Article: Patrol: False alarms

Rate of false alarms is well, alarming

They're the three words police dispatchers most commonly hear from patrol officers who have responded to activated home or business security alarms.

Those words are proof that officers have responded to a security alarm activation call that proved unfounded-for which the owner might have to pay a fine. The number of such calls is growing each year.

Do they constitute a major problem for law enforcement agencies by taking up time and resources that could be allocated elsewhere and putting responding officers at additional risk? That is a subject of some debate.

A recent survey of randomly selected law enforcement agencies upon which this article is ...

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