Brief History of Alarm Systems in USA - Part 1

In the 1920’s, crime began increasing substantially in the United States.  Burglar alarms were developed to respond to the threat to homes, individuals and families.  At that time, alarm systems were monitored directly by the police.  But soon, police departments became over loaded by false alarms.  In some cities, you had to have a special permit or own a business that proved its need for police security to have monitoring services.  Mostly businesses, with a much smaller percentage of home owners, benefited from having a monitoring service. Gradually, private companies began taking over the responsibility of monitoring the alarms.  The “central stations”, as they became known, that did the actual monitoring would determine whether or not any signal triggered was a false alarm or not.  If the signal that was received alarm was determined to reflect a true emergency, the company would then contact the police on behalf of the security system owner.  For many years, this established pattern remained the same.