We have a proposal on the table from the Dallas Police called "Verified Response." Essentially, it boils down to the age-old question: if your house alarm goes off and no one is around to verify it, will the Dallas Five-O show up? "Verified Response" answers that question: no.
Verified Response is a program wherein the Dallas' Police Department will only show up if there is a third party physically on-site to verify that, yep, there's a crime going on. Under this plan, the dispatcher will not send a car if the third party calling is a security company. They would, however, come a-running if someone set off the "panic button" in the home.
My wife and I arm the alarm every night before we go to bed. If I'm out of town, she arms it as soon as the dogs come in for the night. Let's just say, Heaven forbid, some masked thug breaks in and prevents her from reaching the alarm; because she doesn't get the chance to hit the panic button, the Dallas police will ignore the distress call. This is a load of unmitigated horse shit.
The Dallas po-po cite stats that show that 97.2% of all house alarms are false. That means that 60,100 calls out of 62,000 per year are false, but this outright ignores the fact that 1,900 are real distress calls. I'm sorry if that means that you have to check out a couple of false calls, but check them all out. Charge me a fine if it's a false alarm (why do they not already do that?). Hell, I'll pay the officers that show up and offer a heartfelt apology for wasting their time as long as they actually show up.
The stats that the DPS cites show that they would save an average of two (2) minutes on response time. Two fucking minutes when their average response time is twenty? If they're going to emphasize percentages, then why aren't they claiming to be 10% faster as a result of the change? The answer is ten percent is a drop in the bucket when someone's life is being radically altered for the worse. Two minutes is palpable; ten percent is the difference between getting an "F" or an "F+" for response time. "We're sorry your family lost everything of value in your home, and the rest of the place was ransacked, but we would have arrived there 10% faster than before had we actually shown up!"
And what about that fee that I pay every year to register my alarm? Do I really need to be officially registered for you to ignore my alarm? Perhaps if I don't register my alarm, police officers might be dispatched to my home to write me a ticket, then they can catch the criminals in the act!
But what, pray tell, do they spend their time investigating? Elvis' missing shirt. Elvis' missing shirt gets CSI: Dallas to show up within 24 hours, but my neighbor's mugging in her own damned gargage gets settled over a voice mail hotline.
http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/news/local/12884726.htm
Hey, Chief Kunkle! I've got a lot of Star Wars memorabilia in my house. Just go ahead and assume that all of my alarm calls are threats to my Carrie Fisher shrine. Maybe if they officers show up under 18 minutes, I'll let them touch my wookie...
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