If you spend the money to put in an alarm system on your home or business, make sure you check with your local police and fire departments to make sure there isn’t some sort of fee and/or permit required. Otherwise, you could be like the Kansas City car dealer who watched a break-in attempt live on his phone while police ignored the alarm.

The used-car dealer had already been a robbery victim once this year, losing more than $50,000 in cars and tools to thieves. So he recently spent $2,200 to had ADT install an alarm system.

Problem is, he claims no one ever told him about the city ordinance that requires the payment of a $45 permit in order to have police respond to the alarm.

So when his alarm went off on Monday evening, he was able to watch a live video feed from his business on his smartphone, but no police officers came to check on the disturbance.

“Nobody told me I was supposed to have a permit for an alarm,” he tells KCTV 5. “It’s an alarm, that’s it. They installed it and that was it, I thought I was done. Nobody sent me anything, the alarm company did not tell me anything and I was not told by anybody that I need an additional form for them to show up.”

Kansas City (the Missouri one) police confirmed to KCTV that cops will not respond to an alarm unless the permit is on file, and that it is up to the alarm system provider to let the customer know about this.

The lesson here is that many local authorities require permits/fees for alarm systems, often to mitigate their liability and the costs of responding to every false alert caused by people who punched in the wrong code.

So if you get a system installed, be sure to contact your local police to make sure that all the red tape has been cut so that you’re not paying for an expensive system that just makes a lot of noise.

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