Tucson’s false alarm ordinance went into effect two months ago, but to this point the police haven’t been enforcing it.
That all changes on Friday.
The Tucson Police Department announced this week that beginning June 1 it will start assessing fees for any and all false alarm calls it has to respond to within city limits. Those who have registered their alarms (at a cost of $20 per year) get the first falsie for free, but after that it will cost $100 to have the cops show up for nothing. The price then goes up with more and more alarms, with the price even higher if the call is for something other than burglary.
Don’t have your alarm registered? Then the first call out, regardless of the situation, will cost $200. But if the user registers that alarm (with the aforementioned $20 annual fee) within 10 days of the false alarm, half of that penalty is erased. The remaining half would be waived if the use takes and completes an Alarm User Awareness Class within 90 days of the incident.
Alarm registration is still available, and can be done in person at a number of places. A full list of registration locations, as well as complete information about the ordinance and its associated penalties, can be found on TPD’s Web site.
So, kids, remember: if you’re going to trip an alarm, make sure it’s at your neighbor’s house, not your own.
This article appears in May 31 – Jun 6, 2012.
They don’t have anything better to do, other than sit under tree’s on the phone or eating. That’s about the only place I see officers any more. Oh, sitting in vacant lots door to door talking with each other.
Obvious troll is obvious.
The Weekly’s earlier coverage of the topic: http://www.insidetucsonbusiness.com/news/t…
Councilman Kozachik discussed the alarm fee in his newsletters with characteristic nuance; his basic concern (and why he voted against it) was that he was worried this would give people a reason not to have house alarms.
Should be interesting to see how this plays out. The TPD keep pretty good records about this sort of thing so we should have the statistics to see if it helped or not in a year or two.