Council passes false alarm legislation

Lorain City Council is cracking down on the high proportion of false alarm calls by passing legislation July 30 enabling fines to be issued to homeowners and businesses.

“Eighty percent of the time they’re false,” said Lorain police Capt. Roger Watkins. “We’re moving ourselves out of drug areas doing investigations responding to basically fantasy calls.”

Out of the more than 2,000 calls of service responded to in 2017, about 37 percent of the offenders are responsible for more than 60 percent of the calls, said Lorain police Sgt. Ray Colon, a crime analyst for the Lorain Police Department.

The calls lead to unnecessary risks taken by officers in responding to situations that are not true emergencies, Colon said.

“Keep in mind, false alarms are always at least a two officer call,” he said. “We’re flying code two. That means disobeying laws of traffic to get there as fast as possible, to either apprehend the offender, or save whoever we think may be injured in the alarm.”

Council unanimously passed the ordinance, which calls for fines of $35 on the third false

call and increases up to $75 for the fifth false alarm.

Any additional offenses would result in a $100 fine.

In targeting repeat offenders, who are mostly businesses, Colon believes the city will dramatically reduce calls of service.

“Typically with the fine schedule, based on the literature on what other cities have done, the stiffer the fine schedule, the more impact the ordinance has,” Colon said. “And we went below what other cities are going to see if going lower first has the impact we want.”

Up to this point, Watkins

“We still want them to have alarm systems.”

— Lorain Safety-Service Director Dan Given

said the Police Department has sent out bills to repeat offenders, however, it has lacked the authority to force compliance without an ordinance.

Lorain Safety-Service Director Dan Given stressed the issue has been an ongoing conversation with the Police Department over the past few years in balancing the needs of residents and reducing false alarm calls.

“We still want them to have alarm systems,” Given said. “However, like the officers have stated, we have certain individuals that just ignore instances of common sense and they aren’t correcting the problems.

“We have to admit when you’re talking in excess of $40,000 a year in man hours exhausted on events that are not real, we have to do something.”