A commercial alarm goes off after hours. The monitoring company calls it in. In a lot of cities today, that alone still gets a squad car sent to the building. In Seattle, as of October 1, 2024, it does not. Unless the alarm signal comes with audio, video, a panic button activation, or an eyewitness report of a crime in progress, Seattle Police Department will not dispatch (Seattle Police Department, “Monitored Alarms,” 2024, https://www.seattle.gov/police/community-policing/community-programs/monitored-alarms). No Kentucky city has adopted a policy like it, as far as this research could establish. But the reasoning behind Seattle’s move, and the ones that came before it, does not stop at a city line. It is about what a burglar alarm tells a dispatcher, and for most alarms, historically, the answer has been not much.
What verified response means and what triggers it
Verified response is a dispatch policy, not a piece of equipment. It shifts the question a 911 center asks before sending an officer, from “did an alarm go off” to “is there evidence a crime is happening.” Under Seattle’s policy, that evidence has to take one of four forms: audio confirming an intruder, video confirming an intruder, activation of a panic or duress button, or a witness on scene reporting a crime in progress (Seattle Police Department, “Monitored Alarms,” 2024). A signal from a motion sensor or door contact by itself, with nobody confirming what set it off, does not qualify. That distinction is the entire policy. It does not ban alarm systems or monitoring companies. It changes what a monitoring center has to hand a dispatcher before an officer gets sent.
The false alarm numbers behind the shift
Cities are not drawing this line on a hunch. The Los Angeles Police Department responds to more than 100,000 privately installed burglar alarm calls a year, and 97% of them are determined to be false, according to LAPD’s own program description; alarm calls alone make up more than 10% of everything LAPD patrol officers are dispatched to (Los Angeles Police Department, “Alarm Section: History and Problems,” LAPD Online, 2022, https://www.lapdonline.org/police-commission/alarms-section-history-and-problems/). That figure is not a Los Angeles quirk. The U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services found that 94 to 98% of police alarm responses nationwide are false, that each one consumes roughly 20 minutes of police time, typically for two officers, and that chasing false alarms costs the public as much as $1.5 billion a year (Rana Sampson, “False Burglar Alarms,” 2nd ed., DOJ COPS Office, 2007, https://popcenter.asu.edu/sites/g/files/litvpz3631/files/sites/default/files/problems/pdfs/false_alarms_2nded.pdf). That DOJ figure dates to 2007. It remains the standing federal reference because no newer edition or comparable national study has replaced it, which means the country has been dispatching officers to mostly-false alarms for two decades with no fresher accounting of the cost.
Which cities adopted verified response, and what happened
Seattle is following a pattern with a documented track record, not experimenting. A 2012 Urban Institute report, still the most detailed multi-jurisdiction comparison of its kind, tracked three cities that moved to verified response earlier. Montgomery County, Maryland cut false-alarm police responses by roughly 60%, from 44,000 calls in 1994 to 16,000 in 2011, saving about $6 million a year. Seattle itself had already cut false alarms by about 60% once before, from 25,000 in 2003 to 11,000 in 2011, saving at least $1.7 million a year. Salt Lake City, which required in-person verification by a private guard before police would respond, cut alarm dispatches by 95%, from over 10,000 in 1998 to about 500, saving at least $500,000 a year (Phil Schaenman, Aaron Horvath, & Harry Hatry, “Opportunities for Police Cost Savings without Sacrificing Service Quality: Reducing False Alarms,” Urban Institute, 2012, https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/23221/412729-opportunities-for-police-cost-savings-without-sacrificing-service-quality-reducing-false-alarms_1.pdf). That report is from 2012, and it remains the standing reference because no newer report with the same jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction financial detail has replaced it.
