Sandy has lowest false-alarm rate in nation

Sandy police respond to fewer false security alarms than any other city in the nation, according to new survey results collected by the Utah Alarm Association and the Security Industry Alarm Coalition.

The combined average rate of false alarms between residential homes and commercial businesses in Sandy that officers respond to is .27 per year. In other words, each of the city's more than 5,100 alarms will have a false alarm once every four years, according to Duff Astin, a civilian employee with the Sandy City Police Department who oversees the alarm program and Bill Cooper with SIAC.

"The biggest thing by far is education. If alarm companies educate their customers on their accounts ... how to turn off the system, how to turn it on, how to cancel it ..., if they do those things it results in a big decrease in false alarms," Astin said. "Eighty percent of all false alarms are caused by user error."

Sandy's low false-alarm rate was put up against 70 to 100 other cities, Cooper said. The national average is approximately .5 false alarms per year.

The rates can be evenly compared, Cooper said, between big and little cities.

"The numbers are remarkably similar," he said. "You could compare a community of 50,000 to a city with 2 million."

Each month, Sandy police will meet with all the alarm companies.

"We get together and we talk about false-alarm issues and problems we're having," he said. "We sit and talk about things to improve, share ideas and concepts."

The result for residential customers is a .15 average for false alarms that resulted in a police response, or an alarm wrongly going off approximately once every eight years. For businesses, the false-alarm average is about once every 18 months.

Astin said the commercial false-alarm rate will naturally be higher because businesses have a higher turnover rate than residences, more people have access to the alarm and the chances for human error are increased.

For a call to be considered a false alarm, Astin said police have to arrive at a scene and find "no obvious signs of a break-in or criminal activity going on."

That's not to say Sandy police only respond to false alarms once every four years. The city typically gets 180 alarm calls each month. About 50 of those are canceled before police arrive. And out of the remaining 130, extremely few turn out to be legitimate calls.