By Summer Felker, Everett Customer Service Representative

I read two great articles today.

The first titled “Mice and Men: False Alarms Lead To Blame Game in Rural Maine” and the other was from the Wall Street Journal about a burglary experienced by a California medical records-keeping company.

In the Mice and Men article, police departments explain that due to the high rate of false alarms they must begin enforcing their already existing false alarm ordinances.  The alarm companies in Maine cry “foul” and redirect the focus (and blame) to their customers.  The president for the Maine Burglar & Fire Alarm Association, Rich Brobst Jr., stated “it’s the end users who are causing the problems, but instead of going after the end users he’s [Chief Deputy Dane Tripp] going to go after the alarm companies because he says they make so much money on the customers“.  He followed that with, “We verify our alarms, which is a pretty common practice. We call the premises to try to verify”.  The trouble is calling into the premises often times doesn’t verify anything.

To really confirm for an officer that they’re responding to the real deal, you need a more proven means such as Impact Activated Audio sensors.  This technology listens to the entire facility and gives a central station operator a huge advantage in the ability to truly verify alarms.  With today’s extreme false alarm rates eating up an officer’s valuable time and resources, we’re perplexed that any alarm company would consider “calling into the location” as the best way to verify an alarm.

One statement made by Rich was actually quite true in that customers do need education and training.  Sonitrol Pacific dedicates itself to assuring that is an on-going and FREE part of our service.

The second article really drove home the point that information theft can leave a company devastated and they should invest, up front, in the best security system to prevent this from happening.  Impairment Resources LLC suffered a break in and loss of electronic medical records for 14,000 people.  The intruders were not captured and the aftermath of this kind of theft forced the company into filing Chapter 7 bankruptcy.  The law states that the breach must be reported to state attorneys general and the Department of labor’s Office of Inspector General.  The cost of this was prohibitive enough that their company’s assets could not pay back the lender Insurance Recovery Group’s $583,000 loan.  And of course, there will likely be law suites flooding in from the patients affected by the theft of their personal information.

Early detection and actual criminal apprehension are key to averting a situation like this.  Sonitrol Pacific’s early detection due to hearing the onset noises of an intrusion help get officers on site faster and increase, tremendously, the chance of the criminal being apprehended as our record clearly shows!