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