Police gear for
registration system
for building alarms

People with more than 3 false
alarms in a year will pay a fine

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By Gordon Y.K. Pang
gpang@starbulletin.com

Purchasers of new building security alarms will need to pay $15 in registration fees when a new city ordinance takes effect April 27.

The estimated 25,000 Oahu homeowners and businesses who already have alarms will need to register and pay the $15 fees for their systems by Aug. 25, Honolulu Police Department officials announced yesterday.

The measure was approved by the City Council and signed by Mayor Jeremy Harris in December.

"We want to lessen the amount of false alarms tying up our officers' time for no good reason," police Maj. Louis Souza told alarm dealers at a briefing yesterday.

The law requires alarm owners to pay a $5 renewal fee every year. The registrations are not transferable with either the dwelling or alarm system. Failure to have an alarm registered will result in a $100 fine. Separate permits are required for all structures with different addresses, even if they reside on a single campus.

Fire and auto alarms are excluded.

The most controversial part of the new ordinance deals with service charges that will be assessed on those with excessive alarms.

Police will not fine parties who have up to three alarms within a 12-month period. Users will be slapped with $50 service charges for subsequent occurrences within a year. The fee is derived from the average cost it takes for an officer to respond to an alarm, Souza said.

A charge for the fourth violation is waived if a party attends a two-hour alarm education class to be administered by the Police Department. Souza said one mainland study reported 90 percent of alarm school participants never had another false alarm.

Unpaid charges, fees or fines could result in police not responding to future alarms at sites. But police Capt. Debbie Tandal stressed that police would still respond to 911 calls from those sites.

Police estimate it costs the city about $600,000 annually to respond to about 33,000 false alarms, while there are only about 600 valid alarm calls each year.

Fees collected are designed to allow the program to pay for itself. Police estimate it will cost about $260,000 to operate the program, including the salaries of a supervisor, patrol officer and three civilian clerical personnel.

Some dealers have been reluctant to support the program, claiming that well-intentioned property owners will be unfairly penalized when the intent is to crack down on a small group of blatant violators.

Some dealers, such as Sentinel Alarm Co. General Manager Stan Correia, wonder about pitfalls in the ordinance such as how police will deal with outdoor, photoelectric, motion detection alarms that scare away would-be burglars but leave no trace of evidence of any intrusion.

There will be a three-member appeals panel for those who want to contest their violations. Souza said police are also willing to work with individual violators to find the cause of their false alarms.