In eyes of L.A., to err is a fine -

Too Many False Alarms!

Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times Three times Checkers escaped from his cage and triggered owner Glenn Geraghty's burglar alarm, bringing police. Police should have stopped responding after two false alarms, but LAPD computers didn't flag the problem. Penalties for too many false alarms have helped reduce the number of calls, but problems persist. By Joel Rubin, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
March 2, 2008 On a recent morning while Glenn Geraghty was away, the security alarm at his Watts home went off. When Los Angeles police officers arrived, a neighbor with a key to the house offered a sheepish apology: Geraghty's dog, Checkers, had pawed open the gate on his cage and tripped the alarm's motion sensors.

The police left, only to be summoned back hours later when the dog got free a second time. That should have been the end of it. A city law grants only two false alarms every 12 months. Any more than that and police aren't required to respond unless someone at the scene verifies that the alarm is real.

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But when Checkers triggered the alarm a third time, the Los Angeles Police Department's computer system failed to flag Geraghty's address as a repeat offender, and a 911 dispatcher sent more officers.

That a dog can fool police into chasing a phantom burglar three times in a day underscores LAPD's long, frustrating history of battling false alarms.

More than three years after taking a tough-love stance on the nearly 110,000 bogus calls it received each year, the department is still struggling to get the upper hand.

The overall number of alarms has dropped, but nearly all are still false.

Obsolete computer technology and understaffing, meanwhile, have left the department as overwhelmed as ever, failing to collect millions of dollars in fines each year from often belligerent home and business owners.

"The system we have now is flawed," said Lt. Andre Dawson, who oversees a small, frazzled staff in LAPD's Alarm Division. "It is totally antiquated."

Los Angeles is a city obsessed with protecting itself. Dozens of companies, with names such as Sentry Tech and Protection One, serve an estimated quarter of a million homes and offices that are equipped with wired locks, secret pass codes and panic buttons.

The systems can be valuable crime deterrents for residents, but police complain that they are a tremendous drain on their resources.

The issue came to a head in 2003, when police responded to 109,295 alarm calls -- about 13% of all calls for assistance that year -- and nearly 106,000 of them were false. Police Chief William J. Bratton, already trying to make do with an undersized force, tried to push through a new policy calling for officers to respond to alarms only when there was clear evidence that a break-in was occurring. Too much time and too many resources, Bratton said, were wasted on wild goose chases.

But Angelenos and the security industry erupted in protest, lighting up the phones of City Council members. The council took the unusual step of vetoing the LAPD's proposed policy and appointed a task force, which produced the compromise that went into effect three years ago.

The city ordinance imposed the two-false-alarm limit and requires operators at security companies to try to contact clients on at least two phone numbers to see if an alarm should be canceled before the LAPD is sent.

It also imposed an increasingly steep scale of fines for each false alarm, starting at $115 for the first offense. For those who do not get an alarm permit required by the city, the fines are much higher. On Friday, city Councilwoman Wendy Greuel made a motion to amend the ordinance to cover the thousands of false alarms the city Fire Department responds to each year as well.

In one way, the plan has worked for police. By last year, the number of times police were dispatched to an alarm call had plummeted to 59,482.

At least part of the decline, police said, was due to "Alarm School" -- a reeducation camp of sorts for people with a track record of false alarms. Akin to traffic school -- and equally boring -- the two-hour classes are offered periodically at night and on weekends. In exchange for sitting through PowerPoint presentations and a melodramatic video about how to avoid false alarms, alarm owners can have their fines reduced.

Geraghty, Checkers' owner, attended one of the classes on a sunny Saturday morning to lower his $495 bill. Bleary-eyed and unenthusiastic, about 35 people shuffled into the dimly lighted room at the LAPD's cadet training center in Westchester. More than a few slurped coffee from foam cups. One woman dozed off with her chin in her hands.

"Would I rather be somewhere else? Definitely," Geraghty said. "But at least they're giving you a way out" of the bill.

On many other fronts, the city's alarm policy has been an outright mess.

Most notably, although the overall number of alarms is down, the rate of false calls has held steady at about 97%. More than 4,500 addresses tallied three or more false alarms last year. Topping the list is a building on Hill Street in downtown L.A. -- home to scores of jewelry wholesale businesses that wrongly summoned police 253 times in 2007. The response by officers can be significant, especially at night when helicopters are sometimes called in to check rooftops.