"With depleted resources, we cannot prioritize a patrol response when there is a very low probability that criminal activity is taking place."
According to a Sept. 13 letter from interim Seattle Police Chief Sue Rahr, beginning Oct. 1, SPD will only dispatch officers to calls from alarm companies if there is supporting evidence of a crime, such as audio, video, panic alarms, or eyewitnesses that a person is illegally entering or attempting to enter a residence or commercial property.
Rahr wrote in the letter, "With depleted resources, we cannot prioritize a patrol response when there is a very low probability that criminal activity is taking place."
SPD has lost over 700 officers since the Seattle City Council began defunding the department in 2020 in response to the riots that rocked the Emerald City following the death of George Floyd.
The Seattle 911 Center receives approximately 13,000 annual residential and commercial burglary alarm calls from monitoring companies and according to Rahr, most of those calls are due to an "unintended sensor trip by a homeowner or business employee,” while others are the result of “old or failing equipment."
In 2023, less than 4 percent of the calls were confirmed to have a crime associated with them that resulted in an arrest or report being written.
Washington Alarm told KOMO News, "The verified response policy has been tried and rejected numerous times including by cities such as Dallas, Texas, and San Jose, California. It goes against best practices established through a collaborative effort by the International Association of Chiefs of Police and the National Sheriff’s Association.”
The new policy will affect over 75,000 alarm sites in Seattle as 911 response times have continued to grow in the city. Additionally, SPD is still seeing more separations than new hires and is at its lowest staffing levels since the 1950s while Washington is dealing with the highest rates of burglary and auto theft in the US and is the state most affected by retail crime.
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Comments
2024-09-25T03:33-0400 | Comment by: Dean
Keep voting for those liberals. Criminals are now informed that there little likelyhood of a response on alarms.
2024-09-25T12:29-0400 | Comment by: Jeffrey
"In 2023, less than 4 percent of the calls were confirmed to have a crime associated with them that resulted in an arrest or report being written." That means that over 96% of the calls were false alarms. If your fire alarm company calls are false fire alarms over 96% of the time, you need a new fire alarm company. It''s not the responsibility of the taxpayers to fund responses for an obvious failure of the alarm companies. How much does it cost taxpayers to send out cops every time some idiot forgets to turn off the alarm system when he walks in the door? Whose fault is it if the systems are triggered because they were neglected & out of repair? The companies have an obvious financial incentive here so their claims cannot be assumed to be accurate. The solution to retail crime is not responding to false alarms. It is correcting the alarm system so it has a 4% false alarm rate & 96% accuracy. Fix the problem. Don't ask the public to pay for the failures of private companies.