News

TMA Press Release, January 31, 2023

The Monitoring Association (TMA) Standards Committee has received confirmation that its TMA-AVS-01 Alarm Validation Standard has received official ANSI accreditation. Initiated in 2020, the standard provides a method of creating an alarm scoring or classification metric for unauthorized human activity detected by alarm systems. The alarm scoring will assist law enforcement with resource allocation and Call-for-Service prioritization.

David Holl, director of Public Safety, Lower Allen Township Department of Public Safety (PA), and one of the TMA-AVS-01 Committee co-chairs, remarked, “The development and evolution of this scoring standard has been an impressive collaborative effort of the alarm industry community and public safety professionals. It will change the way we all manage and respond to alarm events.”

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By David Holl, Mark McCall

January 17, 2023

For nearly two years, a dedicated committee of alarm industry and public safety professionals have been diligently developing a collaborative ANSI standard that will transform the way central stations evaluate site alarm activations through the application of a scoring matrix.

The scoring criteria provides the method to analyze alarm information received and categorizing them into five priority levels depending upon identified severity. Based upon the determined priority level, the alarm information may or may not be transmitted to the designated site ECC/PSAP for a request for law enforcement dispatch.

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Security Sales & Integration, August 12, 2022

By Morgan Hertel, Vice President of Technology and Innovation for Rapid Response Monitoring

AVS-01 is the first standard to look at many variables and disparate data and use that to ascertain new priorities that can be used by monitoring centers to vary their workflow and notification processes and methods.

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PA Chief’s ‘Bulletin’ Summer 2022 issue

By David Holl, Public Safety Director for Lower Allen Township PA Police Department and Bob Finney, Director of Communications Technology for Collier County Florida Sheriff’s Office. 

There is no standard on how the myriad of alarm monitoring centers across the nation provide information to the ECCs. A new approach is needed and essential. The ‘TMA-AVS-01 Scoring Standard’ was initiated by a committee formed from the alarm industry, the Nationally Recognized Testing Laboratory (NRTL), public safety (including law enforcement), and the ECC community.

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By Paul Rothman, Security Business Magazine, May 6, 2022

A concerted effort among the industry to change how alarm information is received, exchanged and relayed should pay dividends for officer safety, prioritized response, false alarm reduction and much more.

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SUMMARY: PPVAR Announced the New 2022 Board Members comprised of Individuals from the Public Safety, Electronic Security, and Alarm Monitoring Industries

The new board members will each help support the organization’s mission and work of
promoting the value of verification and validation of alarm events during the emergency
response process using video, audio, and other emerging technologies along with proven best
practices. This collaboration maximizes the effectiveness of all resources required to protect life
and property.

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NENA’s ‘The Call’ January 2022

By Frank Fernandez, President of Blueprints 4 Safety (B4S) Strategies Group, and

John Chiaramonte, ENP, Consulting Division President of Mission Critical Partners.

Unverified alarm notifications are plaguing law-enforcement and other emergency-response agencies nationwide—but a new approach to analyzing them offers a potential solution.

For more than a century, since the earliest pioneers in alarm monitoring began connecting their customers to public safety agencies, the task of separating false alarms from real emergencies has been a persistent challenge. On one hand, thousands of lives and millions of dollars in property are saved every year because of public safety’s response to monitored alarms, ranging from structure fires and carbon monoxide incidents to home/business invasions and burglaries/robberies. On the other hand, most alarms are unverified, and many turn out to be false. That creates a serious conundrum for the public safety community—respond or not?

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The Monitoring Association has initiated work on a new American National Standard, AVS-01, which will use data applicable to alarm activations at protected premises to create an alarm validation score. The score will be an important piece of information provided when an alarm monitoring center contacts an ECC/PSAP to generate a burglar alarm call-for-service.

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Using video and audio to verify intrusion alarms is gaining momentum. Leadership of the Partnership for Priority Verified Alarm Response (PPVAR) explains how smarter technology is slashing false dispatches and optimizing law enforcement response.

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SUMMARY: The Partnership for Priority Verified Alarm Response (PPVAR) is
pleased to announce Tom Nakatani, IT VP of Customer Monitoring Technology for ADT, has been
elected President.

As PPVAR continues to work toward its mission of promoting the value of verification during the
dispatch process, it is expanding the composition of its Board of Directors to increase the number of
public safety representatives. This change will ensure that the PPVAR board will represent a
balanced team of professionals with excellent relationships across both public and private sectors as
they work together on the issues related to alarm response process.

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The Partnership for Priority Verified Alarm Response (PPVAR) is an organization bringing together Law Enforcement, Insurance, and the Security Industry to coordinate efforts to verify alarm activity, reduce false alarms, and increase apprehension rates and officer safety.

An important part of this mission is to develop standards and recommendations for making effective use of new technology and services – especially when innovations challenge relationship norms between the alarm industry and Public Safety. PPVAR believes that Law Enforcement must be allowed to make use of appropriate technology with the proper safeguards. To that effect:

PPVAR encourages clear and proactive communication of any relationships between Public Safety and Private companies.
PPVAR encourages transparency in those communications of the nature of the relationship and conditions and obligations of the involved parties.

Signed,

PPVAR Board of Directors

For more information please visit www.ppvar.org