Security Company and Home Burglary Issue

[kl323]

What is the name of your state (only U.S. law)? NY

Hello,

There was a recent break in at my house. As I went through the sequence of events and the timeline given by my alarm company, there are certain issues that I find "alarming."

- According to them, the call center immediately notified the dispatchers (local PD) after calling my home. I would assume this can occur in under 1 minute after my alarm goes off. I will err on the side of caution and will give them 1.5 minutes to complete that call to the PD.

- However, according to police records, the alarm company DID NOT notify the police until 4 minutes AFTER the initial alarm.

- In fact, I did not get a phone call on my cellphone until 7 minutes after the alarm went off.

From what I read online, most burglaries take less than 10 minutes to occur. Considering the fact that I have a 3.5 story home...and the fact that they went through each floor, I would assuming 10 minutes is a decent bet.

When I arrived on the scene, I had to personally call 911 for the police to arrive. In all, it took the police ~50 minutes to arrive after the initial alarm was set off. I realize that police response time can vary, but 50 minutes? And I'm not even sure if the police arrived because I called 911 or was it because of the alarm company's call. (Don't have access to that info unless I have a subpoena...). Ultimately, my issues are as follows:

-Discrepancy btwn what the PD and alarm company told me.
-The DELAY btwn the time my alarm went off and the time I was notified on my cell.
-The DELAY btwn the time my alarm went off and the time the police were notified. Had the alarm company called earlier, maybe the police would have responded sooner? (My argument is this... if someone made a call for the dispatch before my alarm company, obv the police has to respond to that call first, unless its something major. So my point is if the alarm company was faster... there MIGHT have been a slim chance things ended differently)

Anyway, any thoughts or suggestions?

Any advice would be much appreciated.

Thanks!

 

[Zigner]

The police wouldn't have come any faster. 1 minute or 4 (or even 7), the police would still have taken their 50 minutes to arrive.

 

[antrc170]

What does your agreement with the company say about call times?

Many alarm companies will attempt to call your home first to determine if false alarm had been triggered. That may take a minute to do. Then the company may (depending on where they are located) need to pull up the local network to properly place a 911 call to the closest call center to your residence. I had a call center located in Denver, they couldn't just pick up the phone and call 911 because they would get a Denver dispatch. They had to call up my local network to get a local dispatch. So maybe that takes a minute. They have to relay the information to the dispatch, it can take up to five mintues or so.

I would say that four minutes, and seven minutes are reasonable times. The fifty minutes it took for the police to arrive depends on local response policy. A home burglary with no one at the residence is going to have a lower priority than a call from you at the residence. That is something that you may want to research.

 

[justalayman]

Any advice would be much appreciated.

keep your insurance payment current and keep any special items needing to be listed done so.
Other than that; don't expect anything to be instantaneous. For any delay in the alarm company's actions; call them and ask. If you have listening devices and depending on what type of alarm was tripped, they may have been listening for activity. Police really really hate false alarm calls only to find out the cat tripped some alarm.

Cops get there when they get there. If you want faster service, speak with the police but expect to be asked for more money, via taxes of course, so they can increase manpower. That is often the reason for a slow response time.

 

[You Are Guilty]

I actually spent a good deal of time responding to your other post, only to hit "submit" and find it was locked. Rather than waste all that time again, I will leave you with this:
Williamsburg Food Specialties, Inc. v. Kerman Protection Systems, Inc.: "here is a triable issue of fact here as to whether the defendant's delay in responding to the alarm signal was so great as to constitute gross negligence. Accordingly, the defendant is not entitled to summary judgment."