Reduce public-safety costs by diverting non-emergency 911 calls

CityLab has a story about a topic that's been on my mind lately, though I hadn't written anything yet: How to reduce 911 volume by weeding out non-emergency calls. Mostly on Grits we've discussed this in terms of time wasted on false alarms from private burglar alarm companies, which make up 10-12% of 911 calls and almost never result in arrests, even in the less than 1% of cases in which a burglary actually occurred. But there are other means, like diverting non-emergency medical situations from the emergency room, as discussed in the CityLab article. One might also suggest diversion programs for calls related to the mentally ill - right now we use the same tactics and personnel to respond whether the emergency involves a criminal or a patient.

911 is treated by the public as a one-size-fits-all solution to a multi-variate array of life problems. Whittling back its use would decrease demand for patrol services without harming public safety and relieve pressure on local budgets to constantly increase police staffing. Instead, departments could more thoughtfully deploy their officers and be less reactive, spending more money on detectives, crime labs, crime-scene techs, and other necessary functions that make it more likely crimes will be solved.

How Houston can boost police coverage without busting the budget

Say you're chief of the fourth largest police department in the country. You need more warm bodies to investigate crimes but the city's revenue cap means you can't afford to hire more officers. Why not use the ones you've got more intelligently?

A consultant's report (pdf) released last month found that Houston PD failed to investigate 20,000 offenses for which officers had "workable leads." Reported the Houston Chronicle, "The report noted that 15,000 burglaries and thefts, 3,000 assaults and nearly 3,000 hit-and-runs were not investigated last year. The data was based on monthly HPD management reports of cases with workable leads." From the Chron, see:

• 20,000 criminal cases not investigated in 2013 by HPD
• Chief: HPD can't investigate every crime and should not try
• Editorial: HPD needs help: More money won't cure ineffective management at the top
• Falkenberg: HPD woes are for us all to bear

I meant to post these links before now except Grits suffers from the same nagging feeling as Charles Kuffner that "We need more context to the HPD no-investigations issue." Many cases go uninvestigated for a variety of reasons, so is 20,000 typical, high, low? The low clearance rates on burglaries don't surprise me; we have the same issues in Austin. Reported crime has declined in recent years in Houston, so something's working in a positive direction. But whether that's because of police practices, demographic changes, economic improvement, declining background levels of lead, the rise of video games and cable TV, who knows? What's responsible remains largely a mystery.

In Houston, the announcement has predictably led to calls for H-Town to hire more police officers, so let's focus on that. Assume for a moment more officers are needed (and I agree with Kuff that how many is a legitimate debate). The city is strapped so how to pay for it?

Here's how to boost the number of police officers available on patrol while freeing up officers to work as detectives in the burglary and other backlogged divisions:

• Implement verified response for burglar alarm calls, requiring alarm companies to verify a crime was committed before dispatching police. These alarms are 98-99% false, almost never result in arrests, and account for 10-12% of most departments' patrol calls. This one reform would be the equivalent of increasing patrol staffing by ten percent.
• Begin to use discretion given police by the Legislature in 2007 to write citations instead of making arrests for driving with a suspended license and possession of marijuana.
• Follow Texas' other large cities by issuing paraphernalia citations for crack pipes instead of sending them to the crime lab to scrape traces off for state-jail felony possession prosecution. (See Harris County District Judge Mike McSpadden's letter to the Legislature urging this reform.)

Those three changes would free up many thousands of police hours without costing the city a dime - certainly enough to allow HPD to adjust staffing levels to create a few dozen new detective slots. Indeed, the last couple of bulleted items would probably save the county money, too.

Statesman Newsflash: Burglar alarms almost never catch burglars

Finally covering a topic Grits has been hammering on for years, the Austin Statesman today published a report by Eric Dexheimer regarding wasted police resources spent responding to false burglar alarms, though the article IMO understated the problem. Reported Dexheimer ("Nine times out of ten, a burglar alarm means no crime," Jan. 25):

An American-Statesman analysis of police statistics over the past five years shows that, on average, Austin police respond to more than 80 burglary alarms every day. Nine out of 10 of those are false.

The high rate of false alarms — most commonly the result of equipment failure or user error — isn’t unusual. Industrywide, false alarms rates of 90 to 99 percent are common.

Large municipal police forces have complained for years that answering tens of thousands of unnecessary calls for service to check out alarms installed and monitored by private companies drains away manpower and diverts their attention from more serious policing — such as genuine burglaries, which are reported about 20 times a day in Austin. While security companies say alarms can deter break-ins and limit their severity, police say they rarely catch criminals thanks to an alarm. ...

And, while the city’s alarm calls trended slowly downward between 2008 and 2012, last year saw an increase in both the number of alarms and percentage that were false. In some parts of the city, especially well-to-do residential neighborhoods, false alarms demanded more police attention than any other type of calls except traffic stops.

The article stressed a point this blog has been making nearly since its inception: That burglar alarms in practice don't actually contribute to solving burglaries:

Many customers are under the impression that home and business alarms installed and monitored by private companies, which can cost upward of $100 a month, help police nab crooks. “Somehow, the idea has been planted in their heads that we’re going to beam down Star Trek-like and catch the burglar,” said Shanna Werner, alarm coordinator for Salt Lake City.

But in truth, police say most burglars are in and out in minutes. And like most departments, Austin treats alarm calls as a low priority — responders use no lights or sirens, and travel at the speed limit. More urgent calls bump alarm calls.

The result: “By the time it’s dispatched, the chance of catching anyone is next to zero,” said Sgt. Robert Hester, a former longtime supervisor in Austin’s burglary unit.

Austin Chief Art Acevedo defended the policy of police responding to burglar alarms but said the department does not keep records on how many arrests result from them. If that's true (and I must say I doubt it), it's because such data would show the policy he's defending is a complete waste of time and resources. In 2007, an internal APD analysis of burglar alarms found that 99% of alarms - well above the 90% estimated by Dexheimer - were false, and just eleven arrests were made based on burglar alarm responses compared to 7,467 burglaries reported in Austin that year. All those arrests were from commercial alarms; no arrests that year resulted from residential alarm calls.

There's no reason to believe Austin PD has gotten more efficient since then. Indeed, wrote Dexheimer, "The department’s efforts [to reduce false alarm calls] have been hampered by a series of weak ordinances and laws that provide little incentive for alarm companies and their customers to cut down on the frequency of false alarms." Dexheimer quoted from a 2012 Urban Institute report on the topic that I hadn't seen before which demonstrates this is a national, systemic problem.

