Denver – When Denver 9-1-1 received an alarm notification for the home of Lisa Sommers, police were not dispatched because the public safety telecommunicator transposed the alarm’s permit numbers. This misunderstanding resulted in the home being burglarized and Sommers being put at risk when she chose to check out the alarm by herself.

The city requires all monitored alarms have a permit in order to reduce false alarms and unnecessary police responses. In this incident, the alarm company dispatcher provided a valid permit number, but the telecommunicator read back and confirmed a number that was one digit off. The alarm company dispatcher did not catch the error and confirmed the incorrect number.

According to an article from The Denver Channel, “Even though Sommers does have a valid alarm permit, she had to check out the break-in herself. She thinks the thieves may have been hiding inside while she looked around, because the next morning, the place was ransacked.”

To address such misunderstandings and improve the exchange of information between alarm companies and PSAPs, APCO International partnered with the Central Station Alarm Association to develop a technical standard. The Alarm Monitoring Company to Public Safety Answering Point Computer-aided Dispatch (CAD) External Alarm Interface Exchange  APCO/CSAA 2.101.1-2008 was adopted by the American National Standards Institute in January 2009. Click here to read the standard.

Among other things, the standard recommends that once an exchange has been developed end‐to‐end by the CAD provider and the alarm monitoring software provider and is ready for testing, the alarm monitoring company should trigger an address validation request for each alarm address within the PSAP’s jurisdiction. This will facilitate the identification of problem addresses that need to be massaged or reassigned to a different PSAP. Also, alarm monitoring companies should implement a procedure to ensure the address for a new alarm subscriber is passed through the address validation process with the PSAP at the time the alarm subscription is added to the company’s database.

Read the full story about this incident at TheDenverChannel.com.