The initial verified response proposal, which called for both residential and commercial verified response but was later changed to commercial only, was crafted after an efficiency study called for by the city council noted that 97 percent of calls were false alarms, according to Rick Watson, Dallas police lieutenant.
“It’s a lot of time and it’s a lot of man hours responding to false alarms,†Watson said. In 2004, Watson estimated Dallas police expended approximately 47,000 man-hours answering burglar alarm calls.