ALARMING NUMBERS

False alarms trigger expenses for the city

Oklahoma City Public Schools owes the city of Oklahoma City more than $45,500 in fines for excessive false alarms that have required repeated police responses to district buildings.

The school district is at the top of a long list of commercial and residential alarm owners that have neglected to pay fines for false alarms. Included among the top 10 is the state of Oklahoma.

Time spent responding to false alarms pulls officers away from other duties.

Assuming officers spend 20 minutes on average responding to a false alarm, the cost to the city over the past two years has been $1.2 million or more.

City Manager Jim Couch said in a memo to the city council in March that “responding to false alarms … is not the best use of 911 and police services.”

As of March, unpaid fines had grown to just over $1 million, doubling since 2010.

Oklahoma City Public Schools issued a statement last week saying officials “hope to meet with city leaders in the next few weeks to discuss the issue and work toward a resolution” of the district’s unpaid fines.

Police say around 96 percent of alarms turn out to be false. In the past two years, the police department documented 108,126 false alarms, according to Couch’s memo.

Fines are levied when a given address has more than three false alarms within a one-year period.

“Your fourth one is when we start charging you,” said police Capt. Beto Balderrama. He said the fine, $65 per response, is intended “strictly to reduce the number of false alarms.”

False alarms also are a problem for the fire department.

Battalion Chief Benny Fulkerson

said firefighters responded to 3,050 false alarms in 2016.

“We averaged 254 false calls per month,” he said.

The fine for fire response to a false alarm, after the first three, is $107.

Added issues

Besides false alarms, the police and fire departments deal with a chronic number of commercial and residential alarm owners who do not renew their alarm permits.

When an alarm system is installed, property owners must obtain a permit from the police department.The permit application is available to download on the police department’s website but forms are mailed to all permit holders annually.

“Thirty-sixpercent of the alarms we go to have permits, the rest don’t,” Balderrama said.

Renewing permits ensures the police have accurate information about the location of an alarm and can ensure the problem is dealt with more efficiently. Renewal costs $17.

When an officer answers an alarm at a location that

does not have a permit, the alarm enforcement officer researches the address, finds the responsible party and fines them, Balderrama said.

“We have to treat every alarm that goes off as if it’s (the) worst-case scenario,” said Officer Megan Morgan, assistant public information officer.

Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 123 has two grievance spending against the police department, out of concern that patrol shifts are failing to meet minimum staffing levels.

“When you’re shortstaffed, a couple of things happen: It affects officer and citizen safety, but what you’ll see more than anything is crime is going to go up,” said FOP President John George.

“We don’t want to respond to any false call,” he said, “because any time you’re responding to a false call and the officer isn’t actually needed, it’s taking away from instances where they are.”

Alarms have multiple triggers, meaning owners are not always at fault.

“Sometimes it’s weather-related,” Morgan said. During storms, “we have alarms going off constantly.

“Patrol is having to go to all these different houses just to see what’s going

on,” she said. “But they have to actually check the alarms, even if we think they’re weather-related, because who knows if there’s actually somebody breaking in?”

Potential solutions

The police department is looking at potential solutions.

“We need a faster system,” Balderrama said. We need “a good alarm program because our main concern is reducing false alarms so we can free up our manpower.”

Sending out notices of fines and renewals takes time, and the alarm enforcement program lacks the resources to keep up with growth in Oklahoma City.

Two options being considered:

• Using an outside private alarm management company.

• Adding alarm program responsibilities to the utilities department.

“Utilities bills you for water, bills you for trash, bills you for drainage. All you’re doing is adding alarms in there,” Balderrama said. “We just have to make sure they can do it like we need them to do it.”

Houston police contracted an outside vendor

to handle billing and permitting in 2009. Results have been encouraging.

“Our contract vendor has worked to increase permit compliance,” said Toya Ramirez, administration manager for Houston’s administration and regulatory affairs department.

The approach has improved their false alarm reduction rate, Ramirez said.

Looking forward

Oklahoma City Public Schools officials thinkthe majority of the district’s fines were related to numerous MAPS construction projects prior to 2014.

In their statement, officials said the district set up a hotline and put its security team on call around the clock “in order to help reduce the number of alarms and limit unnecessary police and fire department response to our buildings.”

The district said it had seen improvement. Officials said they had formed an internal task force to review existing polices and processes in order to see where they can be even more efficient.

The district will meet with city leaders in the next few weeks to continue working on a resolution.