What is an alarm response?
Alarm response is attending a site following an alarm activation, checking it and securing it. It is usually provided alongside keyholding and is contracted with a response time.
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<img src="https://secureoptix.co.uk/glossary/alarm-response/diagram.svg" alt="alarm response — diagram from SecureOptix" width="880" height="620" loading="lazy">
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<a href="https://secureoptix.co.uk/glossary/alarm-response">What is an alarm response?</a> — diagram by
<a href="https://secureoptix.co.uk">SecureOptix</a>
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</figure>Response time is the contracted measure and the commercial exposure. Attendance times have to be recorded at the point of arrival, because a time entered later is not evidence of anything.
Officers attend not knowing what they will find, which makes it the part of the service with the most variable risk and the strongest case for a defined procedure about what to do on arrival.
Repeat activations at one site are data about the site rather than about the service. A client with weekly false activations is paying for attendances that a fault or a habit is generating.
In practice
A retail unit, repeat activations, third call this week.
The first two were faults. The officer attending the third assumes the same, walks the front, sees nothing and resets it from the panel without going round the back.
Habituation is the mechanism of almost every failed alarm response, and it is produced by the system rather than by the officer: a site that cries wolf trains the person responding to it.
The useful control is a procedure that does not shorten with repetition, and a record of faults that goes to whoever can get the alarm fixed.
What goes wrong in practice
- Arrival times entered from memory after the event.
- No procedure for what an officer does on finding a site insecure.
- Repeat activations never analysed or raised with the client.