Faking fire alarms is bad. Those high school kids thinking it’s a funny prank to yank the lever so the fire department is signaled, sirens screaming, are doing everyone a disservice. We know that too many alarms is a response issue for police departments across the...
It may sound odd or counter-intuitive, but sometimes it’s productive to not ask for full payment. Cities are finding this out. Recently, in Venice, California, the city has decided to allow citizens amnesty on certain fines and penalties. What they’ve decided is that...
Former Dallas Police Chief David Kunkle is currently running for Mayor of the city. For those of you who’ve followed the debate over Verified Response (VR – where break-ins must be verified before police will respond to the premises), Kunkle was chief when the Dallas...
This blog serves a good purpose in reinforcing messages related to alarm response issues across the country. Readers are members of the security industry, and you may get information from a number of sources regarding technology, actions taken by police departments or...
We don’t live in a vacuum. Our lives, the work world, and technology are always changing, sometimes slowly, sometime quite rapidly. It may seem like the technologies we employ in the electronic security industry to deter crime are the same as they were 10 years ago....
Budget cuts result in resetting priorities. That applies to your family, your company, or a government entity. In this, our third installment addressing reductions in municipal and county budgets and specifically police departments and sheriff’s offices, we’ll examine...
Cuts to local government budgets are affecting infrastructure. This is not just about police enforcement and fire departments. It’s fundamentally about a change (perhaps short-term, perhaps longer) in how these services are delivered. As we discussed last week, this...
The recent IACP-SACOP (International Association of Chiefs of Police-State Associations of Chiefs of Police) meeting in Atlantic City, NJ, was both heartening and frightening -- heartening because SIAC and the security industry continued to build stronger...
It’s a reality in our business that unwanted alarms occur far too frequently at government facilities, schools and churches. There are several reasons for this: Many different people may be responsible for turning on and off the system; someone new may have just...
A couple of weeks back, we gave some examples of progress on the alarm management front in several key cities across the U.S. SIAC was directly engaged in those cases. We’re proud of this, but also proud when the electronic security industry takes step to do the right...