FALSE ALARM FORUM: Let Visual Verification Be the Judge Washington DC

How serious is serious? What constitutes an emergency? When a home security alarm system is triggered, assessing whether an emergency call is a life-threatening crisis, a home intrusion, or a system malfunction can be difficult to determine without the benefit of visual verification—to truly see what is happening as it is happening.

By not being able to view what is unfolding spontaneously in order to best evaluate the severity of the situation, the logical progression of procedural choices to resolve a situation is marred. In a worst-case scenario it may mean emergency dispatch services are allocated at the wrong time to the wrong place, or erroneously sent to a non-event. In some cases no dispatch may even be sent at all, potentially creating a greater risk to the loss of life and property.

Time to see and assess

No question, false alarms waste time and money, yet every agency runs a certain risk by taking no action at all. The evolution of enhanced visual verification technologies that are integrated into operations software, however, can reduce false alarm rates and the considerable expense tied to them. This translates into fewer wasted dispatches and improved efficiencies that produce operational cost-savings, particularly beneficial in remote rural areas that are low on physical and financial resources and geographically scattered. Most significantly, automated technological advancements help create a faster format to make emergency services more readily available when they are truly needed.

With greater numbers of home security systems on the market than ever before there are increasingly higher call volumes, each needing individual assessment and potential response. It is here that technology can help bridge that gap, to cut down on the time and money wasted dispatching services to a false alarm.

With the utilization of automated monitoring platforms with notification systems, customers themselves are empowered to receive notification of events more quickly and are able to respond immediately to the event by either canceling the alarm — must have forgotten to close the door properly — or by utilizing their mobile device to view live video of the event. Some platforms provide an emergency services portal.

Once an event is triggered, the event history unfolds in real-time, highlighting what has happened, what actions the central station operator has taken and who has responded to the call. There is video footage to chronicle the event. By adding the ability to visually verify a call objectively through an automated system the number of false alarms can be reduced, while creating a faster platform on which to act upon in an emergency situation. Ultimately it makes a Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP's) job that much easier by creating an immediate view of what is actually occurring by linking them to the real-time information they need.

Gilles Prefontaine is the Leader of Strategy and Planning at Denver, Colo.-based Active Response Monitoring (www.activeresponsemonitoring.com), part of Edmonton, Alberta-based VOXCOM Security Systems. He may be reached at gilles.prefontaine@activeresponsemonitoring.com.