posted on Monday, August 17, 2009 12:00 PM
by
klehan
Annapolis, MD, Holds off on Alarm Registration unitl 2010
A new Annapolis, MD, law now requires residents and businesses with burglar alarms to join the county's alarm registry or face a $125 fine, but police are urging security system customers not to sign up until an electronic system is ready in January.
Advertisement "The thing that needs to be stressed here is: We're going be very lenient with this," county police Deputy Chief Emerson Davis said.
The new law, which took effect this month, is aimed at reducing the time police spend on false alarms - a tally that reached more than 8,500 hours last year. Police respond to an average of 85 false alarms every day, which they say diverts resources from legitimate public safety work.
The new law is designed to deter false alarms by imposing a series of increasing fines for unnecessarily summoning the police three or more times to the same address within a year. The registry is part of administering the rules.
"What we were hoping was for most people to hold off and register electronically," Davis said. "We've always said we want to implement the program no later than Jan. 1, 2010. That's always been our goal."
The law requires both the alarm user and the alarm company to file contact information with county police so officers know whom to call when a faulty alarm needs to be shut off. Registering is free and, by law, all the information will be kept confidential.
Davis said the $125 penalty for failing to register a system will be used sparingly, if at all, and only in instances when there's no other way for police to get residents or businesses to comply with the law.
"If we get an alarm (set) off at a residence, and we go there and we find out by being there that the alarm is not registered, we'd work with the homeowner to get it registered," Davis said. "Only in those rare instances where you have some defiance, then we'd work through the (fine) system. We're really doing this through education."
County officials are currently in the procurement process to select a way to administer the program and the e-registration system. In the meantime, police plan to post a link to a registration form on the county's Web site, www.aacounty.org.
"If people feel compelled to register now, they can fill it out and we will accept it," Davis said.
Until the law was passed earlier this summer, Anne Arundel County was one of only a few jurisdictions in Maryland without a way to crack down on bogus calls. The oft-cited success story among these programs is the one in Montgomery County, which saved $1.7 million in police resources in 2006 through its false alarm system, according to the False Alarm Reduction Association.
The Annapolis City Council last month adopted a fine schedule to punish repeat offenders, but it does not include a registry provision, city spokeswoman Rhonda Wardlaw said. The fines will take effect in the city on Sept. 1.