Vallejo police face skeptical residents on plan to reduce alarm call responses

VALLEJO – The Vallejo Police Department presented a plan to stop responding to the majority of alarm calls at a town hall meeting Tuesday night attended by nearly 80 residents, many of whom expressed skepticism of the plan.

The department claims that 98% of alarm calls that they receive are false alarms. Interim Chief Jason Ta said  that the time officers spend responding to these alarms could be better utilized in responding to other priority areas.

Vallejo currently has an ordinance which requires the department to respond to all alarm calls. According to Ta, staffing levels at the department have dropped so low that he needs to find ways to reduce officer hours in order to address more urgent calls. Last month the Vallejo City Council passed a resolution that the staffing shortage constituted a public safety emergency.

Many members of the community questioned the wisdom of the department’s plan and the publicity it has garnered.

“I wonder if it was the best thing to have our city emergency on three or four of the television channels because everybody knows about the trials and tribulations here,” Ceci O’Donnell said, referring to the TV news reporters in attendance at Tuesday’s meeting. “So to me it was kind of like open season [for crime in Vallejo.]”

O’Donnell also said that she is concerned that the lack of response to alarm systems will encourage people to go out and buy guns to protect their homes and businesses.

“Will this proposal not incur more danger and jeopardy to our businesses and homes?” resident Carolyn Dyson asked. “We can’t afford to reduce anything in this city that has to do with safety.”

“Reduction in any service delivery model is not good,” Ta replied. “We are not here to suggest that this is good for us or the community. We just don’t have the ability to respond to everything, so we have to figure out a way to respond a little more smartly.”

Ta proposes to make changes to the Vallejo municipal code that will allow dispatchers to disregard silent or audible alarms that cannot be verified. The verification would include confirmation from the alarm user either at the alarm site or by self-monitored audio/visual equipment.

Many alarm systems notify alarm users and connect to audio or visual feeds through which a property owner or alarm operator can verify that a burglary or intrusion is in progress. Eyewitnesses or private security personnel also could confirm an incident to trigger a response.

Alarm systems with forced entry detection, such as sensors that detect a broken entryway or broken glass and interior motion detectors, would also be considered a verified alarm, according to police spokesperson Sgt. Rashad Hollis.

The department will continue to respond to panic alarms and manually activated silent alarms as well as alarms that indicate a medical emergency and require a response from both the police and fire departments.

Many community members were surprised by this statistic that 98% of alarm calls are false alarms and suggested that it might not accurately depict the situation.

Resident Cliff Cruz said that he would have liked to see the data back to 2018 because using numbers from the height of the pandemic when many people were home might not represent the current conditions.

Dyson said that she wanted to know how times officers actually responded to the alarm calls.

“If we have been laboring with low numbers on the police force, it would seem almost impossible that they were able to respond to those 3,000 [alarm calls a year],” Dyson said.

Ta said it takes an average of 23 minutes of officer time to respond to and resolve an alarm call. He said the department receives about 300 alarm calls a month, which amounts to 115 officer hours that are taken up responding to alarm calls.

“We are not saying that we are not going to go to these calls,” Ta said “We just don’t want to go to 98% of them that are false.”

Philip Balbuena, who serves as the designated community member on the Vallejo Police Department’s critical incident review board, asked if the department is going to request assistance from the Solano County Sheriff’s Office.

Ta said that he is talking with other agencies but they are having similar staffing problems.

“The Vallejo Police department has 132 authorized positions for sworn officers and 50 of those positions are vacant,” he said. The sheriff’s office has 82 deputies in the patrol division. For them to upstaff to support the 50 vacant positions in Vallejo would be an enormous challenge, Ta said.

“If somebody were to come in and help us I would take whatever help I could take, whether it was one, two, three or four people,” Ta said. “In the meantime though, we need to figure out how we can better use the resources that we currently have.”

Shane Clary, chair of the California Alarm Association governmental affairs committee, said that Vallejo’s municipal code has a requirement for alarm permits but the city is not currently issuing those permits.

According to Cleary, the permit process allows the city to track alarm usage. He says that it is often only 5% of users that cause most of the false alarms and reducing alarm response overall would jeopardize the rest of the users. He said a system of progressive fines for repeat offenders can reduce the number of unwanted false alarms.

Marco McCleod, the owner of the Grind Cafe on Tuolumne St., said that his business has been broken into twice and after the second break-in his insurance company dropped his policy. He said additional fines could make things even harder for small businesses to make it in Vallejo.

Economic Vitality Commissioner Calvin Harrell argued that the 50 vacant police positions should amount to significant salary savings for the department. “Where does the budgeted money for staff vacancy on the police force go?” he asked.

“I can tell you where it’s not,” Ta said. “Ït’s not being used for our department. I do not have control over the budget. If I had control over salary savings I would do things differently.”

In June, city officials narrowly produced a balanced budget by utilizing staff savings from unfilled positions in the police department and other city departments.

Councilmember Mina Loera Diaz said that she would ask the finance director to address the question of where the salary saving from the police department is being used in the budget.