Surety Visual Alarm Verification is now available
Visual (video) verification of alarms is now available to all Surety customers who have cameras and the Surety Complete plan with professional monitoring.
This important feature greatly enhances our ability to dispatch the police for you when an alarm occurs. It speeds up police dispatch when a camera shows a burglary is in progress and helps reduce false alarms by providing valuable information to both the professional monitoring agent and you when it’s not obvious on camera that a break-in has occurred.
Visual verification is a valuable feature for most alarms system but some police departments, in an effort to avoid dispatching officers on false alarms, will not dispatch at all unless the break-in has been verified visually. If you live in one of these areas then enabling and using visual verifications is vital.
Visual verification is optional and is disabled by default. It can be enabled for your system using the system manager.
How does Surety Visual Alarm Verification work?
When an intrusion alarm occurs, the first thing we do is look at cameras or image sensors that you have enabled for visual verification.
- If we see on camera that a break-in has obviously occurred then we dispatch the police immediately, before we call your emergency contact list. We then call your contact list and notify you.
- If we see activity but it’s unclear whether it’s a break-in then we call your contact list but we don’t call your on-premise land line phone number or use two-way voice. Instead, we skip directly to your off-premise or cellular phone numbers because we’re trying to determine whether the person we see on camera is an intruder.
- If we don’t see any activity then we call your contact list, just like we would without visual verification, but we’re able to inform you that we didn’t see any activity on camera to help you decide whether you want the police dispatched.
Visual verification is an important step forward in improving security alarm police dispatch and we’re excited to make it available! We highly encourage you to use it, especially if you live in an area that requires alarm verification for police dispatch.