The Partnership for Priority Verified Alarm Response (PPVAR) held its mid-year meeting virtually today, June 10, at 11 a.m. ET.

New PPVAR President Tom Nakatani led the meeting, explaining the PPVAR’s strategy and what the organization has been up to. In the past year, Nakatani says PPVAR has brought on a new executive director, updated their website, updated the bylaws and more.

“We’ve moved ourselves away from when PPVAR was just a start-up and transformed ourselves into a professional organization,” Nakatani said in the meeting.

The key role of PPVAR is to work on standards, Nakatani continued, and their next main goal is creating an alarm verification score for central stations in an effort to reduce false alarms. There is a dedicated working group — the PPVAR TMA-AVS-01 Draft Committee — tasked with developing a draft outline of the table of contents for the new standard that will be used by a TMA Standards Committee in the creation of a standard for scoring signals received from burglary, robbery and duress systems. 

The meeting also revealed that PPVAR is working on becoming more closely aligned with The Monitoring Association (TMA) and other organizations, while increasing community outreach. In addition, the current PPVAR team wants to extend the board to bring on more public safety officials.

When someone asked the board at the end of the meeting how much progress had been made on creating a false alarm standard, Nakatani said it will be months if not a year before the standard can be completely flushed out and adopted. But still, the board says they are happy with their progress. 

Learn more about PPVAR at ppvar.org.