Use case · After-hours coverage
The building is empty for two thirds of every day
Nobody is watching it, and the thing most sites rely on to cover that gap is an unverified alarm. In 2025 San Diego Police Department was dispatched to 17,075 burglary-alarm calls in the city and 97.97% of them ended with no crime report and no arrest. That is the whole argument on this page, in the city's own published data.
- CSLB C-7 #976737
- BSIS ACO #7501
- CMMC certified
- SAM.gov registered
- Est. 2008
The problem
Sixteen hours a day with nobody in the building
Count the hours honestly. A business trading eight until six is occupied for ten hours out of twenty-four on a weekday and not at all at the weekend. That is about a hundred and twelve unoccupied hours a week — roughly two thirds of the year — during which the only thing standing between the site and whatever happens on it is a locked door and a device that sends a signal.
Everybody knows this in the abstract and almost nobody has scoped against it. The system that gets installed is designed around the working day: cameras positioned for daylight, an alarm that arms when the last person leaves, a recorder in a cupboard, and an arrangement in which the first human being to learn that anything happened is whoever opens up in the morning. Occasionally the alarm goes off at two, somebody's phone rings, and either a keyholder drives across the city in the dark or nobody does.
What it costs operationally is not just an incident. It is the keyholder call-out rota, the manager who has been out at 3am four times this year, the alarm everybody has stopped taking seriously because the last eleven were nothing, the permit consequences of repeated activations, and the growing quiet assumption inside the business that the alarm does not really mean anything. That last one is the expensive part, because it is exactly the assumption that is wrong on the twelfth occasion.
It is hard to solve because the instrument is blunt. A detector reports that its state changed. It cannot say whether that was a person, a pallet settling, a rodent, a spider on a lens, a door out of alignment in cold weather, wind through a roller shutter or a genuine entry — and it reports it to somebody who has to decide what to do with no further information at all. Everything that goes wrong after that follows from that one gap.
The San Diego data
17,075 dispatched calls, 90 with an outcome
The City of San Diego publishes every police call for service with its disposition. We pulled seven years of it and counted what happens to burglary-alarm calls specifically. The method is set out under the table, because a figure like this is only worth anything if you can check the working.
| Year | Burglary-alarm calls | No crime outcome | Share | Report or arrest | Share |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 28,370 | 27,740 | 97.78% | 258 | 0.91% |
| 2020 | 21,861 | 21,257 | 97.24% | 275 | 1.26% |
| 2021 | 22,361 | 21,805 | 97.51% | 278 | 1.24% |
| 2022 | 23,751 | 23,124 | 97.36% | 263 | 1.11% |
| 2023 | 20,537 | 20,081 | 97.78% | 191 | 0.93% |
| 2024 | 19,685 | 19,293 | 98.01% | 156 | 0.79% |
| 2025 | 17,075 | 16,728 | 97.97% | 90 | 0.53% |
Source: San Diego Police Department, Police Calls for Service, City of San Diego Open Data Portal — data.sandiego.gov/datasets/police-calls-for-service; disposition code definitions from the same portal. Period: calendar years 2019–2025. Type: COUNT of calls dispatched, with percentages computed. Retrieved: 2 September 2026.
Method, so it can be checked. Call type 459A — BURGLARY ALARM. Rows were de-duplicated on the full record before counting. A call was treated as producing no crime outcome where the disposition was K, KB or KHR (no report required), U (unfounded), X (dispatched alarm call cancelled before a unit was on scene), W (no dispatch, or incident cancelled before a unit was dispatched), CAN (cancel), or DUP and V (duplicate). It was treated as producing a crime outcome where the disposition was R, RB or RHR (report), A, AB or AHR (arrest), or S (stolen or recovered vehicle). In 2025 the full disposition breakdown was K 8,115 · U 4,231 · CAN 3,020 · W 984 · X 282 · O 231 · R 75 · DUP 60 · KB 36 · A 15 · blank 25 · SS- 1.
Read this correctly, because it is easy to overstate. This is a measure we derived from SDPD's published disposition codes. It is not an official SDPD false-alarm statistic, and we are not saying SDPD says 98% of alarms are false. "No crime outcome" is not the same as SDPD's administrative false-alarm determination for permit or fine purposes — it includes cancelled calls and calls where no report was required. These are also calls dispatched, not alarm activations: activations resolved by a monitoring centre never reach SDPD and are not in this data at all.
