Lawrence police and firefighters are responding to thousands of false alarms a year from automatic security systems, officials say, draining resources and undermining the readiness of emergency responders.

“We’re going to an awful lot of alarms that don’t generate anything,” Lawrence Police Lt. Dave Cobb said last week.

In 2003, his department responded to automatic alarm systems 4,816 times. Only 11 of those alarms resulted in the filing of a crime report.

It’s happening with fire alarms, too.

Lawrence-Douglas County Fire & Medical responded 637 times last year to false fire reports from automatic systems, accounting for nearly 8 percent of all emergency calls the department received.

“Any time we’re sending resources to handle an incident, it lessens the resources to handle another, simultaneous incident,” Deputy Chief Mark Bradford said.

With fire alarms, officials say, there’s not much they can do except pressure building owners to do proper maintenance on alarm systems.

Enforcement abandoned

But the city long ago stopped enforcing its own ordinances that penalize owners of businesses and homes where burglar alarms misfire too often. And officials can’t say exactly how many burglar alarm systems exist in Lawrence, because they also stopped requiring building owners to annually renew their alarm permits, even though city ordinances require the renewal.

Lawrence-Douglas County Fire & Medical units leave the scene of a false alarm response at Grace Pearson Scholarship Hall, 1335 La. Last year the police and Fire & Medical responded to more than 5,400 false alarms.

City Manager Mike Wildgen said the administrative costs of following the city’s alarm laws had become prohibitive.

“It’s outdated,” Wildgen said of the alarm ordinance, “and it needs to be updated.”

Officials say they think there are 1,617 fire and burglar alarm systems in the city — up from 288 in 1988 — though they admit that number is imprecise because permit renewals have been abandoned.

David Rueschhoff, of Rueschhoff Locksmith and Security Systems, said the number of burglar and fire alarm systems had grown along with the city in recent years.

“There’s not a boom going on,” Rueschhoff said. “It’s simply a matter of, as more people have them, more people feel the need to, because they don’t want to be the ones without.”

Inevitable?

City code: Chapter 13, Article 3: Emergency Alarm Systems

Property owners buy the systems, Rueschhoff said, for three reasons: to protect family, protect property, and to earn a discount on home and business insurance policies.

“People who visit a home or business and observe those (systems), they know it’s not a place to break in,” he said. “The opposite is also true: If you don’t have those things, people will feel invited to come back.”

He said his company tried to screen out false alarms by calling the business or home owner before calling emergency dispatchers.

“As an alarm company, we respond as quickly as we can to alarms we know about,” he said. “But when there’s user errors, there’s not much we can do about that.”

And, Rueschhoff noted: “A smoke detector is a sensitive device. They can be triggered by a number of things that are not fire.”

Firefighters agree, saying a fire alarm triggered by tobacco smoke or shower steam — common occurrences at university residence halls — is functioning properly.

“When they do go off,” Bradford said, “we do want to be called.”

Dangerous trend

But in cases where firefighters are called repeatedly to the same building, he said, “mentally, it unprepares us.”

And residents of a building also get used to false alarms, he said, potentially putting their lives in danger if they ignore possible danger.

“We get conditioned and don’t prepare ourselves for a proper response,” Bradford said. “For the tenants, it’s the same thing.”

Scarier, he said, is when firefighters are responding to a false alarm when a real emergency is taking place somewhere else in town.

“We’ve had instances where we’ve been en route to a false alarm when there was another call of a more urgent nature,” said Maj. Rich Barr of Lawrence-Douglas County Fire & Medical.

And that endangers lives and property, Bradford said.

“A fire grows 10 percent every minute that it’s burning,” he said.

The costs

Fire officials could not estimate the cost in resources of their false alarms. Cobb conservatively calculated police costs at $48,000 a year, based on the number of calls, the length of time police spent responding to the alarms and the average officer’s salary.

Those costs are borne entirely by taxpayers, though that hasn’t always been the case.

City ordinances require fire and burglar alarm systems to be registered at City Hall at a cost of $6.25 a year, plus another $6.25 a year for the renewal fee.

Wildgen said the city didn’t bother mailing out renewal notices anymore, saying the city costs are greater than $6.25 per permit.

City ordinances also require the chief of police to revoke permits for alarm systems that mistakenly summon officers four or more times in a calendar year. The city also has the option, under the ordinance, of levying a $10 fine for each false alarm after the first four.

That part of the law was abandoned, Wildgen said, because of the decision to cease permit renewals. He did not explain why that happened.

But the law was once enforced. In August 1994, the Journal-World reported the city collected $5,867 in false call charges so far that year. In 1993, the paper reported, police answered 2,931 false alarms — nearly 2,000 fewer than in 2003.

The response

City officials say it is time to re-examine the city’s alarm ordinances.

“There are a number of communities that have looked at alarm systems, tried to make them more responsible in light of the public safety resources that are committed,” Assistant City Manager Dave Corliss said. “It’s probably an important issue to take a look at.”

Wildgen said city staffers have a “full plate” of higher priority projects.

“It’s on the list, I can tell you that,” Wildgen said.

In the meantime, officials say, they’ll continue to respond, at a rate for the police of more than 10 times a day, to all the false alarms.

“We’re going to keep responding,” Cobb said. “That one time somebody’s there, we have an opportunity to take somebody off the street who shouldn’t be there.”