Simplisafe Has Lower False Alarm Rates Than Professional Systems

I think that you also have a large demographic that are interested in buying a DIY system...because they are technical enough to feel comfortable with the installation process...which also means that they are more comfortable with the system...thus more understanding of how it works and why. Therefore less likely to accidentally set it off. Plus the modern features of an App based Verification Filter should provide lots of opportunity to cancel the false alarms before they are communicated all the way to the C.S.  Just my hunch.  

But really... where are the statistics for this and how are they measured? 

I am not buying this, the police chiefs hate DIY because of the false alarms.

Just looking at the equipment which is not UL listed tells me your going to have false alarms due to the low level of technology that is used. Compared to professional manufacturer's equipment which is designed to UL standards, recognized to provide more secure installations with less false alarms.

A good example is the PIR which doesn't even have a pigmented lens to withstand white light which is a major source of false alarms and a UL requirement.

Should we all stop buying Honeywell and Bosch products and start buying China made DIY to install, I think not.

I have spoken with a lot of monitoring station owners, and surprisingly they do not measure their statistics about false alarms. Why? Because they have to call the premises the next day and confirm the outcome - I am not aware of anyone doing this, so the industry accepts the police figures. We started doing this in Dec and the first few data points appear significantly different than the usual number quoted of 98%. I would rather not say, I need more data.  

I believe Cops and Rapid are seeing a difference - what I think though they are measuring is the alarm factor: number of police dispatches compared to the number of accounts in these two classes of accounts. Typically the industry tracks the number of police dispatches compared against the respective number of residential and commercial accounts. typically commercial has more alarms per system than residential. Now there is a 3rd demographic DIY, perhaps this is what they are seeing. There is a great deal of variation between the number of system/100,000 people and number of alarms per system (IMHO) depending on the differences in the regulations in the jurisdictions and the execution on the regulations. 

For example, here are 12 month stats for 3 cities in 3 countries:

Phoenix from 2012 - pop 1.5m

34,691 police dispatches on 147,623 registered systems, n/a false

Calgary for 2016 - pop 1.39m

7,110 police dispatches on 144,966 registered systems, 95.7% false

Metropolitan London for 2013/2014 - pop 13.7m

14,781 police dispatches on 164,105 registered systems, 96.6% false

There are two stories in the above statistics: Why does Calgary have so few police dispatches compared to Phoenix?, and Why so few alarm systems in London,UK? 

I have sen some of these DIY systems installed by the homeowner and it is just scary, wrong position of contacts, motion detectors and such. I make sure that my customer is fully involved with the install of my systems and how they operate. I also push for the interactive use of their phone. The customers that use the phone option, do not have that many false alarms. There is plenty of work out there and we can't do it all. More people are using the internet to buy and obtain instructions for the work they are doing. Some are misleading and some work out ok. We as professionals just need to be there to help when we can and sometimes this works into another job for us.