NEW YORK — The Security Industry Alarm Coalition (SIAC) announced at the International Security Conference (ISC) East it is setting up a national database to track alarm ordinances.

The Ordinance Tracking Information System, dubbed OTIS, will track the various alarm ordinances within the United States and Canada. OTIS, currently in development, will provide a starting point for law enforcement and city officials who are looking to implement a false alarm policy.

“OTIS will help law enforcement, policymakers and monitoring companies find information on alarm ordinances in other cities so they can apply it successfully to their own community,” says Stan Martin, SIAC’s executive director

. At the session at ISC East (for more on this and other recent industry events, see Industry Pulse In Depth or page 20 of the December edition of the magazine.), SIAC also announced a plan to promote enhanced call verification (ECV) among police departments, municipalities and industry leaders.

ECV is a relatively new procedure to be used by central stations that will seek to reduce the number of false alarms by making more than one phone call to the subscriber. Martin provided the group with statistical data that indicates ECV has been instrumental in reducing the number of false dispatches by 30 percent to 50 percent in municipalities where it has been implemented.

 

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