Seattle stopped sending officers to unverified alarm calls on October 1, 2024, The Seattle Times reported, and became the 19th law enforcement agency out of roughly 18,000 nationwide to adopt the policy in 24 years.
Nationally, the numbers behind that shift are stark. Between 94% and 98% of dispatched burglar alarm calls turn out to be false, according to a Department of Justice guide from its Office of Community Oriented Policing Services. Seattle’s own dispatch logs turned out to reflect that national pattern almost exactly.
Seattle’s Numbers Made the Case for Themselves
The city’s interim police chief laid out the reasoning in a letter to alarm companies that September: the Seattle 911 Center fields around 13,000 residential and commercial burglary alarm calls a year, and in 2023, fewer than 4% of them were tied to a confirmed crime that ended in an arrest or a written report, according to trade coverage from SDM Magazine. Most were traced to an accidental sensor trip by a homeowner or employee, or to aging equipment that misfires on its own. Under the new rule, officers only respond when a call comes with actual supporting evidence, like video, audio, a panic alarm, or an eyewitness account of someone breaking in.
Alarm Companies Pushed Back Hard, and Fast
Washington Alarm, which monitors roughly 65,000 systems across homes and businesses in the city, argued the timeline was the real problem. Getting that many customers upgraded to video-capable systems wasn’t something that could happen in a couple of weeks. Depending on the property, the company estimated the retrofit could run anywhere from around $5,000 for a small home to $100,000 for a large commercial building, and by its own count, only about 2% of its current customer base already had that level of verification in place.
The company’s broader worry was less about cost and more about coverage: without a guaranteed police response, some property owners might feel compelled to check on a triggered alarm themselves. That means walking into a situation with no backup on the way.
History Suggests the Policy Sticks Once It’s Tried
Seattle isn’t running an untested experiment. Salt Lake City adopted essentially the same policy back in 2000, and its police dispatches to burglar alarms fell by roughly 95%, from about 10,500 a year down to 500, without any documented rise in completed burglaries afterward, a January 2026 industry retrospective notes. That result became the reference case every subsequent city has measured itself against.
Not every city that’s tried it has stuck with it. Dallas, San Jose, Madison, and Henderson all adopted some version of verified response and later walked it back, usually after pushback from residents or the alarm industry. Reversal, in most of these cases, tracks political pressure far more closely than it tracks actual crime data.
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Mid-Size Cities Are Next in Line
Industry retrospectives published since Seattle’s policy took effect describe it as the most recent major adopter of a trend expected to keep moving into more mid-size cities, particularly in the West and Pacific Northwest. Monitoring centers, for their part, are increasingly leaning on AI-assisted video review so a human operator can confirm or dismiss an alarm in seconds rather than minutes, since speed is exactly what determines whether a verified alert reaches police before an intruder is already gone.
That shift changes what a home security system actually has to deliver. A system that can only report motion is a system that, in a growing number of cities, may not get a police response at all. One that can tell the difference between a person and routine activity, and act on that distinction the moment it matters, is built for where this is heading.
Cities will keep experimenting with the specifics, timelines, exemptions, which crimes qualify for automatic response regardless of verification. But the direction is consistent across every jurisdiction that’s tried it: unverified alerts are becoming less reliable as a way to get help, and the burden is shifting onto the technology itself to prove something is actually happening before anyone shows up.
