For nearly two years, a dedicated committee of alarm industry and public safety professionals have been diligently developing a collaborative ANSI standard that will transform the way central stations evaluate site alarm activations through the application of a scoring matrix.

The scoring criteria provides the method to analyze alarm information received and categorizing them into five priority levels depending upon identified severity. Based upon the determined priority level, the alarm information may or may not be transmitted to the designated site ECC/PSAP for a request for law enforcement dispatch.

The five alarm priority levels include:

• INTRUSION ALARM LEVEL 0 — No call for police response with no criteria evident or a reasonable belief there is a crime in progress.
• INTRUSION ALARM LEVEL 1 — Police response request with no or limited additional information or other data beyond the alarm signals.
• INTRUSION ALARM LEVEL 2 — Police response request with confirmed or "highly probable" human presence with unknown intent that there is significant data that a person is onsite. This could be audio or video but could also be determined by several other things that are designed to detect human presence, for example, energy management systems, cellphone detection, WiFi or LiDAR, along with a whole host of analytics.
• INTRUSION ALARM LEVEL 3 — Police response request with confirmed threat to property where there is clear evidence an intrusion is in progress.
• INTRUSION ALARM LEVEL 4 — Police response request with clear confirmed evidence threat to life is present.

This standard is critical for public safety because it provides situational awareness for responding officers concerning life safety for owners and occupants, officer safety enhancements, and situation awareness for safe response logistics decision-making. The standard’s threat criteria, through the verification analysis process, provides the groundwork for greater priority response which will enhance apprehension potential for actual events.

Through the central station analysis process the standard adds value to security customers, the ECC/PSAP community, and the security industry through increased validation. Credibility is also raised for all stakeholders in the alarm process by increasing confidence in dispatch requests to law enforcement. The standard further provides for flexibility that accommodates innovation by allowing new technologies and datasets to be adopted when analyzing alarm activations. Both manual as well as automated central stations can equally participate in adopting and implementing AVS-01.

With AVS-01 nearing approval and adoption in the ANSI process, hopefully by the end of 2022, the call to action is for central stations, the ECC/PSAP community, and law enforcement to begin considering continued awareness efforts and implementation strategies. These implementation processes will include policies, procedures and training programs. Both TMA and PPVAR will continue to collaborate in advancing the awareness and implementation of AVS-01.

In the next several months we will see security automation providers writing into automation platforms support for the scoring processes outlined by the standard. Also, members of the development committee will be reaching out to the software vendors that provide ECC/PSAP call-taker software to encourage AVS-01 standard criteria into their programs to integrate the dovetailing of central station information through the ECC/PSAP to their Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) software. This will provide a seamless pathway for information transfer and updates. Many of the ECC/PSAPs also utilize TMA’s ASAP to PSAP with greatly enhances the speed and accuracy of these transmissions.

Additionally, awareness and training will need to occur within the central stations, ECC/PSAPs, and law enforcement agencies across the country to familiarize all partners in the process with the new vernacular and the threat level classifications. These training discussions and program development will be a primary priority of TMA and PPVAR for both the first and second quarter of 2023. Outreach will also continue through industry and public safety professional associations to get the message out.

As Morgan ertel, president of TMA, recently commented, “I believe that this is going to be one of the most significant changes in the past 50 years on how the alarm industry and public service work together. It will allow alarm companies to have several new offerings and value propositions, and it will allow public services to manage their assets and processes more effectively.”

The real benefactors of AVS-01 will ultimately be the industry alarm subscribers and the community citizens served by public safety with a comprehensive, integrated, coordinated alarm response. Let us all, alarm industry and public safety alike, make this AVS-01 call to action an overwhelming success story for 2023.

For additional details on AVS-01, check out SDM’s podcast with Mark McCall here. McCall highlights the standard’s technology aspects, the cross section of industries and public service making it all happen, benefits to the public, and more. You can also find information about the standard from TMA here and PPVAR here.