Kirschenbaum Idea: Impose A False Alarm Charge In The Contract?

Seems good on the surface, but a lot of gray area.  

If the false alarms are coming from things like poorly placed motions, or flaky sensors, etc., it seems like customers would push back on this, including being asked to add-on video verification for additional cost.

Maybe for user-specific false alarms, where the user does not disable the alarm when entering the property, or opens a door/window when armed in night mode.

I also think the $1 fee could be just enough to seem petty and irritating to the user, but not enough to compel them to do anything about it. 

Certainly some *interesting* logic by Mr. K.

First he claims the reason for the charge is to "combat false alarms."

Considering that municipal false alarm fines, usually charge after one to three false alarms, and have fines ranging from $100 to over $500 and ultimately suspension of response service, your subscribers should appreciate, not resent, the effort you are making to reduce false alarms.

The "effort you are making" here is simply billing them.  But it's not so simple, since 

The real issue may be getting the central station to identify the false alarm and then let you know so that you can charge the subscriber on the next invoice. 

So you are billing them for something you have no part in, just so that they realize how serious this is?

There is some specious moral justification included as well:

Why not? We already have a separate charge for Alarm Verification, though most of you don't charge for it because your central stations aren't charging you for it. But that may not really be true. Your central station calculates its charges based on its expenses, and those expenses have to take into consideration the amount of operators the central station has to employ on any given shift. We know that for traditional alarm monitoring an operator can handle about 1000 accounts. That can't be the case when false alarms become excessive, forcing the operator to ignore the signal or get sloppy with how it's responded to. So your central station may have already factored in the extra employees required to handle the average day's signals, false and real.

Sure, but haven't you already taken into account what the central station charges you, in total, and 'factored' that in to your customer's rate?

Finally, some straight denial:

Think the charge will cost you subscribers? Well, it won't because you will already have the subscriber under contract.

Yet they are not under contract to pay the $1 until they sign a new contract, so what does K mean here exactly?

I would do it, and a higher dollar amount for commercial systems because even with video, their employees ignore the alarm.

After first time reading this comment, I wasn’t sure if Mr. K was just being silly, or sincere. After several reads, determined he was sincere. Some of us (law layman) believe the proposed $1 contract language, when added to an already voluminous customer contract, could be counter-productive. It can draw attention to lots of “non-disclosure” by the alarm industry.

We now know the alarm industry and local police each have a different definition and perspective of “false alarms” and each have different and conflicting ways of managing the related problems. He listed five (of many) ways to combat false alarms. We could add a very important sixth template to the list, which is VR-Verified Response, aka low, or no priority response to calls from monitoring firms. We often forget, most local police do not have a duty or obligation to respond to private property alarm systems when called by licensed monitoring firms, unless a 911 type emergency is witnessed (key word). Also, the police can re-set the response priority at the time of receiving the call from licensed monitoring firms.

How do you disguise from the customer, or disclose the industry supported VR-Response. Such as state-wide legislation that requires ECV-C, wherein monitoring firms are restricted from calling the cops first, must make several attempts (much delay) to call the customer first. Already legislated statewide in Florida and Texas (and planned for California), all with industry (alarm association) support. If the alarm system is intended to be a deterrent (per SIAC), why pay a monitoring fee for emergency police notification when you only get customer notification? What is the right word for a promise to do something, then do the opposite?

I like the idea, however the amount needs to be at least $10.00.

This will, of course, lead to "discussions" when a false alarm does occur, which is a good thing. A discussion should help point out possible design problems with the system, and it will also point out training/procedural issues. Both of these are things that should be addressed by an alarm company, but it is often difficult to get an end-user to make these issues a priority.

A line-item cost would likely get them to pay more attention and expend some effort to resolve the issue.