False Alarm Persectives

Section 4: Court Decisions

A examination of appeals cases in all state courts plus the federal court system highlighted several false alarm issues that recur in lawsuits but that have apparently not been decided definitively. Some of the issues are directly on point for persons involved in the details of solving the false alarm problem. Other issues are relevant in that they illustrate the importance of finding a solution to that problem.

The issues are as follows:
• false alarm ordinances

  --clearly written?

  --fair?

  --who pays fines?

• false alarm as proximate cause of injury
• general consequences of false alarms

Although a few of the following lawsuits involve fire and holdup alarms, the issues raised may nevertheless prove instructive to persons attempting to reduce false burglar alarms.

False alarm ordinances

Ordinances that require alarm permits and set fines for excessive false alarms are a common means of controlling the incidence of false alarms. However, such ordinances do not always go unchallenged. Two cases, one in New York and one in Illinois, adjudicated the question of whether particular false alarm ordinances were legal. In both cases, the ordinances were held to be illegal.

In New York v. Cortlandt Medical Building Associates, 582 N.Y.S. 2d 640 (1992), a commercial alarm user refused to pay $300 worth of fines it had accrued for false alarms. The user's objection was that the law imposing the fines violated the user's right to due process by making no provision for the user to have a hearing to determine whether the alarms were in fact false. The user also claimed the law's higher fines for commercial alarm users than for residential users violated the equal protection clauses of the state and federal constitutions. The court agreed on both points and effectively threw out the law.

Queenwood East Sheltered Care Home, Ltd. v. Village of Morton, 418 N.E. 2d 472 (Ill. App. Ct. 1981), examined the validity of an ordinance adopted by the board of trustees of Morton, Illinois. The commercial alarm user claimed that the ordinance itself was beyond the powers of the village and that the ordinance violated constitutional due process rights. The court held that the ordinance was beyond the powers of the village on the grounds that: "...the power to regulate can exist only when the object of regulation is mandated by a specific ordinance." That is, since alarms were not required by any ordinance, no ordinance could regulate them.

The court also found the ordinance too vague to pass constitutional muster: "In the instant case the experts for each side could not agree when the ionization detector was `in proper working condition.' One said that the presence of an insect which triggered the device indicated proper working order. The other maintained that anything which triggered it other than smoke or fire indicated improper working order. If the experts cannot agree, it is beyond comprehension that the ordinary citizen, who may understand the working of an ordinary household toaster, could be placed under quasicriminal penalties for failing to understand the working of an ionization fire detector." Therefore, the court held that the provision in the ordinance that required systems to be in proper working condition was too vague to enforce.

Three other cases examine the question of who must pay false alarm fines under specific ordinances. Plainview Volunteer Fire Dep't, Inc. v. AFA Protective Systems, Inc., 489 N.Y.S.2d 587 (N.Y. App. Div. 1985), acknowledged the difficulty of determining who must pay false alarm fines (the alarm user or the central station) because of the way the governing ordinance was written and held that the question was so unclear that it must be left to the jury.

Armored Services, Inc. v. City of Wichita, 804 P. 2d 987 (Kan. 1991), examined several provisions of the local alarm ordinance. Among other provisions, the ordinance fines the central station for false alarms unless the central station can prove that the alarms were caused by users; that is, the central station is presumed to be liable for the fine unless it can prove otherwise. The court upheld that provision.

City of Medford v. Herbison, 645 P. 2d 563 (Ore. Ct. App. 1982), shows how complicated the assignment of responsibility for false alarm fines can become. An alarm company had installed a burglar alarm panel in the local police station's dispatch center. The panel displayed 150 lights, which were connected through leased telephone lines to private burglar alarms throughout the city. When one of those alarms was activated, a light on the panel would blink, and the police would investigate the scene. The fact that other alarm companies had purchased the use of many of the 150 lights raised the question of who was liable for false alarm fines: the company that installed the display board or the users of the individual lights. As in Plainview Volunteer Fire Dep't, Inc., the issue was deemed complex enough that it was referred to a jury.

