Alarm and police: the procedure, step by step

How the signal travels from sensor to centre, and the ways of verifying it, are covered in the guide to alarms and the alarm receiving centre. This guide is about what someone decides after the signal, and in what order:

1. Verify: footage from the zone’s camera, a second zone triggering, a call to the keyholder with a confirmation password.
2. Decide: a real break-in, a person in danger, a fault or a user error?
3. Call the police: when there are signs of a real event, by the role the procedure names.
4. Respond on site: a guard or patrol and the keyholder, with an agreed meeting point.
5. Close: report, secure the site, re-arm, find the cause.

A panic signal or any sign that someone is in danger does not wait for verification: the call for help is made at once. Verification exists to filter out mistakes, not to slow down real events.

100 is the Hellenic Police line («Άμεση Δράση», Immediate Response) for immediate police intervention in every prefecture, around the clock. 112 is the single European emergency number, free of charge, and alerts all the services that need to be involved at once — useful when a break-in also involves an injury or a fire.

• Call at once: a person seen inside, the sound of breaking glass, a panic signal, internal zones triggering in sequence, a guard who sees a forced entrance.
• Verify first: a single zone with no image, a zone with a known history of faults, a signal right after the shop closes.
• Never close without a check: if verification gives no clear picture, a person checks the site from outside before the event is written off as a false alarm.

Write into the procedure who calls the police: the centre’s operator, the guard or the keyholder. Two calls about the same event cause confusion; no call at all, because each thought the other had made it, is worse.

1. Where: the exact address, the entrance to approach from, a landmark if the site is outside town.
2. What: which zone or camera, what was seen, when. “We can see two people in the rear storeroom”, not “the alarm is going off”.
3. Who is inside: whether staff, cleaners or a guard may be on the premises.
4. Who from your side: the response guard and the keyholder — where they will wait, how to recognise them, how soon they arrive.
5. Contact: a phone number that answers and updates the police if anything changes.

Note the time of the call and what you were told. You will need it for the incident report, which also explains how to hand an incident over to the police.

• An ordered list: two or three names, mobiles that answer at night, and someone responsible for updating it when people leave or change numbers.
• Confirmation password: a password that tells the real keyholder apart from whoever answers the phone, and a duress word if you use one.
• Keys and codes: who holds them, where they are kept, and who hands them to the response guard if that is agreed.
• Their own safety: the keyholder does not go alone into a site with signs of a break-in; they wait for the guard or the police at the meeting point.
• Decisions afterwards: re-arming, a temporary fix for a forced door, calling a technician, informing the insurer.

The most common failure is not technical: it is a contact list with someone who left the company a year ago. Check the list every time staff change.

A security guard is not the police. Their value at an alarm is being eyes on site and knowing the premises. The post orders should spell it out:

• Does: approaches carefully, walks the outside, checks doors, windows, shutters and fencing from a safe distance.
• Does: reports to the centre straight away what they see — an open entrance, broken glass, a vehicle, people — as a description, not a guess.
• Does: waits for the police in a visible spot, gives them the picture of the site and shows them entrances and routes.
• Does: leaves the scene as it is, touches no traces, and logs times and observations.
• Does not: go alone into a site with signs of a break-in, give chase or confront anyone.

A guard responding alone at night needs protection too: constant contact with the centre and clear limits. See the guide to lone guard safety, and for whether a fixed post or a patrol fits you, static guarding vs mobile patrols. Remote guarding can give a picture before a person arrives, but does not replace them.

1. Secure: if an entrance was forced, the site is not left open; someone stays until it is repaired or temporarily covered.
2. Re-arm: only once the site has been checked, on the keyholder’s decision, with the centre told which zones will not arm.
3. Camera footage: the relevant clip is set aside, because routine deletion will not wait; see how long footage is kept.
4. Report: signal, verification, calls with times, what was found, who came, when it closed.
5. Cause: a break-in, user error, a fault or a badly placed sensor. A false alarm that goes unexplained will go off again.

For the decisions of the first hour, when an event turns into a crisis, see the first 10 minutes of a crisis. At OVIT, the signal, the guard’s actions and the report sit in the same picture on the Guardly platform, and a real person answers at the operations desk.