posted on Friday, March 21, 2008 12:38 PM
by
klehan
Madison, WI, Quietly Drops Verified Response after 26.6% Spike in Burglaries
Madison police in October quietly dropped a 10-month-old policy that limited police response to business burglary alarms after the number of burglaries in the city kept skyrocketing.
Police spokesman Joel Despain on Wednesday said police have been responding to all burglar alarms at city businesses from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. every night since October but did not make that public.
DeSpain said officials have not been able to find a correlation between the controversial "verified response" policy and the 26.6 percent boost in city burglaries from 2006-07 that Police Chief Noble Wray revealed Tuesday.
However, David M. Koenig, of Capital Lock Inc. in Madison, said it would have been important to let the public know the policy had been dropped.
"Frankly, it was a recognition that the verified response policy wasn 't working and they had to do something, but it really doesn 't do anything until it 's made public, " Koenig said. "... (Abandoning the verified response policy) may have made some bad guy think twice about doing it again. "
Under the policy the City Council approved in 2006 at police request, officers were not required to respond to mechanical alarms at businesses until someone called police to verify there was a problem. Wray exempted residential alarms and panic button alarms activated by hand.
Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz denied the verified response policy, which went into effect Jan. 1, 2007, was part of the reason the burglary numbers soared.
"The police saw no significant change in burglary rates when they suspended verified response, " said mayoral spokesman George Twigg, and "burglaries are also up in places outside Madison that don 't have verified response. "
In addition, Twigg said, police report a significant number of the commercial establishments that were hit didn 't have alarm systems. "Whether perpetrators consciously are looking for businesses without alarms, I don 't know, " DeSpain said.
Commercial burglaries in Madison jumped from 522 in 2006 to 716 in 2007, DeSpain said.
Twigg said the mayor is expecting to review a police report on implementation of the verified response policy in 2007.