False alarm as proximate cause of injury

The cases above are complicated enough, but the next set of cases shows how false alarms can cause serious trouble and exact high human and financial costs. When an alarm is activated, one result is that people on-site may have to evacuate a building; another result is that police or fire fighters may race across town. Both results can lead to personal injury. When the alarm in question turns out to be false, injured parties often feel they were unnecessarily placed in jeopardy. Five cases discovered in this research show a range of decisions as to who, if anyone, must pay damages.

In Vicknair v. Hibernia Building Corp., 468 So.2d 695 (La. Ct. app. 1985), a woman seven to eight months pregnant was forced to descend 21 flights of stairs in response to a false fire alarm. The false alarm was caused during some renovation work being done in the building. As a result, the mother went into premature labor and delivered a son who was cyanotic (lacking sufficient oxygen in the blood) and required resuscitation. The child has since contracted an abnormally high number of respiratory illnesses related to the premature birth and resultant lung immaturity. Although a legal technicality later raised the question of exactly who--the building owner or the company performing the renovations--was liable, at trial the jury awarded the family damages of $60,980.

In two other cases regarding injuries that followed false alarm activations, the alarm was held not to have been the proximate cause of the accident. In Ford v. Peaches Entertainment Corp., 349 S.E.2d 82 (N.C. Ct. App. 1986), an employee of the alarm user caused an alarm to sound at the fire department when he tested a sprinkler system. On the way to the user's place of business, a fire truck collided with a car, injuring the car's driver. That driver's lawsuit was dismissed on the grounds that the defendants' negligence in activating the alarm was not a proximate cause of his injury: "[i]t is not reasonably foreseeable that in the event of a false alarm a fire truck will cause an accident in responding to the alarm."

Another case, Western Stone & Metal Corp. v. Jones, 348 S.E.2d 478 (Ga. Ct. App. 1986), reaches a similar finding. A false silent alarm sounded; the security agency notified police; and two vehicles were dispatched. As the police vehicles were traveling to the scene, a 73-year-old woman was crossing the street. The police cars approached, the pedestrian was startled, and in stepping backward to avoid being hit she injured her right hip. The injured woman contended that the alarm user was negligent in one of several ways: negligently setting off the alarm; negligently maintaining the alarm system; failing to discover that the alarm had been activated; or failing to notify authorities not to respond to the alarm.

At trial, the pedestrian was awarded $100,000, to be paid by the alarm user and the city government. The city government's liability was limited by statute to $1,000, and it therefore did not bother to appeal the decision. The alarm user, however, did appeal. The appellate judge quoted another case, Southern Bell Tel. &c. Co. v. Dolce, 342 S.E.2d 497 (Ga. 1986): "A prior and remote cause cannot be made the basis of an action if such remote cause did nothing more than furnish the condition or give rise to the occasion by which the injury was made possible, if there intervened between such prior or remote causes and the injury a distinct, successive, unrelated, efficient cause of the injury. If no danger existed in the condition except because of the independent cause, such condition was not the proximate cause." The judge in Western Stone & Metal Corp. held that that was the situation in the present case and reversed the trial court's judgment.

In Horn v. Urban Inv. and Dev. Co., 519 N.E.2d 489(Ill. App. Ct. 1988), a fireman slipped and fell while investigating an apparent false alarm at a retail clothing store. Both at the trial court level and on appeal his suit to recover damages from the building owner was summarily dismissed. The court noted that "while the possessor of land has a duty of reasonable care to a business invitee, that duty does not extend to obvious dangers the invitee would be expected to discover and to avoid by his own efforts."

A different sort of case is Duncan v. Rzonca, 478 N.E.2d 603(Ill. App. Ct. 1985). In that complex and rather painful case, a police officer responding to a bank's robbery alarm was forced to swerve his squad car to avoid a collision with another vehicle. The officer's car struck a telephone pole, and the officer was injured. The alarm, a false one, allegedly was activated by the three-year-old son of a patron at the bank. Moreover, in the preceding four months, six false alarms had originated from the bank, at least one of which was alleged to have been activated by the same child.

On the day in question, the child's mother had been advised to keep her son away from the back of an employee desk where an alarm button, exposed and facing outward, was located in the corner of the desk's knee-space. The child nevertheless walked to the back of the desk, but was requested to leave that area by a bank employee. The child did so but then allegedly returned and pushed the alarm button.

