Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Criminal Law Blogs -> Grits for Breakfast

Criminal Law

: Grits for Breakfast

Cutting police costs? 'Verified response' for alarms gets more benefit from same number of officers

The City of Austin has put up a page asking citizens to prioritize budget reductions, and reducing overtime and police pay were the top suggestions for the police department. Via their feedback mechanism, I replied:If you're talking about cutting officers or eliminating overtime, here's a suggestion to put more officers on the street essentially for free: Implement verified response for burglar alarms. About 98-99% of residential burglar alarm callas are false alarms and nearly all the rest of the time the suspect is long gone when officers arrive. Implementing verified response would be like expanding the police force by 10% or more, allowing officers to focus on more important tasks. The reason this suggestion is free to the city, incidentally, is that it essentially eliminates a special-interest subsidy to the private alarm industry that's unjustified based on any cost-benefit analysis...continue to full post

Full post as published by Grits for Breakfast on June 22, 2010 (boomark / email).