I apologize, this became a long rant, too long for a single comment. This comment is mostly rant, I’m going to reply to it with sort of a TL;DR in a 2nd comment, but it’s still probably going to be kind of long, I have a lot of thoughts about alarm companies.

I work in 911 dispatch. What happens when your alarm gets activated is the alarm company receives the signal and then they call someone like me to send police/fire/EMS.

I’m pretty sure that everyone in my profession has a pretty low opinion of alarm companies. In theory the services are a fine idea. In practice, they’re kind of a shit show. I’m not too sure where the biggest issue is with them- corporate decision making, lazy installation techs, incompetent account managers, terrible phone operators (some of them like to call them dispatchers, they don’t dispatch shit) or the customers are all just idiots, but it’s probably all of the above and more.

Starting from the bottom, a whole lot of these places seem to use the same sort of call centers we’ve all come to know and hate from having to call tech support. Most of them have thick accents, and most of the ones who don’t seem to be borderline illiterate. Think back to grade school when the teacher would go around the room having you read a paragraph or two from a book out loud then pass it onto the next person to continue reading, it eventually would come around to the kid who probably had undiagnosed dyslexia and a fear of public speaking, and he’d struggle through it having to sound out each word syllable by syllable while you all just went ahead and read the paragraph on your own. That’s what talking to some of these operators is like. And if you deviate from their script even the tiniest bit they get totally flustered and don’t know what to say.

That’s all well and good in your high school English class when you’re reading through Romeo and Juliet, but when I’m trying to send the fire department out to see if a house is burning down or not it’s maddening when I can’t tell if the address they’re giving me is “7 main Street” so “11 maple Street” either because of their accent, they’re mumbling into the phone with a screaming baby in the background (I’m pretty sure some of them are working from home now) or they just can’t fucking read.

On my call here are the questions I’m asking.

What is the address- house number, street name, apartment/suite number if applicable, municipality (not necessarily the same thing as the town/city on the mailing address, they’re different sometimes, I’m sending your towns police, not delivering your mail)

What is the nearest cross street- to verify I have the right location, damn near every town has a Maple Street, and because I can’t necessarily count on getting the correct town from the caller, this helps me make sure I’m sending help to the right Maple Street and not the one in the next town over.

If it’s a business, and the name of the business. I’ve had alarms called in as residential alarms but the name of the resident is listed as something like “Anderson Construction LLC” so a commercial alarm under just some schmuck’s name. Or it will be the name of some property management company and not the actual business at that location.

For security alarms- is it audible or silent

The area of activation - half of them are just labeled as something like “zone 2” which is useless. I don’t know where zone 2 is, the alarm co doesn’t know, the homeowner doesn’t know, our police and fire sure don’t, so we don’t know where we need to be looking for the issue. Is it a motion sensor? A window alarm? The garage? Your guess is as good as mine. Or sometimes zone 2 is kitchen windows, bathroom door, side room motion, and basement stairs all on the same zone.

Also once in a while they’ll tell me something like it’s a security alarm but it’s coming from the smoke detector.

If it’s residential - what is the resident’s name?

Some sort of contact phone number. Ideally a premise phone number, but at least a residents cell phone, or a keyholder for the business. Some way to get ahold of someone to make sure everything is ok, see if they know why the alarm is going off, confirm if anyone is supposed to be there, figure out how to re-secure the house if they find an unlocked door, get authorization to force entry if needed, etc.

Will you notify- will you be calling the resident, an emergency contact, keyholder, etc. to let them know about this alarm

That’s a lot of ranting on my part, but it’s not much information I’m looking for. On the rare occasion they have all the information and the operator is competent, it takes me just over 1 minute to get everything I need

My entire call ideally boils down to something like:

123 MAIN ST, TOWNSVILLE NY, APT 4
X-STREET: MAPLE ST
AUD, BEDROOM MOTION
JOE SCHMO - 555-555-5555
W/N

There’s not a single one of those fields that they haven’t messed up- wrong or incomplete addresses, no x streets, no name/wrong name, wrong or no phone number, no list of emergency contacts, or the contacts are all outdated and haven’t worked at a company for 10 years. Sometimes all on the same call. I sometimes wonder how they manage to get paid for their service because I don’t know how they’re able to send their customers a bill or call them to ask for money because they don’t seem to have any of that information.

And sometimes they call the wrong jurisdiction, I’ve occasionally had to transfer alarm calls to other dispatch centers around the country.

We had one once where all the information they had was an “address” that was something like “¼ mile past the motor pool” and the zone. Literally nothing else. Somehow our supervisor managed to track that down to an Indian reservation on the other side of the country. I have no idea why it came to us, but we got that call a couple times before they were able to finally update the account information.

Some of that is lazy installation techs not setting things up properly, or customer service and account managers and such not properly verifying information. Sometimes though I think it’s customers providing them with garbage information from the get go.

Also most of these companies have some sort of verification protocol where they try to reach the homeowner to confirm if help is needed and they ask for a password. I get a lot of false alarm calls where they spoke with the homeowner but they didn’t know their password, so they had to call it in. Maybe write that down and stick it in your wallet or something if you can’t remember it.

They’ll call in 3 hours later with an “update” to a previous alarm that our responders have already been out to and cleared from for 2½ hours. And sometimes they’ll call in 2 minutes later with a new request for dispatch and are shocked to learn that we already have help on the way because I literally just hung up with another operator for an alarm at the same location.

And when a sensor is malfunctioning and giving false alarms, no one ever seems to do anything about it. There are houses and businesses that we legitimately have police or fire at almost every night and sometimes multiple times a night because the alarm keeps going off for no reason and it sometimes goes on for months or years because no one can be bothered to get a tech out fix it or at least take that sensor offline.

We had one alarm we kept getting for about a year. The business it was for had been closed for years and the property vacant, even our police couldn’t track down a property owner or anything. Who the hell was paying that alarm bill? I think it only stopped when the building was demolished.

This all pretty much applies to medical alarms like life alert and such too. Missing or incorrect information across the board there. Same address verification, name and phone number, we also want medical history and access information like a hidden key or garage code. We’d rather not have to break down your grandmother’s door to help her up after she’s fallen and can’t get up if there’s a spare key hidden under a flower pot we could use instead.

And the icing on the cake, of the probably thousands of alarm calls I’ve handled in almost 6 years I’ve been here, maybe a few hundred of them have been legitimate, the rest were false alarms or accidental activations. Most of the legit ones have been fire alarms.

And of those legitimate calls, all but maybe a few dozen of them have been called in faster and more efficiently by the homeowner, employees, or random bystanders/passersby who either noticed something suspicious or heard the alarm going off and called it into us before we ever got a call from the alarm company. Hell, sometimes the alarm never even goes off until the police are there clearing the interior of a building after a break-in.

I live and work in what I’d overall consider to be a very safe area. Break-ins are almost vanishingly rare, and when they do happen it’s more likely to be some sort of a domestic thing where your ex wants to steal back the TV they bought you and remembers your alarm code or something like that than the sort of burglary you probably imagine. And when the more legitimate break-ins happen, it’s either in the super rich neighborhoods when the homeowner is out of town, or it’s in the poorer, more urban (this is the suburbs, none of it is really urban, but a couple towns come pretty close) parts of my county, where most of the people probably don’t have the extra money for an alarm system anyway. For everyone else in the middle, I think security alarms aren’t really worth it.