Home Alarms Killing Innocent Victims?

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