Police Monitoring Alarm Accounts.....

I have 2 in my area that have been doing it for years Mt lebanon pa. which requires all fire alarms to them and Bethel Park Pa.which is optional if you want to use them

also Greensburg and Jeanette Pa have the old master boxes still in use for fire.

As you probably know, it used to be common practice to local dispatch centers to monitor alarms via direct connect lines. As these lines became expensive and obsolete, most of them stopped. We used to maintain an old Keltron receiver in one city and they dropped it because of liability concerns. It suprises me that a city would want to be in the alarm monitoring business. Maybe they ought to research the insurance and legal ramifications a little more.

is a program called DAM (Direct Alarm Monitoring) in a place called University Park, Texas ( a suburb in the Dallas, Texas area) that has its own central station. It uses Bosch (Radionics at the time it started) receivers. You can see from the demographic that this is a wealthy upper middle class neighborhood. It is heavy duty Republican so Bass would be in abject misery if he lived anywhere near the place. At least he would be happy that alarm companies aren't charging 'excessive' fees for monitoring. I bet that with the tax base burden there it means that the monitoring is probably costing the home owners far more than if they paid their own monitoring bills and lived elsewhere.

I believe Highland Park Texas still does

Paradise Valley, AZ used to (not sure if they still do or not)...their service sucked. For a while they tried to force people to be monitored by only them. They had a 6500 and one Ademco reciever and no software...just Rolodex cards. The CS was in a closet.

West Hartford, CT's police department, also used to monitor alarms. Most were municipal, churches and a few industrial site fire alarm systems. They did not insist on monitoring all local alarms though. Then one day the town decided to get out of the monitoring "business" altogether. Their receivers needed replacement and the decision was made to give it up instead. The fire marshal notified users that they needed to change and, when asked, suggested they use any firm with a central station in town. There was only one such company -- mine. We weren't UL listed since our CS was in a home/office (used to belong to a dentist) but that made no difference since we didn't monitor any banks. Even the few small jewlers we monitored never had an issue with their insurers.

Robert

Any type of timeframe when West Hartford stopped monitoring? Within the last couple of years or longer than that? How long were they monitoring and why did they stop...insurance reasons, liability, or too much to handle. I can call Chief Strillacci, but he might have a biased opinion.

Thanks Norm Mugford

I choose Polesoft Lockspam to fight spam, and you?

Just like RLB's central station then

It was a sad attempt. My little backup CS was better than what they had.

Thanks guys for all your responses. I'm checking all the city websites that you have mentioned and calling to get comments from the cities you've listed. Keep them coming. I'm trying to mount a challenge to city police departments that feel going into the alarm monitoring business is a way to raise funds to compensate for the shortfall of tax dollars to pay the police officers.

Any comments any of you have, pro or con, with relation to this thread is also appreciated.

Thanks again Norm Mugford