For many years, Grits has argued that one of the best ways to boost patrol coverage without raising taxes to hire ever-more officers would be to implement "verified response," placing the burden on alarm companies to verify a crime has occurred before sending police to investigate. In a town like Austin with one of the lowest clearance rates for burglaries in the country, that would allow police to devote more resources toward actual crime instead of showering subsidies on alarm companies and more affluent neighborhoods. The biggest barrier to this is political: Whenever they're asked to foot more of the burden, alarm companies gin up their customers with inflammatory, misleading propaganda to scare local decision makers into backing off. But if the public really understood the economics of the situation, IMO even alarm company customers should support verified response - at least if the goal is to reduce burglaries and catch burglars.

One more aside: After the Texas Tribune covered a story last year that Dexheimer had broken about Attorney General Greg Abbott drilling a well on his property to avoid mandatory watering restrictions, Eric published a snarky blog post about how the story seemed "familiar" because the Statesman had done it first. So it's hard to resist mentioning that the only online version of the internal APD report referenced in today's Statesman story is posted on Grits' Google drive, much less that this blog beat the Statesman to the punch about the prevalence of burglar alarm calls in affluent areas of town. It'd be nigh impossible to Google this topic without finding those articles. I'm not generally one to fret over credit; indeed, I tend to think the "scoop" is dead. But if media folk are going to grouse about who scooped whom, perhaps they should acknowledge when they're the ones following up on stories somebody else reported first.

See related Grits posts:

• Austin police calls for service flat, handled less effectively by ever more officers
• Austin police staffing "shortage" stems from subsidies to well-off residents
• Austin will raise taxes to hire more cops but still won't investigate more burglaries
• False alarms are the "single greatest waste of law-enforcement resources in America" but political third rail
  Cutting police costs? 'Verified response' for alarms gets more benefit from same number of officers
• Smart policies can boost police coverage even in bad economy
• Dallas nixes verified response for commercial burglar alarms
• False burglar alarms drain police resources
• Burglar alarm subsidies harm taxpayers, public safety

Good idea in Dallas on domestic violence prevention, but few resources to implement it

Here's an interesting, proactive approach to family violence being pursued in Dallas, following the lead of a successful, similar program in New York City: Home visits following up on high-risk domestic violence episodes. Reported the Dallas News ("Dallas police consider home visits to prevent domestic violence deaths," Nov. 23):

Right now, many domestic abuse victims don’t hear from police beyond the initial response to a 911 call. Victims of felony offenses receive a follow-up with an investigating detective, but even then, police involvement ends once the case is handed over to the district attorney’s office.

[Maj. Robert] Sherwin said he wants home visits to fill the gap during the eight to 10 months it can take for the case to reach a result in court.

The plan is already working well in New York City, where police respond to about 250,000 family violence incidents a year. Dallas police respond to about 13,000 domestic abuse incidents annually.

To deal with its large caseload, NYPD assigns about 450 officers to conduct home visits with the most vulnerable victims: children, elderly and people police suspect will be abused again. They go on a “high propensity” list and must be visited at least once a month, said Chief Kathleen O’Reilly, who oversees the domestic violence unit.

On their visit to New York, the Dallas officers joined their NYPD colleagues on a visit to a Harlem public housing complex, where they navigated dark, narrow hallways and knocked on doors. The officers chatted with victims, looked for signs of further abuse and helped create a safety plan — putting Social Security numbers, credit card information and other necessities in one place in case the victim needs to leave in a hurry.

Though the program has existed for years, O’Reilly said, her unit re-emphasized the visits after the city saw a spike in domestic violence murders a few years ago. Now, family violence homicides have fallen and, O’Reilly added, “We don’t know how many lives we’ve saved just by showing up.”

Problem is, Dallas wants to implement the program without assigning extra resources.

the biggest challenge is deciding how to choose which victims to visit. Sherwin said police are considering using the lethality assessment program, criminal background checks on the abuser and knowledge of previous assaults on the victim.

The success of the program would likely hinge on such a filter system.

“That’s kind of the sticky wicket,” Sherwin said.

This is a good idea but it flies in the face of the current policing model where patrol officers rush from 911 call to 911 call without an overarching strategy. Thanks in part to more than 10% of police calls responding to false burglar alarms, there's little extra patrol power to assign to this sort of proactive approach. Make me philosopher king and I'd pull the plug on home-burglar alarm responses, implementing a verified response system and using the extra manpower for more of these sorts of targeted, risk-based policing tactics. But it's become clear that, certainly in Dallas, verified response is "good public policy" but "bad politics," as former Dallas police chief David Kunkle has said.

You can't get something for nothing in this world and that includes extra police resources, even if it's to implement a good idea. Policing, like every other government function, involves trade-offs. Not everything can get done in a world of limited resources. I'd rather see officers following up on high-risk domestic violence cases than chasing after thousands of false burglar alarms, but between the public's ignorance and the alarm industry's political clout, in the near term the trade-off will almost certainly continue to prioritize the latter over the former.

MORE: From Texas Monthly.

Austin police calls for service flat, handled less effectively by ever-more officers

While I was out of town there was a nice story at KUT-Austin on Councilmember Bill Spelman's argument that the City of Austin doesn't need to fund more police officers or detectives in its next budget. Here are the charts Spelman presented to support his arguments. The article closed thusly:

Council member Spelman came prepared for this conversation – as he had prepared several charts outlining calls, responses and crime in Austin since 1999.

•  The first chart Spelman showed displayed a remarkably consistent number of dispatch calls from 1999 to 2013 – despite the total Austin population growing significantly since 1999.
• Subsequent slides went on to display an increase in the number of patrol officers, and a slight increase in non-violent crime – while noting the number of investigators doubled over that time.
• The primary question raised by the data – the title of a slide overlaying all the data – was  “Why do we need more detectives?”

While Spelman qualified his remarks by stating that there are many factors that statistics can’t encapsulate, he argued Austin has not gotten consistently better results over this time period. “I feel I need also to point out that we actually cleared more crimes in 1999 than in 2013,” he said, “despite the fact that the number of, at least general assignment, detectives more than doubled.”

Acevedo alluded to the need for more security against terrorism as a reason why it is not possible to compare police budgets prior to 9/11 to today’s requirements.

“I think as our footprint increases, in terms of our visibility on an international level, it makes me a lot more nervous as a police chief,” Acevedo said.

The Austin City Council takes up budgetary matters again Aug. 22, as a part of its regular council meeting.

