Why Police Don’t Respond to Security Alarms Anymore

If you live in a major American city and pay for home security monitoring, here’s something your security company probably hasn’t mentioned: there’s a very good chance the police won’t come when the alarm goes off. 

Not because they don’t care. But because they have had to stop.

In U.S. cities with populations over one million, 80% of residents now live in jurisdictions where police will not respond to, or cannot guarantee a response to, a residential alarm. In cities with a population over 50,000, the number is more than 40%. This is no longer a fringe policy in a handful of places. 

It’s called verified response, and it’s one of the most important shifts home security has ever seen. It’s also the thing home security companies have no incentive to talk about. 

But we’ll talk about it.

What is verified response?

Verified response is a policy that requires proof of an actual crime in progress before police will respond to the call. 

Proof usually means one of four things:

• Video showing an unauthorized person entering or inside of the property
• Audio capturing sounds of a break in
• An eyewitness like a neighbor, onsite security guard, or another building occupant

What doesn’t count as proof of a break in:

• Your motion sensor
• Your door sensor
• The alarm itself

None of those on their own will get a police car to your house in most major U.S. cities. 

Why is verified response required?

To put it plainly, false alarms. 

The Center for Problem-Oriented Policing estimates that U.S. police respond to more than 36 million alarm calls every year, costing $1.8 billion. Up to 98% of them are false alarms.

Here are a few examples from the public record: 

• In Pittsburgh, 9,100 alarm calls in 2023 generated 39 police reports. Six involved an actual break-in. The remaining 9,061 calls burned more than 4,200 officer staff hours.
• The LAPD received 65,369 alarm calls in 2023. The false alarm rate: 97%.
• Seattle's average police response time to a burglar alarm had stretched to two and a half hours before the city formally adopted non-response in October 2024.
• Following their reform, Sandy Springs,Georgia saw weekly emergency alarm calls to 911 drop by roughly 74%.

When police departments are already operating with staffing shortages, sending officers to respond to a call that’s wrong 98 times out of 100 makes no sense. So they stopped.

Which cities have verified response policies? 

Here’s where it stands as of early 2026. This list isn’t exhaustive, but it’s the cities with publicly documented policies or de facto non-response practices.

The Security Industry Alarm Coalition estimates dozens more cities are evaluating similar policies right now. 

What this means if you have a home security system

The vast majority of monitored security systems in the United States (there are 39 million of them) can’t meet the verification standard. They’re built around sensors and a call center. 

Even the existing cameras a lot of people have aren’t really a fix. When Seattle’s policy took effect, only 2% of one major alarm company’s 65,000 customers had cameras capable of meeting the verification standard. Upgrading runs $5,000 for a small home and up to $100,000 for a commercial property. 

The camera can only verify what’s in frame. The CEO of that same company put it plainly to the Seattle Times: “There are ways somebody could break into my house without being on video.” 

So homeowners are stuck. Every part of the deal has quietly stopped working.

• A monitoring contract promises a police response many police have publicly said they won’t provide.
• The recommended fix — a camera or system upgrade — still doesn’t meet the verification standard in most cases, plus costs thousands of dollars.
• The monthly bill is the only part of the deal still functioning.

What verification should really mean

The core problem with every existing verification method is that it's reactive and blind. What nobody has solved is the question underneath all of it: who is actually home right now?

If a monitoring center calling 911 could say "we have verified presence data showing an unknown individual inside the home, no known residents detected, this is not a false alarm" — that call would be treated entirely differently. It would meet the verification standard before anyone got dispatched. It would protect police resources without sacrificing homeowners.

That's the gap we're building HomeAware to fill. A security system with continuous presence intelligence and a brain that brings signals together to verify the alarm. 

What you can do now

If you live in one of the cities above there are a few things you can do:

• Check your city's alarm ordinance. Search "[your city] false alarm ordinance" or "[your city] alarm permit." Most cities require a permit and impose fines for false alarms regardless of response policy.
• Ask your security company directly: "Will police actually be dispatched when my alarm goes off?" Get the answer in writing if you can. The answer in most major cities is more complicated than the sales pitch suggested.
• Stay up to date on these policies in your area. Verified response is spreading fast. We're tracking it city by city and will keep this list updated.

This is a broken system. It's been broken for a long time, and the industry that profits from it has had every reason not to say so out loud.

We’re saying it out loud. And we’re building the fix.