Police to eliminate response to home burglary alarms

Jeffrey Libby

Tuesday, June 12, 2001 | 10:39 a.m.

Henderson police will no longer respond to home burglary alarms as of July 1 in an effort to free up police officers to respond more quickly to life-threatening crimes, Chief Mike Mayberry said Monday.

Police will continue to respond, however, to commercial burglary alarms tripped after dark, Mayberry said.

Other "small town" services will likely be eliminated in the near future, including instances when police officers travel to homes to take burglary reports or to check on emergency 911 phone call hang-ups.

Instead, residents will have to travel to the police station to fill out crime reports. A 911 hang-up will be ignored unless a dispatcher considers it suspicious. And if a car is stolen, residents may soon be forced to catch a bus to fill out reports.

In the case of home burglary alarm calls, security companies will have to dispatch a guard to the scene before alerting police. It's the same system as used in Las Vegas and North Las Vegas.

"I never, never thought I'd see the day in my time with the Henderson Police Department where I would not be able to provide small-town, hometown police services," Mayberry said. "But those days are coming."

Those days, arriving in less than three weeks, are the result of a failed tax initiative that would have raised a projected $850 million over 30 years to pay the salaries of 166 new police officers as well as for 30 firefighters and 41 support staff members. The new staff would have been hired over seven years.

Owners of a $100,000 home would have been taxed an additional $84 annually. Voters rejected the initiative by a wide margin last Tuesday, with 56 percent voting against and 44 percent in favor. They narrowly rejected the same initiative in November.

Mayberry estimates that home burglary alarms, many of which are false or the result of human error, account for close to 18 percent of his calls for service, for "thousands of man-hours." By eliminating them, he hopes to cut response times in life-threatening situations to less than 5 minutes. Today it takes police more than 7 minutes to respond to such calls.

Mayor Jim Gibson said the shift away from small-town services is the only way the police department can provide adequate staff with current resources to answer life-threatening situations.

"We have to get our (police) response times down," Gibson said.

City Manager Phil Speight said it is too early to tell whether budget administrators will divert money away from other city departments to increase funding for public safety.

When the Legislature reconvenes Thursday for a special session, Assembly Bill 653 will be decided. Through that bill, Henderson could receive as much as $4 million in back payments due to what city officials say are inequities in state sales tax funding formulas. They say faster-growing communities have been shortchanged by the new formula, which was approved by state lawmakers in 1997.

But even if AB 653 passes intact, Speight said the $58.6 million budgeted for the police department in 2001-2002 would likely remain unchanged. That money represents 46 percent of $120 million budgeted for the general fund.

Some residents questioned the police department's willingness to continue protecting businesses but not private homes, especially because police and city officials have attributed the need for additional public safety staff in large part to new stresses caused by the success of commercial enterprise in Henderson.

"I think it's odd that they would allow businesses to get burglary responses, but not homeowners," Henderson resident Sean Brown, an airline pilot and father of a young child, said. "The priority should be the homeowner. With a house we're talking about personal safety, not property. A stereo can be replaced. That's part of the cost of doing business. But it shouldn't be part of home life."

But Darleen Devaul, a city employee, said the cuts have to be made somewhere. "The police numbers are so low, when you compare them to other departments across the country, I don't know how people expect them to respond to every call," she said.

Mayberry said home alarms are generally set off in empty houses. If residents are home during a burglary and call police, he said they will come. "The police department's No. 1 concern is for citizens," he said.

But the bottom line, Mayberry said, is that with the resources available, "we have to turn into a big-city police department."

Fire Chief Jim Cavalieri said that with three new fire stations opened last year, his department for now will be able to maintain appropriate response times. He could not say, however, if funding will be obtained to staff the Anthem-Del Webb fire station, which is scheduled to open in December.