Spelman could have added that nearly 12% of Austin PD service calls are for burglar alarms that almost never result in arrests (most are false alarms and in the tiny handful of real ones, the culprits have virtually always left the scene before police arrive). If Chief Acevedo wants more manpower for homeland security duty, he's got plenty of officers; they're just performing too many useless tasks that don't contribute significantly to public safety.

Austin police staffing "shortage" stems from subsidies to well-off residents

Would Austin need to hire more officers in its new budget if police deployment practices stopped subsidizing alarm companies and wealthy neighborhoods at the expense of low-income residents and high-crime areas? Probably not, or at least that's Grits' reading of a recent consultant's report on staffing (pdf) by the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF).

The third most common type of police call in Austin (34,003 dispatches in 2011) is responding to burglar alarms, according to PERF's "Patrol Utilization Study." The report was commissioned by the city and has been spun by the media to argue that the department needs increased staffing to keep up with population growth. But deep in the document (and ignored by the local press) we learn exactly what proportion of officer time is spent driving around low-crime wealthy neighborhoods (presumably to prevent crime) and responding to nearly-always-false burglar alarms.

Buried in the study (but not reflected in its recommendations) was the following observation: "The high number of burglar alarms, 5.2% of the total dispatches, indicates that a re-examination of the city’s alarm ordinance may be warranted. Jurisdictions that have reduced alarm calls have levied heavier fines for false alarms, levied fines sooner with few or no 'free' false alarms, or required alarm companies to verify the validity of an alarm before the police are summoned." These authors failed to publish the current false alarm rate, but previous a 2007 APD report found it to be about 99 percent.

That much time spent responding to false alarms (IMO) improperly shifts policing resources toward more wealthy parts of town and undermines so-called hotspot policing in more crime ridden areas. The west-side Adam, Baker and David sectors (see an explanatory map) of the city cover some of the wealthiest areas of the town, and they also have the highest numbers of alarm responses. (See p. 22 of the report, which is p. 31 of the pdf.)

In the past Grits has strongly criticized the needless focus on responding to burglar alarms and so have internal Austin PD analyses. In 2006, out of 39,354 burglar alarm calls to which APD responded, they only made 11 arrests, compared to 7,467 actual burglaries reported that year. Poor folks (who are more frequently targets of crime) mostly can't afford elaborate alarm systems that bring out the police, so this practice amounts to a subsidy to the well-off at the expense of lower-income residents - one garnering very little crime fighting bang for the buck - not to mention a massive taxpayer subsidy to alarm companies.

And speaking of subsidies to the rich, the Adam sector notably is also the only area of town where "directed patrol" accounts for the largest category of "dispatch types," though crime rates in the area are among the city's lowest. The PERF report identified 33,039 total dispatches in 2011 for "directed patrol," with a whopping 10,842 in the Adam sector (out of nine total sectors around the city). Directed patrol is defined in the report as "patrolling critical infrastructure sites in those sectors," but that looks to me like it translates in practice to patrolling areas where rich folks live as opposed to where most of the crime occurs. The Adam sector was the only one where any dispatch category (in this case directed patrol) exceeded the number of traffic stops, which led the number of dispatch types in all other sectors.

Instead of expanding patrol ranks (what are we going to cut this time to pay for yet another round of police hires?), Austin should deploy the officers it has more thoughtfully. Alarm companies should be required to verify a burglary occurred before sending the call through to the police, and officers patrolling rich neighborhoods should be focused more on high-crime areas and/or re-deployed to undermanned investigative units. In tight budget times, everyone else in government has been forced to "do more with less." That meme should apply to APD as well.

On texting, driving, fact checking, murder rates, borderline competency and global security

A few, disparate tidbits:

Houston 2011 murder rate nearly as low as Mexico City
The murder rate in Houston is at its lowest since 1965,  (and nearly the lowest since data began to be recorded), with 198 murders last year compared to a high of 701 in 1981, reported KUHF radio. Still, the murder rate of 9.4 per 100,000 is substantially higher than the statewide murder rate of 5.0 in 2010, according to DPS data (pdf). To put that number into perspective, Mexico City's murder rate is 8.3 per 100,000, so in that light 9.4 perhaps isn't exactly being all you can be. Still, Less Murders = Good. MORE: From Kuff.

After death, inquiry finds most youth at Granbury juvie detention in isolation for unjustified reasons
Now that the new Texas Juvenile Justice Department is up and running, there's no time to lose in exercising its oversight function. Reports the Weatherford Democrat, "A state investigation of the Granbury Regional Juvenile Justice Center following the death of a 14-year-old Cleburne boy in October has raised questions about the role of the facility’s non-compliance with detention facility standards in the boy’s death." Said the paper, a TJJD "report released last week found several violations related to keeping the juveniles in isolation nearly all day on Oct. 10 outside of the physical presence of a juvenile supervision officer. The 11 residents of 'Alpha Pod' were kept locked in their rooms most of the day, not allowed to participate in educational and other activities as required and left without the supervision level required during daytime program hours, the TJJD investigation found." Further, "Investigators found that only one of the 11 residents of 'Alpha Pod' was 'confined for a reason justified by standards, namely the resident’s disciplinary seclusion status.'" In other words, 10 of the 11 kids in isolation at the time of the boys death shouldn't have even been there.

Borderline competency: Good question, no easy answers
Asks a prosecutor on the DA Association user forum, "What do you do with those VERY low functioning defendants who are already receiving services from MHMR and whose competency is borderline?... Seems they are getting more plentiful." While one wag replied, "Send them off to law school?," others including John Bradley noted there are no easy answers, particularly in the wake of budget cuts to mental health services in the most recent legislative session.

Constable resigns in lieu of prosecution
The DA in Lubbock won't pursue criminal charges against a local constable in exchange for his resignation and lifetime ban from serving as a peace officer.

H-Town burglar alarm fees don't pay for city services
In Houston, according to HPD's website, "The cost of responding to alarm calls for service in FY2007 was approximately $11.8 million dollars and exceeded the City's total annual revenues in that fiscal year ($7.99 million dollars) derived from permit fees and penalties associated with burglar, panic, holdup and similar alarm systems."

Balko: Anger vs. Lykos stems from 'efforts to change the culture'
Radley Balko suggests that in the Harris County District Attorney primary, "intra-party anger seems to stem mostly from [Pat Lykos'] efforts to change the culture in the Harris County DA’s office." Exactly. There's an odd nostalgia among her most ardent critics which Grits suspects can never be satisfied. It's a new century, and whatever happens in April or November, Johnny Holmes won't be walking through the door anytime soon.