A data defect worth naming. The city's 2024 calls-for-service file contains 970,649 rows but only 485,328 unique records — every row appears twice. The 2025 file carries 12,227 duplicates. Every figure above is computed on de-duplicated rows. A naive read of the 2024 file reports roughly double the true alarm volume, about 39,370 burglary-alarm calls instead of 19,685, and any refresh of these figures has to de-duplicate first. We mention it because it is the kind of thing that silently produces a wrong number on somebody's marketing page.
For scale: alarm calls of all types were 4.24% of SDPD's de-duplicated calls for service in 2025 and burglary alarms alone were 3.75%. The 2025 split by type was burglary alarm 17,075, robbery alarm 971, panic alarm 918 and vehicle alarm or audible 305. The no-crime share has sat between 97.2% and 98.1% in every year since 2019. Same source, period and retrieval date as above.
The national picture
This is not a San Diego problem, and it is not new
The Department of Justice looked at this two decades ago and reached the same place from national data. What is striking is not that the figures agree — it is that they agree across twenty years and two completely different methods.
- "The vast majority of alarm calls — between 94 and 98 percent (higher in some jurisdictions) — are false." Our San Diego calculation puts the no-crime-outcome share between 97.2% and 98.1% across 2019 to 2025, from a different dataset by a different method.
- Commercial premises are worse than residential ones. The guide states that commercial properties tend to have higher false-alarm rates because more people share responsibility for arming and disarming and the systems are more complex, and that the commercial rate "may be as much as three times higher".
- Each false alarm consumes roughly twenty minutes of police time, usually for two officers, and police in the United States responded to approximately 36 million alarm activations in 2002. Nationally, false alarms were put at between 10 and 25 percent of all calls to police.
Source: US Department of Justice, Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, False Burglar Alarms, 2nd edition, Problem-Oriented Guides for Police No. 5, by Rana Sampson — popcenter.asu.edu. Period: guide published 2007, underlying data approximately 2001–2005. Type: ESTIMATE. Retrieved: 2 September 2026. These figures are twenty years old and we are dating them rather than presenting them as current. They are quoted because the range they establish and the range we computed for San Diego from 2019–2025 data agree, which is a more interesting fact than either on its own.
The same guide is critical of this industry, and we are not going to hide that. It finds "no evidence of a link" between rising alarm installation and the decline in US burglary, reports one study in which police were more likely to catch burglars at premises without alarms, and lists "providing an emergency police response to unverified burglar alarm calls" under Response Not Recommended. Read honestly, that is not an argument against covering your building overnight. It is an argument against the unverified alarm specifically — which is the thing this page is telling you is the weak part of your arrangement.
One further number belongs here, and it is the one that survives falling crime. In 2025 San Diego Police Department cleared 1,456 of 21,897 reported property crimes — 6.6%, about one in fifteen. So the shape of the after-hours problem is: an instrument that mostly reports nothing, and an investigation that mostly does not resolve. Which leaves your own record of the night as the thing that has to be worth having.
Source: Federal Bureau of Investigation, Crime Data Explorer, offences and clearances, agency ORI CA0371100 — cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp. Period: calendar year 2025. Type: COUNT, ratio computed. Retrieved: 2 September 2026. Cleared means cleared by arrest or by exceptional means; it is not a conviction rate, and clearances recorded in a year may relate to earlier offences. And the trend is down, which we state plainly: commercial burglary recorded by SDPD fell from 1,553 offences in 2020 to 1,014 in 2025, and the FBI's UCR Summary of Reported Crimes in the Nation, 2025 puts estimated national burglary and larceny-theft rates at twenty-year lows. Nothing on this page argues from a crime wave, because there is not one.
What reduces it
Six things that change the outcome
The after-hours gap is closed by verification and by design decisions taken before anything is installed, not by adding cameras.
Somebody looking before anybody is called
An operator who sees what the detector saw, establishes whether there is a person on the site and what they are doing, and can speak into the space. This is the element the entire page argues for. That is remote video monitoring.
Detection that is worth verifying
Intrusion detection specified and set for the actual environment and zoned so an activation tells you where, not merely that something happened — and reported to a person whose job is to act. That is commercial alarm monitoring.
