Legal Brief: False Alarms Are Your Problem Too

Types : Bylined Articles

The law must recognize the duty that installers have to minimize false alarms.

A plague. A scourge. These are words used to describe the prevalence of false alarms in the security industry. These are not my words, but the words of an expert witness hired by a plaintiff in an alleged alarm failure case against one of my clients. I knew the expert earnestly felt this way about false alarms, and so do I.

However, the expert did not adopt this opinion in our case. Instead, he wrote about it in a separate publication years before. For the case, this opinion – although true – did not fit the plaintiff’s narrative. So, the expert had to pretend that false alarms were of minimal concern and distance himself from his prior opinions.

In reality, false alarms are a significant problem in the security industry and have been for many years. This is why the industry takes steps in the manufacturing, design, installation and monitoring of alarms to reduce the risk of false alarms.

Take the traditional monikers used for arming modes – Stay, Away, and Night. The reason that a motion detector is not armed in the Stay and Night modes is to prevent false alarms. While the Stay and Night modes can be used whenever the customer prefers (including when the customer is away), they are generally intended to be used when the customer is in the premises.

An armed motion detector in an occupied premises – particularly a small apartment – creates an intolerable risk of false alarms. So, an installer would be justified in not disturbing these default settings, even when a customer asks for something different.