• Total calls for service decreased from 1996 to 1998 by 1,553 calls.
• False alarm dispatches decreased from 1996 to 1998 by 1,562 calls.

Political Considerations - When the program first started in April of 1997 there were city elections taking place throughout the State of Illinois. With the prospect of new mayors and councils coming into office many of the Police Departments were not anxious to begin discussions of new and stricter ordinances. Once the elections were over the process of developing an ordinance, educating both public officials and the general public, and getting through the varied processes in each jurisdiction actually began. As a result, most of the ordinances did not take effect until late 1997 or even 1998.

Changes in Personnel - Of the 14 Chiefs from the original participating jurisdictions, only eight remain in that position at the end of the program. Of the 14 Alarm Administrators from the original participating jurisdictions, only seven remain in that position at the end of the program. Maintaining continuity was difficult whenever there was a change in personnel. Getting ordinances passed and collecting alarm data both lost momentum.

Software, FAAP (False Alarm Analysis Program) -  A software training class was held on June 26, 1997. Unfortunately, the alarm tracking software was not available for release until September. The delay in having a working software package caused an initial lack of interest in the program and a real difficulty in collecting usable data. Most of the jurisdictions were able to supply me with their total number of false dispatches each month, and none were able to supply the alarm companies that serviced the accounts.

Agencies in Illinois were the first to get the new software and work through the initial "bugs". Whenever there was a problem I would need to go to the jurisdiction, backup their database, take it to the programmer, wait a day or two for it to be fixed, and then return to the jurisdiction to replace their faulty database with the fix.

A key feature of the software, "Export Data to Disk", was not ready until 1998. As a result, prior to 1998, it was necessary to go to each jurisdiction to retrieve the previous month’s data. The zipped data files from the eight jurisdictions were then given to the programmer and returned to me in a format that allowed me to enter the data into my database. This process took anywhere from 1-2 weeks, which meant that by the time reports could be sent to the alarm companies detailing the problem accounts it was already a month after the fact.

Once these start-up problems were corrected – the data collection process improved considerably.