Sgt. Timothy Schoolmaster likens the city’s false alarm problems to a lemon.
“Think if you had a car that every time you turned it on: 99 percent of the time it didn’t work,” he said. “Why would you keep using that?”
When it comes to false police and fire alarms, that’s the rate of error Evanston has been willing to accept, said Schoolmaster, the police department’s alarm administrator. More than 99 percent of police alarms and 97 percentof fire alarms each year are false.
The police and fire departments have been working to curb false alarms for the past few years and said they hope an ordinance recently introduced to the city’s Administration and Public Works Committee might further this goal.
Residents get four “free” alarms per building before paying fines. This ordinance would reduce that number to two. Then residents would be fined $100 per alarm through the 10th false alarm, $300 per alarm from the 11th through the 30th — and even more after that.
Though the new ordinance would bring in about $200,000 in new revenue, its main goal is to prevent false alarms, not pay for them. The fire department estimates the cost of answering a false alarm is $1,725.
The ordinance has been held in committee because some aldermen were concerned that the city needed to improve communication with institutions that log many false alarms, including Northwestern. But Brian Kittle, project manager for NU’s Facilities Management, said the city does a good job of communicating already.
“It’s just a phone call away,” he said. “It’s not been a problem with our department.”
Evanston fire department Chief Alan Berkowsky said a progressive fine schedule already has reduced the number of false alarms from big institutions. The worst offenders used to log more than 100 false alarms per year, he said; now the highest is 48.
The city still needs to bring down the number of people who have just a few false alarms a year, however, Berkowsky said. Reducing the number of free alarms to two will make residents consider the cause and consequences of every false alarm.
The ordinance is also “user-friendly,” Berkowsky said, because it allows the police and fire departments to waive fines for people who work to prevent false alarms in the future.
In addition to loading the city with unnecessary expenses, Berkowsky said, false alarms create a safety hazard because people stop taking them seriously.
“We want these systems to have fewer false alarms so people believe in them and rely on them,” he said.
False alarms also eat at department morale, Schoolmaster said.
“We want to be there,” he said. “But when you’re looking at a 99 percent false alarms rate it gets hard to maintain your enthusiasm.”
Schoolmaster said Evanston should have higher standards when it comes to false alarms.
“If you call and say, ‘There’s a crime going on in my house,’ we’d be there in a heartbeat,” he said. “If that was a false statement, we can arrest you for that. But somehow — because you have a little magnetic switch that goes off — we still need to rush right over, but we’re not allowed to correct that behavior.”