The injured police officer sued for damages; the case was dismissed by a trial court, but he appealed. The appeals court wrestled with the question of who might be at fault--the bank, the mother, the child, or the civilian driver involved in the crash. The judge wrote, "Admittedly, it is quite foreseeable that a police officer responding to an emergency situation of any type presents an inherent risk of harm. However, the societal and policy considerations which require that that risk of harm be borne, albeit regretfully, in order to advance the protection of society and its property as a whole cannot similarly require that the burden of that risk be borne when no purpose is served thereby, and when the need to undertake the risk could have been avoided by the exercise of due care." He added, "The risk becomes socially intolerable and unreasonable when no social need for it exists, particularly when the means of guarding against the risk are eminently available and easily accomplished."

The trial court's decision to throw out the police officer's claim was overturned. The appeals judge held that the bank's negligence in allowing the false alarm could properly be viewed as a proximate cause of the officer's injury; hence, the decision had to be made by a jury.

General consequences of high incidence of false alarms

A particular false alarm may have particular consequences, but the entire wave of false alarms has its own consequences. One consequence is its effect on alarm companies. In Douglas W. Randall, Inc. v. AFA Protective Sys., Inc., 516 F. Supp. 1122 (E.D. Pa. 1981), a jury awarded $14,330 in damages to a jeweler whose leased alarm system, which used ultrasonic sensors, did not signal an alarm even when the entire front window of the jewelry store was smashed. Why did the system not work? And why did the jeweler prevail against the alarm company despite the exculpatory clause in the service contract, which limited the alarm company's liability to 10 percent of the service charge or $250?

The answer flows from "evidence in the record from which the jury could conclude that the defendant's employees had turned down the sensitivity of the burglar alarm to a point where it would not detect the entry of a person into the plaintiff's store." Why did the alarm company turn down the sensitivity of the system so drastically? The judge's opinion states that "the alarm system triggered many false alarms during the hours that the plaintiff's store was closed. [Therefore, an] employee of the defendant came to the plaintiff's store...and adjusted the alarm system in such a manner that the false alarms ceased." In other words, false alarms were such a nuisance, even to the alarm company, that the alarm company effectively killed the system to stop false alarms. The contract's exculpatory clause was deemed invalid because of the alarm company's "gross negligence" (which is legally distinct from and beyond mere negligence).

A second consequence of the wave of false alarms affects the police. As police chiefs have often pointed out, false alarms raise the danger of complacency in police officers. In re Checkmate Stereo and Elec., Inc., 9 Bankr. 585 (1981), is a bankruptcy proceeding, part of which revolves around a store burglary: "The police surmise that the thieves, after gaining entry to the store through breaking the plate glass door which set off the alarm, closed the steel gate behind them, leading the police to believe the alarm to have been a false one. When the police returned about 20 to 25 minutes later, the gate was up and the burglars gone. The intruders could not have removed anything while the steel door was down; they had to act in the 20 minutes...." The question arises, would the police have assumed the alarm was false if false alarms were rare?

Interestingly, that case also points to the potential benefit of private response, as discussed in Section 5. A private responder with keys could have investigated the interior of the store. However, would private responders have been too much endangered by surprising burglars in the act?

Conclusion

Because ordinances, injuries, burglaries, and police response are primarily local phenomena, the cases discussed in this section cannot serve as a road map for any particular reader. Some ordinances withstand lawsuits; others do not. Likewise, judges and juries reach different conclusions in different courts across the country. Nevertheless, the cases point out several matters to consider--in particular, several areas of possible challenge--in any false alarm reduction plan:

Regarding false alarm ordinances
• Is the false alarm ordinance suitably specific?
• Is the ordinance within the powers of the government body that drafts it?
• Does the ordinance give offenders adequate opportunity for hearing?
• Is it fair, desirable, and legal to charge business users higher fines for false alarms than residential users?
• Who exactly must pay the fines?
  Regarding the importance of reducing false alarms
• Is the alarm user, alarm company, police department, or other party likely to be sued after a person is injured—one way or another—following a false alarm?
• Is the desire to avoid false alarms causing alarm companies occasionally to reduce the sensitivity of alarms too much? How does that, or the perception that that might occur, affect users' desire for alarm systems?
• What are the consequences of excessive false alarms on the thoroughness of police response?
• What benefits and risks are raised by private response to alarm calls?