Problem with texting while driving is the driving, not the texting
Fascinating. Fewer teens are driving and studies say cars are no longer the status symbol of freedom that they once were among young Americans, particularly in cities. Texting while driving is bad, argues Lisa Hymas at Grist, but more importantly, "we need to work urgently on making driving less necessary in the first place." Great line from Clive Thompson at Wired: "When we worry about driving and texting, we assume that the most important thing the person is doing is piloting the car. But what if the most important thing they're doing is texting? How do we free them up so they can text without needing to worry about driving?" How's that for reframing the question? I'm still rather amazed that Gov. Perry vetoed the texting while driving ban passed in Texas this year.

Iran, Pakistan, Mexico, None-Of-The-Above: Which is biggest threat to world stability?
This is nuts to me: From any rational American perspective - certainly for those of us living in border states - the biggest threat to stability in 2012 isn't Iran, surely it's from drug violence and instability in Mexico and Latin America, arguably followed by anti-western sentiment in already-nuclear Pakistan, where our troops are entrenched across the border for the foreseeable future. In Grits' book, I'd put high food prices (at least) third on the list. Why downplay instability in a nation that already has nukes, much less massive corruption and bloodshed on the US southern border, to proclaim Iran the ultimate threat? That's the sort of demagoguery that makes people vote for Ron Paul. Which is more dangerous for world security: A nuclear Iran or a starving Africa?

Fact check this
Greg Marx at the Columbia Journalism Review has an essay articulating numerous criticisms which have been gelling in Grits' own mind in recent months about so-called "fact checking" services like Politifact and the limits of the framework under which they operate, particularly regarding legal issues. I finished his piece and thought, "Damn, I wish I'd written that," which of course is the highest compliment one writer can pay to another. My biggest frustration with Politifact, et. al.: Grits despises the notion that fact checking should be somehow considered specialty work among journalists, implying that most journalists are mere mouthpieces for special interests who don't provide a significant truth filter between their sources and the public. That may be accurate as a practical, workaday matter, but it's not a model to aspire to.

Austin will raise taxes to hire more cops, but still won't investigate more burglaries

Should the City of Austin hire 47 new police officers it can't afford when it's short $10 million and nearly 12% of police calls respond to false alarms? Among the Austin City Council and the local media, nobody seems to question such assumptions. But they don't make sense to me.

Austin spends 2/3 of its city budget on public safety (police/fire/EMS), mostly the police department, and in the last decade public safety spending, led by super-generous raises for Austin police, soaked up virtually all additional revenue generated by economic growth. Here's the breakout for how the city general fund is being spent in FY 2011:

For several years now, obligations for pay raises at the Austin Police Department have been a huge driver for local tax increases, to the point where now every city budget plan begins, as the 2012 budget does, assuming that the city will raise its tax rate the maximum allowable amount short of triggering a possible rollback. State troopers would need a 52% pay hike to match Austin PD, who are far and away the highest paid officers in the state and, when adjusted for the regional cost of living, arguably are the highest paid in the nation.

At times, I'm not sure what the high pay is buying us. The 2010 annual performance report (pdf) from the city manager for the Austin Police Department in places reads like something out of a bureaucratic fantasyland. See in particular the "key measures" listed on p. 63 of the pdf, in which we see that both violent and property crime rates per 1,000 residents have increased in the last half-decade, running counter to state and national trends. The final column asks "Goal met?," and for both performance measures the city placed a shiny green check mark. Ditto after data showed a 14% rise in per-capita DWI fatalities last year. APD had inexplicably predicted an even larger increase, despite declining DWI death trends nationally. This is a head-scratcher. If rising per capita crime rates are really APD's goal, maybe they're aiming is too low!

Compounding Grits' frustration with out-sized local police expenditures and below-average outcomes, when the Austin city manager compiled his list of "unmet needs" for the 2012 budget, it included 44 FTEs (full-time equivalent job positions) at the police department, including 18 new 911 call takers, in addition to 47 new officer positions already planned for FY 2012. The city manager says APD needs more resources to reduce clearance rates for serious crimes, particularly burglaries, which are notoriously declining:

APD requests that 8 of the 47 new officer positions for FY 2012 be upgraded to detective to improve caseloads and increase the number of cases solved. The percent of serious Part I Index crimes (homicide, robbery, burglary) that were solved decreased in recent years. The FY 2010 clearance rate was 8% lower than FY 2009 and 10% lower than the average of the last four years (FY 2006 through FY 2009). Austin's clearance rate for Part I crimes in FY 2009 was 13.2% compared to the 18.3% national average.

So the 47 new officer slots don't even implicate efforts to increase burglary clearance rates - presumably most will be patrol-level positions. The department's plan is to fill those 47 slots but to leave extra resources for burglary investigation in the "unmet needs" category. Indeed, a recurring theme throughout city budget documents is that APD needs endessly more staff than it currently has to do its job and any failures or shortcomings may be attributed to lack of more personnel: "Without sufficient staffing levels," says the city in a document titled "Horizon Issues" (large pdf), "crime problems are identified, but very little can be done other than to respond to the problem after it has occurred."

These complaints about unmet staffing needs while expanding the police force strike Grits as odd, since elsewhere cities and counties are cutting their numbers of officers as a result of the budget crunch. Just like the federal government attempts to cut its budget after excluding the military and healthcare - the things it spends the most on - the City of Austin limits its budget frugality to the third of the budget devoted to non-public safety spending, like parks, libraries and health clinics. The police budget is a sacred cow.

Especially in tight budget times, I don't support APD adding 47 new officers until I'm convinced they're not wasting the efforts of those they employ now. Grits has frequently argued the easiest way to free up more officer time would be to implement verified response for burglar alarms. After Grits a couple of weeks ago quoted materials from the Dallas PD calling false burglar alarms "the single greatest waste of law enforcement resources" in America," I was sent the internal document below created by a now-retired APD lieutenant in 2007 promoting the idea for Austin. I'm told it was written for discussion within the department but was never submitted to the city council.

According to that document, "In 2006 the Austin Police Department responded to 42,906 alarm calls.  At least 39,354 of those alarms were burglary alarms.  These calls accounted for 11.7% of calls dispatched to Austin police officers and 5.4% of all incoming calls to the Austin-Travis County 9-1-1 center in 2006.  Approximately 99% of those alarms were false alarms." Out of those nearly 40,000 burglar alarm calls in 2006, Austin officers made a whopping 11 arrests for burglary as a result of alarms, with 7,467 actual burglaries reported that year. Meanwhile, APD clearance rates for burglary (i.e., the proportion solved) trail the national average and have been steadily declining, with more resources focused on reacting to false alarms than investigating the actual crimes. Nobody but the writers of alarm company brochures thinks responding to burglar alarm calls will help solve more burglaries, but APD's proposed 2012 budget hires new patrol officers for that task while leaving as an "unmet need" resources to actually investigate burglaries. How messed up is that?

