By Tom Weber, KWMU
St. Louis, MO – Police hope a new law about to take effect in St. Louis City will cut down on time spent going to false alarms.
Police are not required by law to respond to alarms, but they do. And they say most of them are false.
Home and business owners that have an alarm system in the city will have to register them, starting June 1.
After that, they'll get one free false alarm each year. The second false alarm will include a $25 fine; each false alarm after that will get incrementally more expensive.
After eight false alarms, police will not be required to respond to that house or business.
"The purpose of this is to give people an incentive to maintain their alarm systems so they work properly so they're not wasting the police department's time and they're not wasting the officer's time, so that the officers will be out on the streets responding to real calls," says Jeff Rainford, Mayor Francis Slay's Chief of Staff.
"You know, anything can go haywire once in a while. But when you've got a home or a business where the alarm's going off all the time, it really becomes a problem." Alarms that go off because of a power outage or bad weather won't count against the home or business owner.
Police say they got about 60,000 alarm calls in 2004.