Most business owners have paid for alarm monitoring for years without ever seeing it work. The first time they find out what it does is a phone ringing in the middle of the night, and a stranger asking for a passcode they last used the week the system went in.
Here is what happens between a door opening in an empty building and a patrol car arriving, and where that chain usually breaks. The timings are typical for a monitored commercial system in Colorado Springs. Your panel’s programming and your monitoring contract set the exact figures, and they are worth knowing before you need them.
A contact on the rear door separates, or a motion detector in the stockroom picks up movement. What the panel does next depends on which device it was.
Doors that staff use to come and go are usually programmed with an entry delay, so somebody arriving early can reach the keypad and disarm. Panels built to the industry’s false-alarm standard, ANSI/SIA CP-01, default that delay to 30 seconds. Every other zone, the stockroom motion detector or the glass break sensor on a side window, is normally instant.
When the entry delay runs out without a code, the siren sounds. The panel usually still holds the signal back for a short abort window, 30 seconds by default under the same standard, in case the person at the keypad was a manager fumbling the code. Disarm inside that window and no alarm reaches the monitoring center at all.
That window is the difference between a nuisance and a logged event. It is also why a panel set up with no delays and no abort window produces far more false dispatches than one set up properly.
The panel sends the alarm over whichever paths it has: a cellular communicator, the building’s internet connection, or on older systems a phone line. A system with two paths keeps reporting when one of them fails, which matters, because a burglar who cuts a phone line is not a hypothetical.
At the central station the signal lands on an operator’s screen with your account attached: the zone that tripped, the time, the call list, any special instructions, and the passcode. Signals are worked in priority order. A panic or holdup button jumps the queue ahead of a routine burglary zone.
Colorado Springs requires an alarm company to try to confirm an intrusion alarm by phone before it asks for police. The city calls it Enhanced Call Confirmation. The operator calls the first number on your account, and if nobody answers or nobody can confirm, calls a second, different number.
At 2am the first number is usually the business line, ringing in an empty building. So in practice the second call decides everything. If it goes to the owner’s mobile and the owner answers with the right passcode, the alarm is cancelled. Under the city ordinance, a cancellation before an officer is dispatched does not count as a false alarm.
Panic, holdup and robbery alarms skip this step, and so does an alarm where somebody has already verified a crime in progress. Those go straight to dispatch.
No answer, or an answer without the passcode, and the operator requests a police response for your address. The police department then prioritises it against everything else happening across the city that night, and an unverified intrusion alarm is rarely top of that list.
This is where video changes the picture. If your cameras are linked to the monitoring account, the operator can look at the clip from the zone that tripped. An intruder on camera turns an unverified alarm into a reported crime in progress, and it is described to the dispatcher that way. A forklift battery charger setting off a motion detector gets cancelled without anybody driving anywhere.
While police are on the way, the operator goes down your call list to find a keyholder. The city expects a responsible party to make a reasonable effort to reach the building within thirty minutes when the police department asks, because an officer at a locked door cannot secure it, reset anything or tell you what is missing.
You should hear what happened without having to ask. Depending on the account, that is an email or app notification for each event, the operator’s notes on who was called and when, and whether police were dispatched. If an officer attended, ask for the case or incident number. It is what the insurance claim will ask for.
None of the failures are in the monitoring center. They are in the account details nobody has looked at since installation.
The call list is out of date. The second number belongs to a manager who left two years ago. The operator is dialling somebody who has no reason to answer and no way to help. This is the most common failure, and the fix takes ten minutes.
Nobody remembers the passcode. The owner answers, half asleep, and cannot verify who they are. The operator has no choice but to dispatch. Every keyholder on the list needs to know the passcode, and it should not be written on the panel.
False alarms pile up uncounted. A motion detector that trips every time the heating kicks on, or a door that is never quite latched, generates dispatches. In Colorado Springs, a fourth false alarm inside one permit year suspends police response to your intrusion alarms. Panic, holdup, robbery and duress alarms stay covered. After that, the next genuine break-in reaches a monitoring center that can no longer send anyone.
The permit was never registered. Every monitored alarm in the city needs an alarm permit, and the application is due ten days after the system goes in or monitoring begins. If your system was taken over from another company, check that the permit moved with it.
Log in to your monitoring account, or call your provider, and confirm:
If the answers are uncomfortable, that is worth fixing before the night it matters. The 24-hour monitoring page covers how our monitoring is set up. If you are not sure your panel is still reporting to anyone at all, start with our guide to whether your system is still monitored.
The number is 719-888-7180 if you would rather talk it through with us.
There is no fixed answer. The monitoring center’s part usually takes a few minutes. After that, the police department decides the priority of the call against everything else happening at the time, and an unverified intrusion alarm is lower on that list than a verified crime in progress. Video verification is the most reliable way to move a genuine alarm up.
Because the city requires it. Colorado Springs asks alarm companies to try to confirm an intrusion alarm by phone, with a second call to a different number if the first fails, before requesting a police response. It exists to cut false dispatches. Panic and robbery alarms are exempt.
Not if it is cancelled before an officer is dispatched. Answering the verification call with the right passcode, or disarming inside the panel’s abort window, keeps it off your false alarm count.
Fees apply per false alarm within a permit year, and once a fourth false alarm lands in the same permit year, police response to intrusion alarms is suspended. Panic, holdup, robbery and duress alarms are not affected. The fix is almost always a device or a setting that can be found by looking at which zone keeps tripping.
People who will answer at night, know the passcode, and can reach the building within half an hour. Usually the owner and one or two managers who live nearby. Review it every time somebody on it changes role or leaves.
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