The cost spent responding to alarms in Austin is half again the revenue generated from fines and fees, according to the report, but on top of that there's the opportunity cost: Officers employed to chase down false burglar alarms aren't available to investigate actual burglaries or other crimes. Switching to verified response would be the equivalent of reducing dispatched calls to police by around 10% or so. With that option available, I don't see the wisdom in hiring 47 new officers just to waste their time tracking down false alarms.

Here's the internal report from APD on verified response from 2007; other than the dated statistics, nothing's changed. The department faces the identical practical and political issues today. And the best, short-term solution is the same as that identified by Lt. Pendergrass in this document: Expanding police coverage not through higher taxes and hiring more officers, but diverting police responses from non-productive false alarms to investigating actual crimes. Just hiring more officers to waste their time on unproductive tasks make little public-safety sense.

False alarms are the "single greatest waste of law enforcement resources" in America, but political third rail

Dallas mayoral candidate and former Dallas police chief David Kunkle told the Dallas Observer that "verified response" for private burglar alarms is "good public policy and bad politics." He won't support the idea, not because he doesn't think it's a good one, but because he fears a tuff-on-crime backlash during a contested mayoral campaign. While Kunkle was police chief, Dallas briefly implemented verified response for business burglar alarms. As Merten wrote at the time, "The number of false alarms is staggering -- 97 percent -- and Kunkle compared it to having a car that would only start three times out of 100 and on those three times, it would take so long that you’d miss your appointments." That's about right: It's why Grits has repeatedly argued for sending the clunker to the junk heap.

Dallas originally considered verified response for residential alarms as well, which is where the really big savings would come. But alarm companies rallied their customers to preserve the subsidy, and ultimately those companies and their customers convinced the City Council to reverse course on commercial alarms as well. Merten notes that the Dallas City Council repealed the program one week after Chief Kunkle gave them a presentation urging its continuation, and I was able to locate that briefing (pdf) online. Here are some of the data the Chief used at the time to argue for the program:

• In 2004 the Police Department received almost 62,000 burglar alarms
• Of these, 97.2% or about 60,100 were false
• Responding to these alarms required the time of approximately 45 Dallas Police officers
• This false alarm rate was consistent with findings across the nation
• In Dallas, 86% of the citizens and businesses without alarms are subsidizing alarm responses for 14% who have alarms
• False alarm dispatches are the single greatest waste of law enforcement resources in the U.S.
• 2004 police response time for priority 3 calls was about 32 minutes

In the first year after implementation, business burglaries in Dallas declined by about .6%, according to Kunkle's briefing, meaning in aggregate the effect on business burglaries was a wash. However, DPD responded to 25,949 fewer alarms, or a 45% decrease, freeing up the equivalent of 24 full-time officers to focus on actual crimes. Given that result, with so many departments cutting officers, you'd think these days more cities would be leaping to implement verified response to maintain levels of police coverage with fewer cops on patrol.

But as Kunkle says, this is an instance where tuff-on-crime politics interferes with good public policy and common sense. The small minority being subsidized by police responses to alarms are extremely vocal and well-organized by alarm companies, who have lists with contact info of concerned customers that would be the envy of any political consultant. Plus, those with alarms almost by definition are relatively wealthier - after all, they got an alarm because they have stuff to steal - and therefore also more politically influential. By contrast, the 86% of Dallasites without burglar alarms who're footing most of the bill are unorganized, unaware of the subsidy, and may not even perceive they have a dog in the fight.

That calculus may and should change in an era of budget cuts and law-enforcement layoffs. Verified response would allow agencies to reduce their number of officers without reducing meaningful police coverage. And all the sky-is-falling rhetoric never seems to pan out as predicted in cities where verified response is implemented. I hear many, many politicians talk about cutting "waste" in government, so why are so many too cowardly to confront the "single greatest waste of law enforcement resources in the U.S."?

Cutting police costs? 'Verified response' for alarms gets more benefit from same number of officers

The City of Austin has put up a page asking citizens to prioritize budget reductions, and reducing overtime and police pay were the top suggestions for the police department. Via their feedback mechanism, I replied:

If you're talking about cutting officers or eliminating overtime, here's a suggestion to put more officers on the street essentially for free: Implement verified response for burglar alarms. About 98-99% of residential burglar alarm callas are false alarms and nearly all the rest of the time the suspect is long gone when officers arrive. Implementing verified response would be like expanding the police force by 10% or more, allowing officers to focus on more important tasks. The reason this suggestion is free to the city, incidentally, is that it essentially eliminates a special-interest subsidy to the private alarm industry that's unjustified based on any cost-benefit analysis. It also would create jobs because the alarm companies must hire staff to verify alarms.

Salt Lake City's verified response program provides one of the best examples of this strategic redeployment of scarce officer resources: "Average private guard response times to alarm activations has been much faster than the previous average police response times. Average police response time to other high priority calls for service dropped from five to three minutes." Before Salt Lake implemented verified response, "False alarm calls were draining patrol resources and often created a significant backlog of calls."

I've not seen comparable data for Austin, but in many cities including Plano and Richardson, false alarms are the single most common category of police calls, more frequent than things like 911 calls or traffic accidents. Freed from reacting to unverified alarms, police could focus more on crime fighting, plus local employment gets a boost from alarm companies hiring more staff.

There will inevitably be citizens reacting out of fear who claim that nothing but police reacting to their burglar alarm will do, even if private security would get there sooner. Indeed, as soon as verified response is proposed, you can expect private alarm companies to engage in all sorts of fear mongering communcations with their customers urging them to oppose the idea. In reality, only a tiny number of arrests result from many thousands of residential burglar alarm calls, the false-positive rate is off the charts, and private homeowners are safer with private security getting their quicker, focusing police responses on verified emergencies.

If budget cuts reach so deep that police overtime, eliminating a cadet class, etc, are on the table, Austin should simultaneously seek ways to maximize bang for the buck from the officers we can afford. For jurisdictions which can muster the political courage to make policy based on data instead of the irrational expectations of burglary alarm customers, implementing verified response is the cheapest, most straightforward way to boost police coverage without increasing costs.

