El Cajon, CA
Commercial security in El Cajon
El Cajon is its own city with its own police department, and its alarm ordinance does things San Diego's does not: false alarms are billed as a business licence tax, automatic dialers to the police are banned, and the alarm company's number has to be posted on the building.
- CSLB C-7 #976737
- BSIS ACO #7501
- CMMC certified
- SAM.gov registered
- Est. 2008
The data
164 burglaries recorded in El Cajon in 2024
The El Cajon Police Department reports its crime statistics monthly to the California Department of Justice and to SANDAG, the region's association of governments. SANDAG's 2024 report lists 164 burglary offences in El Cajon in 2024, against 221 in 2023 and 276 in 2021.
| Year | Offences |
|---|---|
| 2021 | 276 |
| 2023 | 221 |
| 2024 | 164 |
Source: SANDAG, Crime in the San Diego Region: 2024 (published 18 August 2025), Appendix Tables 10a, 11a and 12a, "Group A offenses by jurisdiction" — sandag.org. Data: SANDAG and ARJIS. Type: COUNT. Retrieved: 23 September 2026. The report carries no 2022 column. Reporting to CA DOJ and SANDAG: El Cajon Police Department, Records — elcajon.gov.
All burglaries, homes and businesses together. SANDAG's jurisdiction table does not separate commercial from residential, so this is not a commercial burglary count and not a risk rate for any particular building.
Across all Group A offences, the same report records 5,713 in El Cajon in 2024, up 9% on 2023 and down 6% on 2021.
Our own work
Motion detection and CCTV in a covered walkway
This is one of ours, in El Cajon: a camera enclosure suspended from the ceiling of a long covered walkway, beside the strip lighting and the services pipework. The site and the client stay unnamed, because the photograph was never recorded against either.
A walkway like this is a corridor with daylight at both ends, which is the hardest light a camera works in: bright openings and a dim middle. Where the camera hangs, and what it is set to detect, is decided by walking the length of it at the hours that matter.
See more of our installations
Who polices it
The El Cajon Police Department, under El Cajon's code
El Cajon has its own police department, organised into divisions for patrol, traffic enforcement, investigations and records, among others. An alarm at an El Cajon business is answered under El Cajon's municipal code. The City of San Diego's permit and verification rules do not apply, and neither do the county's.
Source: City of El Cajon, Your Police Department — elcajon.gov. Retrieved: 23 September 2026.
False alarms are billed by the police records office
The department's Records Division lists false alarm billing among its duties. Because El Cajon charges false alarms as a business licence tax, the bill arrives as a tax demand, and the code gives ten days to pay it or to appeal to the city manager.
A business licence, including for firms from outside
The city requires all businesses conducting business within its limits to hold a business licence, and says that includes businesses from outside El Cajon that perform services at the customer's place of business. Licences expire on 31 December. An installer working on your premises should have one as well as a state contractor's licence; ours is CSLB #976737.
Sources: El Cajon Police Department, Records — elcajon.gov; City of El Cajon, Business Licenses — elcajon.gov. Retrieved: 23 September 2026.
Area served
El Cajon, as the map draws it
The city we cover, shown as an area. We have no premises in El Cajon; the map is here to show the area, not an office.
El Cajon
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Before it goes live
What El Cajon's alarm chapter requires
- A permit and a licence before the system is used. Chapter 5.84: no alarm user may have, install, operate or maintain an alarm system without first securing a licence and paying the licence taxes, and without a permit from the city. The permit lasts until it is revoked or suspended, or the system or the principal changes; changed details must be filed within ten days.
- A person, not a recording, calls the police. §5.84.030: notice of an intrusion must be made by the alarm company's personnel to the emergency services number. Prerecorded alarms by automatic dialer are prohibited and will not activate a response. That is how a monitored alarm works anyway, and it is why verifying the activation on camera first, through remote video monitoring, fits the ordinance.
- Thirty minutes, and a number on the wall. An audible alarm must be capable of stopping within thirty minutes, and the building must prominently display a number for the owner or the alarm company (§5.84.030). Not posting it is a ground for suspension (§5.84.090).
- The user trains the people who set it off. The licence holder is responsible for training employees and regular users to avoid accidental alarms, and for repairing whatever in the system causes them (§5.84.030).
- False alarms are a tax. Chapter 5.08 charges a business licence tax for false alarms, at amounts set by council resolution, with an appeal to the city manager within ten days. We have not retrieved the current amounts from a city source, so we do not quote them.
Sources: El Cajon Municipal Code ch. 5.84, Alarm Systems — ecode360.com; ch. 5.08, Amounts Payable — ecode360.com. Retrieved: 23 September 2026.
We hold BSIS Alarm Company Operator licence ACO #7501 for the alarm and monitoring work. We do not hold a C-10 or C-16, so fire alarm work is coordinated with your licensed fire alarm contractor, and we work on commercial premises only. El Cajon is one of the cities on our service area.
Common questions
El Cajon security questions
The El Cajon Police Department. El Cajon is its own city with its own police force, and its alarm rules are in its own municipal code, chapter 5.84. The department’s Records Division handles false alarm billing.
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Yes. Chapter 5.84 says no alarm user shall have, install, operate or maintain an alarm system without first securing a licence and paying the licence taxes set in chapters 5.04 and 5.08, and that no alarm user shall have or maintain a system without a permit from the city. The permit stays valid until it is revoked or suspended, or until the system changes significantly or the principal of the premises changes. The amounts are set by council resolution; we have not been able to retrieve the current schedule from a city source, so we do not quote one.
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As a business licence tax. Chapter 5.08 makes a tax for false alarms generated by the system a condition of the alarm licence, at amounts the city council sets by resolution. Any person can appeal whether an alarm was false to the city manager within ten days of receiving notice of payment due. Failing to pay the false alarm tax within ten days of demand is one of the grounds for suspending the permit under section 5.84.090.
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No. Section 5.84.030 prohibits prerecorded telephone alarms by automatic dialer and says they will not activate a response; notification of an intrusion has to be made by the alarm company’s own personnel to the emergency services number. Programming an automatic dialer to an emergency line is also a ground for suspending the permit.
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No. Our only office is 7561 Convoy Ct in Kearny Mesa. We have worked in El Cajon — the photograph on this page is one of our installations there — and we survey every site in person.
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