PEOPLE may be surprised to learn that when they most need their security system to protect their house, they oftentimes cannot rely on it. Jackie Ostrander discovered that when a storm knocked out power to her home in Greenwich, Conn., for a week in March — too long for her backup battery to keep going. And it took her security company three weeks to restart her system.

“I asked, ‘Are we going to get a credit for this?’ We weren’t,” she said of her company, Protection One. “When they came out, I asked, ‘Are you going to charge me for this call?’ They didn’t, but they did charge me $100 for a battery.”

Jonathan Marvin, director of business solutions for Protection One, said, “We could have done better.”

There are about 36 million security systems in the United States, half of them in homes. Revenue for the industry was $28.2 billion in 2009, according to the Installation Business Report, an annual survey published by Security Sales & Integration Magazine. So a lot of people apparently think their homes are going to be impervious to burglars.

But even when the systems are working properly, the police response times can be slow.

Stan Martin, executive director of the Security Industry Alarm Coalition, acknowledged as much. He said that in big cities like New York, Atlanta and Chicago, police could take 30 to 45 minutes to respond, while in smaller towns the best that could be hoped for was six to eight minutes. Given that those times are in addition to the two minutes it takes for the alarm to register at the monitoring station and the operator to call you, the thief and your jewelry could be long gone.

Mr. Martin also attributed part of the slow response to the high number of false alarms — an estimated 80 percent of alarm calls — and partly to the low priority of burglaries.

To combat false alarms, many police departments charge after the first or second one, he said. In Stamford, Conn., for instance, the cost is $75. Yet these fines are often levied when a police car just drives past your house, not even pulling in the driveway, let alone walking around the property.

So if you are one of the millions of Americans paying a monthly monitoring fee of $25 to nearly $100, what are you getting for your money? It turns out you get many things beyond securing your home — like providing an alert in a fire and keeping an eye on your children’s comings and goings.

Article Source:   www.nytimes.com

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