Justice system takes biggest hit when budget crunch gets local

I'm not surprised by news that Houston may be slashing overtime for police and firefighters in response to a budget crunch that's even been receiving international attention.

There are ways to reduce staffing costs without reducing police coverage, but I'm less than sanguine anyone in Houston will seriously consider them. Houston should be authorizing police officers to issue citations instead of making arrests for low-level, nonviolent misdemeanors. And eliminating responses to false burglar alarms by initiating verified response would be like adding dozens of cops to the force without costing the city a dime.

Governments at all levels - federal, state and local - are facing historic budget crises this year, but criminal justice spending affects government inversely from Washington to city hall.

At the federal level, spending on law enforcement and prisons, even if one includes border security and immigration detention costs, is dwarfed by budgets for national defense and entitlements. In an era in Washington where "trillion is the new billion," costs for federal prisons, the FBI, DEA, etc., aren't particularly expensive compared to expanding national health insurance or fighting multiple wars of choice overseas.

At the state level, criminal justice spending of all types is typically the third or fourth largest state spending priority - big enough to be significant but not the dominant force in the budget. In Texas it comes in behind behind education, health care and transportation.

At the local level, though, criminal justice-related expenses typically make up the lion's share of the budget. Counties must finance jails, courts, the Sheriff's department, constables, pay lawyers for indigent defendants, and generally pay a host of costs related to criminal justice. Meanwhile, police departments are an enormous cost driver for cities - often the single largest item in their budget.

So as long as the housing market is down and property tax intake remains low, criminal justice spending will continue to take the biggest hit at the local level. Houston won't be the last city looking to cut police budgets, but how they choose to do so may set the tone for how other Texas cities handle similar situations.

'To really fight crime, raise number of investigators'

The title of this post is the headline of a Nov. 28 op-ed in the Houston Chronicle by Bill King argued that spending more on patrol officers won't reduce crime but redeploying them from patrol to investigations might:

there is one recurring theme I have encountered in my research on this subject, and that is the size of a department's investigative force. While the public generally believes that more officers on patrol will deter crime, most of the studies show that more patrols have little effect on the overall crime rate. Like squeezing a closed tube of toothpaste, patrols may move the crime to different areas, but the total amount does not change much.

What the criminologists say is much more effective is dramatically increasing the number of detectives investigating crimes. Take burglary for example. Last year, there were about 27,000 burglaries in the city. HPD made arrests in a paltry 1,900 cases, about 7 percent. That does not represent much deterrent, nor does it take many burglars out of action.

One of principal reasons the clearance rate for burglary is low is that few cases are actually investigated. One detective told me that about one in 20 is seriously investigated. However, that is hardly surprising considering that HPD only has about 1,100 officers in its investigative division, a number that has not changed significantly over the last decade. With about 140,000 Part I crimes being reported each year, each investigator gets a new case about every other day. Considering that the more serious cases, like murder, can tie up a team of investigators for months, it is easy to see how there is little time to work on a garden-variety burglary. A dramatic increase in investigative resources would likely yield much better results than turning out several hundred new rookie officers.

In addressing the crime issue, we do not need the same old worn-out cliches. If we are going to reallocate resources for public safety, there should be defined expectations as to what results that will yield and metrics in place to confirm the results. Simply putting more officers on patrol, without smart, innovative thinking, will do little good. So when the candidates for mayor and city council come to ask for your vote and tell you they are going to get tough on crime, ask them to get a little smarter instead.

The old school description of law enforcement duties is "trail 'em, nail 'em, and jail 'em." But between the drug war and the increasingly vast array of human behaviors criminalized by law, perhaps it's true that police departments have become overly infatuated with the "nail 'em and jail 'em" aspects of the job, underresourcing actual investigative staff, going after low hanging fruit instead of digging into the harder cases. That's particularly true on burglary, where clearance rates nearly everywhere are in the single digits just like in Houston. Lots of reports get taken, but I'm not sure many detective-hours end up getting spent on those cases.

Interesting perspective from Mr. King. I certainly agree that how police are deployed is just as if not much more important than how many there are.

As a corollary to his suggestion, if departments want to free up patrol resources to shift toward investigations, I'd recommend switching to "verified response" for private burglar alarms, since the vast, vast majority are false alarms. In a survey three years ago, the Texas House Law Enforcement Committee found that in some cities false alarms were the most common type of police service call - more frequent than things like 911 calls or traffic accidents - and in all surveyed jurisdictions it was in the top three. The rate of false alarms is 98-99%, and even when a crime occurred, usually the offender is long gone. If, say, ten percent of patrol officers' time is spent responding to false alarms and those duties are shifted to private alarm companies, that's manpower that could be shifted toward crime investigation without adding any new officers at all.

A Suggestion for Reducing Life Threatening Risks to Officers

Over the holidays came the good news that the number of police officer deaths in the line of duty declined last year, both in Texas and nationally (though Texas still led all states with 14 deaths). So I was interested to see the Senate Criminal Justice Committee Report's Fifth Interim Charge articulate the problem in more detail. See the report (large pdf)

Nationally, 68% of officers killed on the job die in car accidents; in Texas that number is 65% (15 of 23 officers killed between 2005-2007). Another 2 Texas officers (8.6%) during that period were struck by a vehicle while outside their vehicles, two officers died in drowning deaths, and three accidental deaths occurred while training.

These numbers are fairly consistent with national data, the committee found. The part of policing that causes the most on-the-job deaths are high-speed chases and driving to and from each incident - particularly with lights and sirens running when officers can disregard traffic laws, depending on their local policy, and are much more likely to get in a fatal accident.

So perhaps it was that context stirring in my brain that helps explain why I took a decidedly different view than my friend BigJolly at the Lone Star Times of the actions of a woman described by WFAA-TV("Dallas woman fined for misusing panic button," Jan. 6) who's complaining about a $100 fine for using her "panic button" to bring police to her house with lights and sirens running for no good reason just once too often:

Jill Frederick lives alone. She's been burglarized twice. So when a stranger banged on her door at 11 p.m., she hit the panic button on her alarm.

"I thought if I wait one more second, then this guy is coming in. I just did the thing I thought would make them respond fastest," she said.

The panic button triggered what police call a "code 3 call." Officers use their lights and sirens. They got there in six minutes. The man was still there and was drunk so they arrested him.

"To me, that's what a panic button is for," said Frederick.

But a few weeks later, Frederick got a $100 fine for a false alarm.

Jill Frederick said she would do the same thing next time.

