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Somewhere between 94% and 98% of dispatched burglar alarm calls turn out to be false. That’s according to a Department of Justice guide from its Office of Community Oriented Policing Services. In some jurisdictions, that volume alone eats up 10% to 25% of total police call time. A number that large indicates a structural flaw in how home security functions.
Homeowners Feel the Same Strain From the Other Side
The DOJ’s numbers describe what happens on the police end. Parks Associates has the homeowner-side data, and it tells a matching story. Nearly two-thirds of security system owners, 62%, say they’ve dealt with a false alarm within the past year. Ask what actually set it off, and the answer skews away from real intruders: 53% point to a pet, a gust of wind, a delivery truck’s headlights sweeping the wrong way. Close to half of all system owners say their equipment simply triggers too often.
Those two data sets are describing the same phenomenon. A camera or sensor sees something harmless. A notification goes out. Occasionally, so does a 911 call. Neither the homeowner nor the responding officer asked for that outcome, and both sides absorb the cost of a system that can’t distinguish a threat from a shadow.
One City’s Numbers Show What the Math Adds Up To
Phoenix offers a clean illustration of what these percentages look like at real scale. Out of nearly 50,000 alarm calls the Phoenix Police Department fielded across 2018 and 2019, fewer than 1,000 turned out to involve an actual crime. Officers were dispatched on a false signal roughly 98 times out of every 100 calls. That’s tens of thousands of dispatched officer-hours spent on false alarms, in a single mid-sized American city over a two-year stretch.
Multiply that pattern across thousands of jurisdictions running similar ratios, and the DOJ’s 10% to 25% figure for total police call volume stops sounding abstract. It’s the sum of exactly this kind of local math, repeated city after city, year after year.
Discrimination, Not Detection, Is the Real Gap
None of this traces back to cameras and sensors failing to notice things. Modern person-detection is, by most measures, a solved problem. What isn’t solved is teaching a system to tell the difference between a person who represents an actual threat and a person who’s simply present: a mail carrier, a neighbor’s dog walker, someone checking a house number. A system that sends the same alert for every person will generate exactly the false-alarm rates described above, no matter how good its cameras get.
That’s a behavioral question more than a technical one, and it’s the piece the raw false-alarm statistics don’t fully capture. Systems built to recognize which behaviors actually precede a break-in, rather than notifying about any detected motion or presence, minimize this error.
Fixing the Trigger Matters More Than Fixing the Camera
The false-alarm numbers point to a specific kind of fix, not a generic call for “smarter” hardware. Better resolution, more cameras, faster processors—none of it moves the needle on a false-alarm rate if the underlying technology still treats every detected person the same way. What actually closes the gap between the DOJ’s numbers and Parks Associates’ numbers is a system that’s selective about what counts as worth a threat in the first place.
The technology to make that shift already exists. What’s left is adoption: the more systems that trade blanket motion detection for genuine behavioral selectivity, the faster those numbers start moving in the right direction.