Joel Matlin’s Home Alarms Killing Innocent People?
Having a heart-attack?
A grease fire? A hard time
getting up after being crushed by a vehicle whilst on your bike? Don’t worry—emergency services are on the way.
Unless any of these calamities happened during a thunderstorm. Then maybe you’re gonna have to kinda tough
it out for a bit.
Yes, almost any city-dweller, we’re all familiar with
it. The moment there’s a thunderclap,
immediately the ululating, wailing symphony of “first responders”’s sirens begins. And then, of course, anyone within earshot is
instantly vulnerable, for if anyone has a real emergency, “emergency responder”
staff might be just too busy, just too depleted to “respond.”
Remember when you were a kid and you heard sirens? You knew something bad might be
happening. It’s one of the first
unforgettable sounds most people know.
Your thoughts or attitudes on hearing the sirens may change over time,
but their sound never loses its urgent importance.
Or does it? Now, the
minute there’s a thunderstorm, the sirens fire up, the personnel are scrambled,
the slick, dangerous roads are ablaze with emergency vehicles tasked with . . .
finding a way to turn off home alarms that have gone off. I’m getting so sick of this, and every time
there’s a thunderclap and the sirens start up, all I can think of is of
people—victims, if you like—who may be experiencing genuine emergencies as
“first responders” rush to empty urban semi-detacheds or to calm and comfort distraught
homeowners traumatized by having their alarm go off for no pressing reason
while others, maybe, die.
Obviously, for many and variable reasons, it just isn’t in
the interests of “first responders,” or governments, or home alarm peddlers to
let us know just how many useless “responses” are being made, nor how
“response” time during periods of atmospheric instability are being lengthened,
nor how many people who, under duress from, say, a heart attack or stroke, have
had their lives irrevocably altered for the worse—or worst—by delayed response
times owing to squadrons of “first responders” being deployed to placid wet
lawns or private business parking lots, there to congregate and mull over how
to shut off the alarm. Or those who made
the ultimate sacrifice, and DIED, while emergency personnel were rushing to
the scene of a home alarm. I imagine there
must be lots of lawsuits out there, but for now my concern is really just with
the victims, as our politicians like to say.
When I was a kid and I heard a siren, I just thought something bad was
happening and I was a little frightened.
As I aged and I heard those urgent wails, I thought of people possibly
hurt or in life-threatening circumstances and a kind of vicarious empathy and
concern emoted from me. Now, when it
rains, I just hope to Christ someone, somewhere, isn’t really experiencing a
crisis, because all the “first responders” are tearing off to pointless
destinations.
Let’s say human life is “the most important thing.” I think most Conservatives would agree with
this. In this context, no amount spent
on “emergency services” is ever really enough.
But can one spend 100% of one’s budget on “emergency services”? Obviously not. We need to find ways to make emergency
services as efficient and effective as possible. Sending out fleets of personnel on useless
errands every time there’s a rain shower is clearly inefficient and ineffective
and is dangerous to our health. The
Conservative government is keen to cut costs—on anything—how about saving
millions upon millions on useless home-alarm deployments?
Obviously, governments are never going to do anything about
this—that would be seen as impinging upon private-sector alarm companies. Alarm companies won’t touch it—they’re too
busy on the airwaves every day, “Joel Matlin” so subtly suggesting we’re trying
to kill off our parents if we don’t buy home alarms for them, and so on. Funny how those ads never fail to mention
that “’Alarm Force’” is a publicly traded company.” We can all get in on the greed fear inspires
by buying shares. Nations of paranoid
people clutching their guns, sighting out of blacked-out houses looking for any
signs of life—or people—or therefore living bad people not themselves. (Actually, I love those spots when Alarm
Force tells us that what makes them uniquely effective is that they have a
“two-way” voice system—I hadn’t heard that since the “two-way” radio of the
40s. Anyway, it seems to me that, if I
were a jewel thief, say, and I heard some person bark: “Hawoh! Dees ees thawam fose seestem. Eyedenfie you NAOW! Autoritees are ona wei,” I’d probably just
say, “well, hey, awum foce, I’m kinda busy just now making off with this loot,
but maybe the next time I talk to you we can set up a coffee chat. I know you’re only making $8/hr, so maybe I
can help set you up with something better sometime. Gotta go.”)
And of course “first responders” will never want to take
action to do something—like reducing false calls—that will be bad for business,
even if it is good for public safety.
