Electronic transfers of activation (ETA) are coming in to speed police response to intruder alarms, the third National Security Inspectorate (NSI) installer summit heard.
Ken Meanwell, the former policeman who writes the alarm response policies for ACPO, was among the speakers at the National Motorcycle Museum, Birmingham last month. Whereas now an alarm goes from an alarm receiving centre (ARC) through a call handling centre to dispatch and response, the ETA will mean the alarm goes from ARC to dispatch and response. Some police forces – the Met, Essex, Avon and Somerset, and Northamptonshire – are already accepting ETA.
Besides saving up to 90 seconds, it will eliminate human error between the unconfirmed and confirmed alarm; and any omissions or mismatches will be automatically sent back to the ARC, with the incident reference. A February meeting of ACPO (Association of Chief Police Officers) agreed to no fee increase on the unique reference number (URN) in 2015. The Home Office is replacing ACPO this month with the NPCC (National Police Chiefs Council), though that does not mean any change in security systems policy, Meanwell said. Earlier he hailed police alarm response: “We are one of the few countries in the world that still gets a police response to intruder alarms and long may that continue.” While ‘one or two forces’ had queried why they responded to alarms, Meanwell’s reply was that police were obliged to, by common law. He hailed the fall in false, and genuine, alarms. False alarms, more than one million in 1996, were 144,948 in 2014; while the 96,000 genuine alarms in 1995 compared with 11,055 in 2014.
Apprentices were another theme for speakers, such as Simon Banks, Group MD of CSL DualCom, and Anthony King, MD of the Bradford-based installers Kings Security Systems Ltd.
For more on the event, see the April print issue of Professional Security magazine.
