Report 018 · Luxury Home Security
The pitch for a high-end alarm is that it summons help. The quiet truth of American policing is that an unverified alarm now sits near the bottom of the dispatch queue, and in a growing list of cities gets no officer at all. That changes what you should be buying.
Every alarm system sells the same final promise: something bad happens, the siren goes, and the cavalry comes. For an estate owner paying for professional monitoring, "we notify the authorities" is doing a lot of the reassurance. I help design AI for a home-security company, so I want to be straight about the part of that promise that has quietly stopped being true, because it changes what a security system is actually for.
Here is the uncomfortable statistic the industry rarely leads with. The U.S. Department of Justice's own problem-oriented policing guide on the subject states it plainly: "The vast majority of alarm calls, between 94 and 98 percent (higher in some jurisdictions), are false." And these aren't a rounding error in a police department's day. Nationwide, "false alarms account for somewhere between 10 and 25 percent of all calls to police." A dispatcher who knows that 24 of every 25 alarm signals is a cat, a balloon, or a homeowner fat-fingering a keypad is going to treat the 25th accordingly.
Departments responded to that flood in two ways, and both matter to you. The softer, more common one is triage. An alarm signal with nothing attached to it, no confirming video, no second sensor, no eyewitness, gets logged as a low-priority call. An officer is sent when one is free, often without lights or urgency, minutes or longer behind a call that carries actual evidence of a person or a threat. Your alarm still gets a response; it just gets one that assumes it's the cat.
The harder response is verified response: some cities simply stop rolling on unverified alarms altogether. The reporting on this is a mix of the dramatic and the sober, and it's worth being precise. A monitoring-industry account describes Memphis declining to dispatch on burglar-alarm calls without video verification of a crime in progress, Pittsburgh suspending overnight alarm response without video proof of an active threat, and Salt Lake City, Akron, and Las Vegas treating verified response as standard. But the honest counterweight, from the Security Industry Association, is that this remains a minority practice: when Seattle adopted it, it was, by that account, "only the 19th agency out of 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the U.S. to adopt this policy in 24 years," and a string of cities that tried it, from Dallas to San Jose, later abandoned it. Verified response is real and spreading, but it is not yet the norm. Don't let anyone scare you with the maximalist version.
The change with more reach isn't a handful of no-response cities; it's a scoring standard now working its way into dispatch centers nationwide. In 2024 the International Association of Chiefs of Police ratified ANSI/TMA-AVS-01, the Alarm Validation Scoring standard. Its stated job is to provide "a standardized method of creating an alarm scoring or classification metric for unauthorized human activity detected by alarm systems that will assist law enforcement with resource allocation and Call for Service prioritization."
In plain terms, it sorts every alarm into one of five levels. Level 0 is "no call for service." Level 1 is a call "with limited to no additional information," the bare, unverified signal. Level 2 means "confirmed or 'highly probable' human presence." Level 3 is a "confirmed threat to property," and Level 4 a "confirmed threat to life." The higher your alarm scores, the faster and more seriously it's handled. And the thing that moves an alarm up that ladder is verification, evidence that a real human is really there. A naked signal is a Level 1, and a Level 1 waits.
Now put that next to how these systems are marketed. The high-end pitch is all about detection: AI that spots a person, a smart camera that pings your phone the instant something moves. Detection is necessary, but a phone notification is not a police response, and an alarm signal by itself is now the lowest rung on the dispatch ladder. The value of a modern security system isn't that it notices something. It's that it can prove what it noticed to the standard that actually gets someone moving.
That is genuinely where the AI earns its place, and it's the part I work on. The job is not just "is that a person," it's turning that judgment into a verified event: a clip a monitoring operator can look at and escalate, a second corroborating sensor, a scene a dispatcher can score as human-present rather than unknown. Done well, AI is what turns your Level 1 into a Level 2 or 3, and moves you from the back of the queue to the front. Done as a pure notify-the-owner gadget, it leaves you exactly where the statistics say an unverified alarm sits: waiting. I help design the AI security systems for a veteran-owned (SDVOSB) luxury home-security company run by fellow veterans, so this is the design conversation I have constantly. (Disclosure: I don't own that company and earn nothing from this link; it's disclosed because it's a field I build in, not just write about. Nothing here is sponsored. Full policy here.)
An alarm that only says "something happened" is speaking a language police have learned to distrust, because 94 to 98 percent of the time it's wrong. The system has quietly reorganized itself around verification, informally through triage, formally through AVS-01, and at the sharp end through cities that won't come without proof. So when you evaluate a security system, stop asking how well it detects and start asking how well it verifies. Can it hand a monitoring center and a 911 dispatcher enough confirmed evidence to treat your alarm as a real human threat rather than the day's 25th false one? If it can, help is coming fast. If all it can do is buzz your phone, you don't have a response plan. You have a notification.
U.S. Army combat veteran (Counter-IED / Electronic Warfare), peer-reviewed researcher in microwave spectroscopy, and founder & CEO of Shroombiosis. Consults on laboratory operations, AI, and supplement formulation.