Cameras built for the dark
The positions that matter overnight are rarely the ones that matter at noon, and a camera specified for a lit interior produces a grey rectangle at 3am. Night performance is a specification and a mounting decision, not a setting. That is commercial security camera installation.
Coverage on ground with no services
Yards, lots, boundaries and sites between phases, where a fixed install is not proportionate and the exposure moves. We own and deploy our own units and reposition them ourselves. That is mobile surveillance.
Knowing who is meant to be there at 4am
Cleaners, contractors, night deliveries and one manager collecting something. Credentialled after-hours entry turns those from unexplained activations into expected events with a record. That is commercial access control.
A system that has not quietly stopped working
An infrared illuminator that failed, a channel that stopped recording, a drive at the end of its life, a signal path nobody has tested since commissioning. All invisible until the night it matters. That is CCTV maintenance and repair.
Who has it worst
Where the empty hours cost the most
Every business has unoccupied hours. Three types have an exposure during them that shapes the whole design.
- Warehouses and distribution sites. High-value stock in bulk behind dock doors, a yard of trailers, a long fence line, and shift patterns that leave genuine windows with nobody on site — plus mounting heights and backlit dock openings that defeat a camera specified for an office. That is warehouse and logistics security.
- Construction sites. The hardest version of the problem: no envelope, no permanent power, no network, a layout that changes every few weeks, and plant and materials worth a great deal sitting in the open every night. That is construction site security.
- Auto dealerships. A large unlit lot with no perimeter, full of vehicles, adjacent to a road, and empty from close to open — where the coverage question is about plates and approaches, not the showroom. That is dealership security.
The other verticals are on all industries and the full service list is on all commercial services. The related problems on an empty site are trespassing and loitering, vandalism and theft and burglary. The full statistical treatment of the alarm-call data lives on false alarm statistics for San Diego.
Scope, stated plainly, because monitoring is the place it matters most. Our monitoring scope is intrusion, video and access only. Anything falling under a fire contractor's licence is coordinated with your own licensed fire alarm contractor — never performed or monitored by us — we do not hold a C-10 or a C-16. Guard and patrol work is licensed separately in California and coordinated through Guardian Integrated Security, Inc., of which we are a DBA. We work on commercial premises only and not on private residences.
At survey
What we would look at on your site
An after-hours survey is done against the hours the site is empty, and on the sites where it matters that means being there when it is dark.
The actual unoccupied hours
Not the trading hours — the hours with nobody on site, including the weekend, the shutdown week, and the gaps between shifts that people forget about. This sets everything else, and it is usually longer than the first answer given.
Your own activation history
What has gone off, when, where and what it turned out to be. This is the most valuable document you can put in front of us and almost nobody offers it. A pattern in the activation log usually names the faulty detector, the moving door or the actual exposure.
What the cameras do at night
Real recorded overnight footage from the cameras you already have, reviewed before anything is proposed. What a camera is specified to do and what it produces at 3am at its actual mounting height are frequently different, and this reframes the conversation more often than any other single check.
Who is legitimately on site out of hours
Cleaners, contractors, night deliveries, a manager collecting something, a tenant with their own hours. Every one of them is an activation waiting to happen unless the system knows about them.
The paths and what happens when they fail
How a signal leaves the building, whether there is a second route, what is on protected power and for how long, whether a loss of communication raises an alert of its own, and what the agreed procedure is at 2am. Written down, not assumed.
Permit and keyholder reality
Whether the San Diego Police Department permit is current, who is genuinely willing to be a keyholder at 3am, and how far away they live. A response plan that depends on somebody who moved out of the county is a plan on paper only.
Findings go in writing whether or not you go on to contract with us, including the detectors we think should come out. Nothing on this page is a promise about a response time — there is no such promise anywhere on this site, because we cannot evidence one and would not make one we could not keep.
Common questions
After-hours coverage questions
It is the overwhelming norm, and San Diego publishes the data that shows it. In 2025 San Diego Police Department was dispatched to 17,075 burglary-alarm calls in the city — roughly forty-seven a day — and 16,728 of them, 97.97%, ended with no crime report and no arrest. Ninety calls, just over half a percent, produced a report or an arrest. That is our own calculation from SDPD disposition codes in the city open-data release — not an official SDPD false-alarm figure — and the two are not the same thing: our measure counts calls that ended without a crime outcome, which includes cancelled calls and calls where no report was required, not SDPD administrative false-alarm determinations. But the pattern has held between 97.2% and 98.1% every year since 2019, and it is the reason an unverified activation is a weak instrument.