One of the surest routines one can find these days are notes that crime
rates are dropping, but then the exclusively right-wing media reporting and
“first responders” and their Conservative government patrons stating,
evidence-free, that crime is actually soaring, particularly that once
unremarked but now pervasive most heinous of crime types, “unreported
crime.” If you’d like citations on this,
I will provide them, but I think we all know where to go to find government and
“first responders” telling us that all pandemonium is breaking out when neither
scholars nor statisticians nor just everyday people walking down the street can
see it.
Yes, every call is the most important call. I get that.
Still, I wonder where the “first responders,” those who “respond” to suburban
home alarms, are on this question. I
suspect that if you asked “first responders,” on camera, anyway, why they
pursued their vocations, they wouldn’t say, “well, you don’t need much
education, you get a great salary and amazing benefits, automatic raises because
your politician employers are toothless and craven, universal public approval
and none of the scorn dished out to other public employees, etc.” No, they’d probably say, in public, at least, “hey, I’m doing this
because I am driven to save lives. All
my life, that’s all I’ve ever wanted to do, is help people, try to save
people—even at the risk of serious danger to my own life.” If that is so, then how do they feel
wandering around people’s lawns during a storm, knowing that—somewhere,
someone—might urgently need their special skills and training? I just can’t sift that one. If I were milling around a back alley looking
at an immaculate Porsche in a garage with no fire but a serious, serious alarm
system, I’d really be wondering why I didn’t take up a more morally satisfying
career in the payday loans industry, for example.
(If you’re getting sick and tired of me putting “first
responders” in quotations, I am, too.
But it’s my way of registering a moral objection. The “first responders” in most cases are family
and friends and neighbours and passersby.
They are NOT emergency personnel.
There is no such thing as emergency personnel unless there is a “first
responder” first—get it? And a lot of us
have training and have given the blood the “first responders” use.)
Thus, some recommendations, that’ll never be considered, but
that may be implemented in one way, shape, or form before I die or until
various technological shifts take place:
1) Alarm companies must develop technologies to prevent their
alarms going off when there is a shudder (or tremor or movement) caused not by
humans but by the planet. Why is this so
hard? We can put a man on the moon but
we can’t figure out when there’s a storm or a person??? Failure so to do is
accompanied by a tax, payable to the public purse. And/or, and this is really the most just and
immediate one, every alarm system sold must include a tax dedicated to paying
down the full public debt that results from useless responses to private
security alarms. It must be collected by
the companies and submitted to the treasury.
2) All homeowners who purchase private security contracts
must be required to register those contracts with “first responders” so as not
to endanger the lives and well-being of those who do not have such
contracts. “Tough on crime” laws and
“three strikes you’re out” rules typically envision poor minorities and keeping
them off the streets, and of course “white-collar crime” really only exists in
the imagination, but what about: “if your pointless alarm goes off 3 times and
emergency personnel are called out at massive public expense and potential harm
to others, you get not a fine, but 90 days _and_ public service. Just thinking
of what “public service” might amount to could take another 120 days.
3) Of course, in many jurisdictions, any EMS
response already comes with huge costs to the victim. Say I’m a landscaper in a remote place and my
buddy has gone home for the day. I fall
out of a tree and I break my arm. My arm
is clearly broken, and the pain is hellacious.
I know it, but I also know that if I call a paramedic, it’s going to
cost me hundreds of dollars I might not have.
There’s a good chance I’ll elect to get in my truck and, at danger to
others, try to get to a hospital so I won’t have to confront my EMS bill a couple weeks later. Spoiler alert: the joke’s already on the
landscaper, because if he parked at a hospital long enough to get his arm set,
he’d probably already be out 100s of dollars.
But now let’s turn to the home-alarm owners. Every time emergency personnel are called out
for pointless errands when others might be suffering life-threatening crises,
those home-alarm owners should be responsible for _at least_ 75% of the massive
costs involved in bringing out “emergency services.”
4) Because home or business owners who use private security
systems that sound off during a rainstorm and drive up EMS
responses for everyone, those owners should pay a special surtax for the pre-public
protection they choose to buy, but in the end are not responsible for. Conversely, those who do not choose, or
cannot choose, to buy home alarm systems and the like, should be offered a tax
rebate for not drawing out, or being able to draw out, EMS pointlessly (or
pointfully), and also as a kind of weak sop to them for allowing themselves to
die of heart attacks and the like while EMS vigorously pursues phantom home
invaders at dwellings with home alarms.
Call it “victims’ rights lite.”
If the first duty of a government is to protect its citizens,
then here’s an opportunity.
--zr
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