado Springs.”We’re understanding and supportive of what the Police Department is doing,” he added. “They’ve sought our opinion. It’s been a very open process, and the people we’ve worked with have been thoughtful and they’re looking at all options, and that’s the way public policy should be.”CONTACT THE WRITER: 636-0238 or pam.zubeck@gazettedev.gazette.com

Photo by (Gazette file)

Brienne Boortz