RelatedRemote video monitoring
It changes what is known before anybody is asked to act. An unverified alarm reports that a sensor changed state; it cannot say whether that was a person, a pallet, a bird, a door out of alignment or a fault. A verified activation means an operator has looked at what the detector saw and can say what is happening on the site, where, and whether there is a person in the picture. That is a different quality of information for you, for whoever you call, and for a public safety response deciding how to prioritise. We will not promise you an outcome or a response time, and this site carries no such promise anywhere. What we can say is that the case for verification is made by the local dispatch data, not by us.
RelatedRemote video monitoring
In the City of San Diego the alarm permit authority is the San Diego Police Department, and the requirement is SDPD alarm permit, Form 1067. Required before an alarm system is monitored; renewed annually. It is worth treating the renewal as a diary item, not an afterthought, because a lapsed permit is one of the quieter ways a site ends up with a monitored system and a response problem. That rule is San Diego city only — other jurisdictions in the county set their own, and we check the one that applies to your address instead of generalising this one to it.
RelatedRemote video monitoring
Both models exist and they are genuinely different products, so it is worth being precise. Continuous live observation of every camera is expensive and, on most commercial sites, is not what produces the result — a person cannot usefully watch twenty views for eight hours. The model that does work on most sites is event-driven: detection on the positions that matter brings a live view in front of an operator at the moment something crosses a line, and the operator then assesses and acts. What we scope for a given site depends on the site, the hours and what the exposure actually is, and it is settled at survey, not picked from a tier list.
RelatedRemote video monitoring
Not necessarily, and we would rather assess than replace on principle. What matters is whether the existing cameras can produce a usable image at night at the positions they are actually mounted in, whether the recorder or the network can support an outbound stream without falling over, and whether the site has the connectivity for it. Some existing systems take this on without difficulty; some have three cameras worth watching and eleven that are pointed at nothing; some cannot support it at all. We survey what is there, tell you in writing which cameras are worth including and which are not, and we do not treat a monitoring enquiry as an opportunity to propose a rip-and-replace.
RelatedRemote video monitoring
That is a design question and it should be answered before it happens, not after. The considerations are ordinary: how the signal path is arranged and whether there is a secondary route, what is on protected power and for how long, whether a loss of communication is itself something that raises an alert, and what the agreed procedure is when it does. A site where nobody would notice a monitoring path being down until the morning after an incident has a gap it does not know about. We set out what happens in each of those cases in writing as part of the design, because the honest answer varies by site and a general reassurance is worth nothing.
RelatedRemote video monitoring
Sometimes it does the job a patrol was being asked to do, and sometimes it does not, and the difference is worth being straight about. A patrol is present at a point in time and somewhere else the rest of the night; watched coverage is present continuously but cannot physically do anything. Where the requirement is to notice, assess and escalate, watched coverage generally covers more of the night than a patrol does. Where somebody has to physically respond, open up, escort or remove a person, that is guard and patrol work, licensed separately in California, and we coordinate it through Guardian Integrated Security, Inc., of which we are a DBA, instead of presenting ourselves as a guard company.
RelatedRemote video monitoring
It is falling, and we are going to say so instead of talk around it. Commercial burglary recorded by SDPD fell from 1,553 offences in 2020 to 1,014 in 2025, and the FBI put estimated national burglary and larceny rates at twenty-year lows in 2025. The argument for covering an empty building has never been volume. It is that clearance is very low — SDPD cleared 6.6% of reported property crime in 2025 — so whatever record exists of an incident at your premises is very likely to be the one you captured, and that an unverified activation is unlikely to produce anything on its own. Those two facts do not change when the totals fall.
RelatedRemote video monitoring
Inside it: cameras, recorders, access control and intrusion alarm on commercial premises, installed under CSLB #976737 and monitored under BSIS ACO #7501. Outside it: fire alarm, which needs a C-10 or C-16 we do not hold; guard patrol and posted officers, which need the PPO held by Guardian Integrated Security, Inc.; and private residences, which we do not take at all. Managed residential property — an apartment community's common areas — is commercial work and is in scope.
RelatedRemote video monitoring