Police told her there wasn't really an offense, since the man didn't actually try to break in.

"I think that's not right and I don't think anyone should have to pay a $100 to have the police come out and arrest somebody," said Frederick.

Dallas police say there's a city ordinance that allows them to fine people who use their panic buttons in non-emergency situations.

"We encourage people to use their panic alarm where there really is an emergency when there is an offense going down when someone is kicking in, coming in or trying to get into the house," said Lt. Chris Aulbaugh from Dallas police.

This fine probably isn't coming from out of the blue for Ms. Fredereick; more likely, she's been crying "wolf" before this episode. The Dallas News Crime Blog reported last year that "Currently, a location can have three false alarms during a 12-month-period before the city can impose a fine."

So Ms. Frederick has hit her "panic button" at least three times in the last year if she's starting to receive fines. Each time police officers came with lights and sirens running, putting themselves in the statistically riskiest situation they face on the job, all because the woman is afraid to answer her door. The city should fine her. In fact, they should be reimbursed for the last three incidents, too.

Dallas PD tried to implement "verified response" for commercial alarms awhile back, and while it was operating it reduced this problem dramatically, the Dallas News reported in 2007:

"It's about the utilization of a scarce resource," District 5 council member Vonciel Jones Hill said. "Verified response has worked the way it was intended to work. It does not make sense to continue to send a scarce resource to false alarms when we have higher priorities."

District 14 council member Angela Hunt said: "Our police chief helped us use our scarce resources ... to their highest and best use. Why are we taking them off the street? Why are we taking them out of our neighborhoods to cater to false alarms? We should listen to [Chief Kunkle's] guidance and not be swayed by politics."

Between February 2006 and March 2007, Dallas experienced a 45 percent reduction in burglar alarm calls and redirected $1.56 million in manpower costs previously spent on responding to false alarms to other work, according to the city staff's briefing to the council. It also noted that fees charged for false alarms decreased by $1.19 million.

Business burglaries declined by 0.6 percent during a one-year period that ended Feb. 28, according to the presentation to the council.

Ending alarm company subsidies entirely and requiring verified response for all home alarms would be the best public policy approach, but I doubt there's a chance in the world the Lege would ever do it. As evidenced by Dallas' experiment with commercial alarms, verified response puts more officers on the street and reduces fines for false alarms, but it also forces the alarm company to pay the full freight for the service they provide. Right now it's a heavily subsidized business model.

The Senate Committee's interim charge on officer deaths was particularly light on specific recommendations, but perhaps this Dallas case study offers an example of how they could reduce risks to officers by reducing the number of times officers are needlessly placed in harm's way. Either the state should embrace the City of Dallas' proposal to authorize cities to fine on the first false alarm, or else disallow commercial "panic button" services at residences from bringing "lights and sirens" responses.

Either of those reforms would reduce the number of times officers put themselves and the public at risk by speeding and violating traffic rules, and would also reduce the subsidy non-alarm company clients pay in taxes to cater to people who call the police instead of answering the door when somebody knocks.

RELATED: A commenter brings sad news that "The first Texas peace officer officer death [of 2009] occurred Tuesday in Dallas. DPD Sr. Corporal Norman Smith and other officers were attempting to serve a felony warrant when he was shot." See the Dallas News coverage. My heartfelt condolences go out to Cpl. Smith's family, friends and colleagues.

Smart policies can boost police coverage even in a bad economy

CNN had a story this week that I'm sure we'll be seeing much more frequently titled, "Police face cuts as economy falters." According to CNN:

U.S. police departments are streamlining patrols, reducing training and cutting back on some preventative programs as their budgets fall victim to the struggling economy.

Many police chiefs are warning deeper cuts may be coming. ...

A poll of 200 departments during the summer by the Police Executive Research Forum, which studies law enforcement trends, reported 39 percent of respondents said their operating budgets were cut because of the economy and 43 percent said the faltering economy had affected their ability to deliver services.

The Plano, TX Police Department was one of the examples cited - they're leaving vacant officer positions unfilled to save money.

This problem will likely only get worse, but there are two easy fixes Texas departments can implement to keep more officers on the street during the coming economic crunch:

First, more departments should embrace new discretion granted by the Legislature last year to give citations instead of arresting for low-level misdemeanors. In Austin, for example, 37% of all arrestees entering jail are there on charges for which they could have received a citation. That takes officers off the street to handle petty offenses and effectively reduces the number of cops on patrol.

In addition, cities could greatly increase their police coverage by requiring private security companies to do "verified response" before sending officers to react to alarms. As many as 99% of alarm calls are false alarms, and even when a crime did occur, typically the offender is long gone by the time police get there.

In some jurisdictions like Plano and Richardson, police spend more time responding to false burglar alarms than any other departmental function. Plano PD in particular spends about 10% of its officers' time annually responding to false alarms.

So implementing verified response would be the equivalent of increasing the size of their police force by as much as 10%, while using citations for low-level offenses would keep an even greater proportion of officers out on the street to perform more important tasks.

There's little doubt the economic downturn will affect law enforcement agencies' ability to hire more officers in the near future, so it's more critical than ever that officials use police resources wisely. These two ideas would supplement police coverage at no cost to the taxpayers. In fact, both would save taxpayers money while putting more cops on the street - truly a win-win scenario.

Dallas nixes verified response for commercial burglar alarms

The Dallas City Council earlier this month last year foolishly rejected Police Chief David Kunkle's highly successful initiative to require verification for commercial burglar alarms before sending police to respond. Mayor Tom Leppert pushed the council to vote 10-4 to overturn the nearly two-year old policy, despite the fact that it saved the department money, reduced fines on local businesses and enabled DPD to improve other services, all while burglaries declined.

More than 97% of commercial alarms in Dallas turn out to be false and of those that are real police almost never arrive in time to catch anyone in the act. For home alarms that figure is even higher.

Burglar alarm services sold by private companies are a classic example of "security theater." They make people feel safer but don't make it any less likely your home will be burglarized or that police will catch the person who robbed you.

What's more, the business model schlepps actual costs of providing the service onto taxpayers who pay for the cops who show up and mill around after each alarm goes off. The security company does nothing for their income but install the alarm system and call 911 when it's activated.

Bottom line: 911 is for emergencies and burglar alarms almost never qualify as such, but in many jurisdictions they're the single most common type of police service call.

According to the Dallas News ("Dallas police to respond to business burglar alarms," Sept. 7):

Wednesday's vote comes 21 months after the council voted 8-5 to institute verified response for businesses, with Mayor Laura Miller arguing: "I believe in the chief. This makes sense."

