“Nobody benefits from a false alarm — not the citizen, the alarm industry or public safety,” emphasizes Jim Cogswell, special services officer for the Leawood, Kan., Police Department as well as president of the False Alarm Reduction Association, a public safety organization aimed at reducing false alarms.

People within the public safety community and alarm industry like to distinguish between false alarms, where an alarm goes off when there is no emergency, and false dispatches, where public safety is sent to respond to such an alarm. “Today we are seeing residential false dispatch rates in the 0.2 to 0.25 range,” says Stan Martin, executive director of the Security Industry Alarm Coalition, a group comprised of members of several key alarm industry associations with the goal of reducing false alarms. A rate of 0.2 or 0.25, he explains, “means that people have a dispatch to the home only once every four to five years.” Nationwide, Martin adds, the false dispatch rate is around 0.3 for residential users and slightly more than 1 for commercial accounts.