A. An alarm shall be deemed a nuisance alarm and a public nuisance when it has been emitting sound continuously for at least one hour, or intermittently for two hours, and has been reported to the police department as an annoyance by a person in the vicinity of the alarm, and its owner is not available to silence the alarm or to cause it to be silenced.
1. Any officer or police aide of the police department is authorized to enter on exterior private property area, and into vehicles on private property or public streets, for the purpose of silencing a nuisance alarm. Forcible entry may be made into exterior alarm equipment boxes, and attics and crawlspace vents, in order to accomplish this purpose. Actions may be taken to silence vehicle alarms, including the towing of the vehicle, as prescribed in the California Vehicle Code.
2. Neither the city, nor its police officers or police aides, nor any officer or employee of the city or of a private alarm service contractor engaged by the police shall be liable for damages to the owner of a nuisance alarm for silencing the nuisance alarm or for entry on the owner's property for the purpose of silencing a nuisance alarm or for any damage resulting from a reasonable effort to silence the nuisance alarm.
3. An alarm system shall be deemed a nuisance alarm and a public nuisance if such alarm system actuates excessive false alarms. Four false alarms in any ninety-day period is found and determined to be an excessive number of false alarms at any given location.
4. An alarm system shall be deemed a nuisance alarm and a public nuisance if such an alarm system has been intentionally activated at least once to summon the police to an incident for which the alarm system was not intended. This may include, but not limited to, a robbery alarm being intentionally activated for an incident which is not a robbery, or an alarm which is intentionally activated merely to see what police response would result.
5. An alarm system shall be deemed a nuisance alarm and a public nuisance if, upon request of the police department, the responsible party for such a system refuses to provide a list of persons to be contacted should the alarm be activated, or upon request of the police department, refuses to respond to the site of the alarm.
B. No Response Status.
1. If an alarm system has fallen into the category of a nuisance alarm as defined in subsection A of this section, the chief of police may, upon the next activation of that alarm, send a notice of no response to the owner or person responsible for the nuisance alarm. This notice shall indicate that the police department shall not respond to future activations of the nuisance alarm unless a violation of the law is personally reported to the department by a witness at the scene of the alarm.
2. The no response status shall remain in effect until such time that the owner or person responsible for the nuisance alarm has provided adequate evidence to the chief of police that the problems causing the alarm to become a nuisance have been satisfactorily corrected.
(Ord. 93 § 1 (part), 1993: Ord. 3 § 1 (part), 1991: prior code § 11.60.013)