With the repeal, Mr. Leppert, who took office in June, scored his first major political victory on a contentious item before the council.

As recently as last week, Mayor Pro Tem Elba Garcia said she believed she had enough votes to reaffirm verified response, which Mr. Leppert placed on the council's agenda for a vote.

But Mr. Leppert persuaded council colleagues who remained undecided earlier this month to ultimately repeal the policy.

The policy shift also is redemption for a local alarm industry that's relentlessly lobbied council members since verified response became law in Dallas.

Dr. Garcia decried Wednesday's decision, saying it hurls Dallas back to the situation it found itself in earlier this decade, when hundreds of police officer work hours were wasted responding to false burglar alarms.

"Today's choice is whether we back up our chief of police and the Dallas Police Department and continue to prepare to protect citizens from harm, or we cave in to the alarm industry," Dr. Garcia said.

"It's about the utilization of a scarce resource," District 5 council member Vonciel Jones Hill said. "Verified response has worked the way it was intended to work. It does not make sense to continue to send a scarce resource to false alarms when we have higher priorities."

District 14 council member Angela Hunt said: "Our police chief helped us use our scarce resources ... to their highest and best use. Why are we taking them off the street? Why are we taking them out of our neighborhoods to cater to false alarms? We should listen to [Chief Kunkle's] guidance and not be swayed by politics."

Between February 2006 and March 2007, Dallas experienced a 45 percent reduction in burglar alarm calls and redirected $1.56 million in manpower costs previously spent on responding to false alarms to other work, according to the city staff's briefing to the council. It also noted that fees charged for false alarms decreased by $1.19 million.

Business burglaries declined by 0.6 percent during a one-year period that ended Feb. 28, according to the presentation to the council.

Dr. Garcia offered a substitute motion to shelve Wednesday's vote and direct the council's newly constituted Public Safety Committee, of which she is chairwoman, to further study verified response.

But her motion failed, and Mr. Leppert called for a vote on the original motion.

The council's decision is effective Oct. 1.

The Dallas City Council should be going the other direction, requiring verified response for home alarms as well. Instead their decision will reduce police coverage and increase response time for more serious calls. I'm sure the Dallas Council isn't planning to hire more officers to make up the difference.

Mayor Tom Leppert said, "We've got to be concerned about the policy and the wider message it sends." But what message is that, exactly? To me it's basically, "We'd rather make the general public less safe in order to subsidize private alarm companies who profit from selling fear instead of using police resources for fighting crime."

Is that really the message they want to be sending?

CORRECTION: The original post mistakenly said this change was made earlier this month. In fact, Dallas' verfied response ended one year ago and the Dallas News blog post I was reacting to was reporting, instead, on a new proposal by Dallas to ask the Legislature to give cities authority to fine people after the first false alarm. Sorry about the mixup.

UPDATE: A reader sent me data on Salt Lake City's verified alarm system, which appears to work great and save the city a lot of money. According to a handout from the Salt Lake PD I received via email:

The Verified Response ordinance became effective on December 1, 2000. Our department immediately experienced an unprecedented 90% reduction in alarm responses. Past efforts to reduce the volume of false alarms through permits, warnings, fines and suspensions had only a modest effect. Police response to alarms was most effective and efficient when it was first verified that alarm activation was indicative of suspicious activity. Private security guards are ideally suited to make this initial verification. Police continue to respond to human-activated alarms such as robbery, panic and duress which continue to be 99% false.

In the first year, Verified Response freed 8,482 officer hours which could then be redirected to other police priorities and also saved $508,920 in associated personnel costs. ...

Verified Response has been a win-win for our citizens and our department. Due to the low priority of alarm signals, private guard response time to alarm activations has been much quicker than police response. Police have been able to reduce the response time to high priority emergency calls, including panic, robbery and duress alarms, by nearly one minute. Most citizens will pay as little as an additional $5 per month on their monitoring account for guard response, rather than the former $100 false alarm fines. Most importantly, our officers were able to redirect time spent on answering false alarm signals to other public safety concerns.

False burglar alarms drain police resources

The next time your local police chief says he needs to hire more cops, ask him (or her) how much officer time the department wastes chasing false burglar alarms - I'll bet the answer would surprise you.

Responding to false alarms operated by private companies at homes and businesses are the number one type of police service calls in Plano and Richardson, according to a recent analysis by the Texas House Law Enforcement Committee, topping 911 calls and traffic accidents as the main way police in those cities spend their time. False alarms were the second most common type of police call in Garland, and the third most common in Irving.

Those were the Texas towns included with 16 other US cities in a comparison chart from 2003 labeled Appendix E (p. 39) as part of the Law Enforcement Committee's recently released interim report. (In all cities surveyed false alarms were among the top three types of police service calls.)

Think about it - officers in Plano and Richardson spent more time responding to false burglar alarms than any other departmental function!

An astonishing amount of police power is wasted essentially subsidizing the bottom line of these private businesses. In Plano, for example, police responded to 18,716 false alarms in 2003. This is in a town that puts about 50 officers on the street each day, so nearly 10% of the department's manpower is being wasted chasing false alarms.

I've never understood this setup, but the problem is ubiquitous - the rate of false alarms is typically around 98-99%, and even when it's not a "false" alarm, the likelihood police will catch anyone is virtually nil. But taxpayers subsidize private alarm companies year in and year out, even though their entire "service" is to flip a switch that calls the cops.

I'm a fan of "verified response" for private alarm companies - I think they should be required to send a security guard to check if something's wrong before calling the cops. Right now taxpayers subsidize the cost of private alarm services up front, and they don't appear to improve public safety much at all.

Burglar alarm subsidies harm taxpayers, public safety

Maybe another reason police are solving fewer violent crimes than ever before is that they're spending so much time chasing down false burglar alarms. Dallas PD has decided to stop responding to commercial burglar alarms until alarm companies verify a crime was committed at the business. Dallas police say 97% of such calls are false alarms. In other cities, the false alarm rate tops 99%. Even when a crime has been committed, it's extremely rare for police to find a burglar still on the premises when they arrive. Such "verified response" policies save police departments in other jurisdictions huge sums, and free up officer resource to pursue actual criminals.

Alarm companies profits stem from massive, regressive taxpayer subsidies -- police respond to the alarms, after all, not the companies who get the money. Taxpayers should welcome DPD's common sense policy, and the city should extend it to residential alarms -- that'd be the equivalent of putting dozens of new officers on the street without raising taxes or reducing public safety in the least.