Salt Lake City’s numbers got a second, more rigorous look almost a decade later. A 2020 case study using a synthetic control method, built specifically to isolate one city’s results from broader crime trends, found Salt Lake City’s verified-response policy produced an 87% reduction in police alarm-response calls and a 26% reduction in burglaries over the same period, along with faster police response to other calls (Erwin A. Blackstone, Simon Hakim, & Bridget Meehan, “Burglary Reduction and Improved Police Performance through Private Alarm Response,” International Review of Law and Economics, 2020, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0144818820301435; the journal page sits behind a paywall, and the NYU Policing Project publishes an open summary of the same study at https://www.safetyreimagined.org/papers/burglar-alarms). That is one city, studied with one method, not a national result, and no comparable study of another city has been published since. But it is the one rigorous evaluation on record, and it points the same direction as the raw call-volume numbers above it: sending officers to confirmed crimes instead of unconfirmed noise did not make burglary worse there. It ran alongside less of it.
The ANSI standard now formalizing alarm validation
What used to be a city-by-city policy call is becoming an industry standard. In December 2024, The Monitoring Association published ANSI/TMA-AVS-01, a formal Alarm Validation Scoring system that gives monitoring centers a standardized way to tell a 911 center how credible a given alarm signal is, on a scale from Level 0 (no call for service warranted) to Level 4 (confirmed threat to life) (The Monitoring Association, “ANSI/TMA-AVS-01 2024 Alarm Validation Scoring Standard,” 2024, https://tma.us/standards/tma-avs-01-alarm-validation-standard/). The standard is UL-audited, so monitoring centers can be independently certified against it, and companies including ADT, Brinks Home, Guardian Protection, Rapid Response, SimpliSafe, and Vector Security already carry that certification. No Kentucky jurisdiction requires it. That does not make the standard beside the point for a Kentucky property. The central stations that monitor alarms nationally, including many that already hold contracts with Kentucky businesses, are building toward alarm validation as the default, regardless of what a given city currently requires of them.
What a monitoring contract should specify
Before signing or renewing a monitoring agreement, an owner should get straight answers to a short list of questions, in writing, not verbally at the sales table.
Does the central station hold ANSI/TMA-AVS-01 certification, or an equivalent UL-audited alarm validation credential, and can it produce documentation of that. What triggers a call to police versus a call to the property’s own contact list: any sensor activation, or does it require audio, video, or another confirmation step first. Who reviews a signal before police are called, and what happens outside business hours, on a holiday, or during a power or network outage at the monitoring center itself. What is the account’s own false-alarm rate, and does the provider report that number without being asked. Does the agreement specify verification and response times in minutes rather than the word “prompt.” A provider that cannot answer these plainly is still selling a dispatch model that a growing number of cities have already moved past.
How to check a property’s own false alarm history
Most owners have never looked at their own numbers. The information sits in two places.
The first is the local police department’s records or alarm-permit division. Many departments, including large ones like LAPD, track false-alarm counts per address and require an alarm registration or permit; a records request, often just a phone call or a form on the department’s website, can show how many times a property has generated a dispatched response and how many of those were logged as false. Kentucky departments were not found to publish a fee schedule the way Seattle does. Seattle charges $115 for an automated or burglar alarm dispatch, $230 for a panic or duress alarm, $30 if canceled after dispatch, and $0 if canceled before dispatch (Seattle Police Department, “Monitored Alarms,” 2024). The underlying record, a log of dispatches tied to an address, is standard practice at most departments and worth asking about directly, whether or not the fee structure is published.
The second is the monitoring provider. An owner can request a full account history: every signal received, how it was classified, whether it was verified before a call was placed, and who was contacted first, police, the owner, or a keyholder. A provider that cannot produce this on request is not tracking the number that determines both the account’s cost and, in a growing number of cities, whether police show up at all.
What this looks like handled well
Versys installs Qolsys alarm systems, a choice made on how the systems the company has installed and serviced in commercial settings have held up over time. Software faults and nuisance false alarms are what a client ends up living with long after the installer leaves, and equipment selection is where that gets decided. For properties that need more than a sensor and a phone call, the company also runs live monitored surveillance with analytics-based geofencing. A detection event goes to a live agent, who views the scene, can speak to whoever triggered it through a paging horn, and calls police only when the situation warrants it. That is verification in practice: a person confirming a real event before a dispatch request goes out, not a policy forcing the question after the fact.
A Kentucky or Southern Indiana facility manager does not need a local verified-response ordinance to find out where their own monitoring stands. Call Versys at (270) 358-2200 and ask what verification method is on file for the property today.
