Burglar Alarm Sellers Hound Newly Robbed Homeowners

First came the fear. Armed bandits slipped through an open bedroom window in the night and attacked her neighbors with a stun gun, stealing jewelry, cash and the family car.

The next morning, the telephone calls started. Then came knocks on the door.

Already terrified by a recent wave of home robberies in her Orange County neighborhood, Mrs. J. and her husband hunkered down for a siege of burglar alarm peddlers.

“You’re just so plagued with telephone calls,” said the elderly Villa Park homemaker, who spoke on condition that her name not be used. “It was a bit of pressure. Scare tactics. They started after us.” Her husband fielded calls from 10 different firms the first day. More followed in the week after.

Home and commercial security systems are a booming $7-billion industry in this country, with an estimated 10% to 15% of the business concentrated in California, according to industry trade groups.

But one aspect of the business--hustling for clients in neighborhoods suffering a crime wave--raises questions of ethical conduct.

Although many of Orange County’s more than 140 security alarm companies acknowledge that such aggressive sales practices are not uncommon, the tactics officially are frowned on as bad for business. Crime waves are rare and an industry that relies on word of mouth for most of its business only harms itself by leaving bad impressions with potential customers, company representatives say.

Still, the practice continues. Sales people learn of a crime from radio scanners, police blotters, neighborhood word of mouth and, most often, press accounts.

When the “stun-gun bandits” recently terrorized Villa Park and Lemon Heights, scores of security firms were quickly on the telephones and walking the streets. Traumatized residents in the up-scale area were inundated by solicitors hawking home security systems that average about $2,500 and can run as much as $5,000.

“We will nail areas, if you want to call it that,” said Greg Rankin, marketing manager for Westec Security Inc. in Irvine. “We go into areas that have had a crime. Frankly, it’s an opportunity--a heightened level of fear among people looking for a way to protect themselves.”

Janet Adams, who lives next door to one of the Villa Park victims, said she felt safe during the crime spree because she already had an alarm system.

She found the telephone solicitations “hysterical” at first.

“We got a lot of calls at the time,” Adams said. “The neighborhood joke was that (one alarm company) hired the robbers, because he got so much business here. Within a week, he had done four or five houses on this block.”

Opening Pitch

The pitch over the telephone invariably began: “I’ve heard you had some disturbing problems in your neighborhood and I’d like to help you,” Adams said.

“Unfortunately, the business we’re in benefits from crime,” said Barry Brideau, president of Anaheim-based Beam Alarm Corp. “But if there’s more opportunity in an area, you’re crazy not to check it out. It is a market opportunity.

“We saw that with the Night Stalker. That was a bonanza.”

Brideau said he made several telephone solicitation calls to Villa Park when the bandits first struck but gave up when he found the area saturated by his competitors.

“They infested it like a plague,” Brideau said. “I look at this business as doing a service, like insurance. But if people have been contacted 15 times, that’s a nuisance. At that point, I don’t think I’m doing them a service.”

Different Approaches

Home protection systems vary in complexity from a dead bolt on the front door to alarms that connect to the security firm’s headquarters or to the local police. Typically the triggers are door mats, light sensors or electrical connections broken when a door or window is opened.

In California, alarm system companies are licensed by the state and their conduct is bound by the Business and Professions Code. Unhappy customers can lodge complaints with the state Department of Consumer Affairs

People purchasing a system can contact the department’s Bureau of Collection and Investigative Services in Sacramento to find out whether a firm has complaints lodged against it, Noreene DeKoning said.

Rankin, Brideau and others in the industry emphasize that most security alarm business comes from referrals. Happy clients tell their friends about the firm. Reputable companies, whose livelihood rests in large part on their reputations, secure little business from working in neighborhoods that have been hit by criminals, industry officials said. After all, there aren’t that many crime waves to capitalize on.

Wide Open Market

Only 8% to 10% of American homes have burglar alarms, said Donna Gentry, executive director of the Security Equipment Industry Assn., an industry wholesale trade group. That leaves a wide open market, she said.

“If you’re looking at 90% of the market as available and then wait for areas having a crime problem, then you’re not going after the market,” she said. “Most of the companies we deal with are professionals and wouldn’t do that.”

The National Burglar and Fire Alarm Assn., an industry retail trade group, requires its 3,000 member firms to abide by an eight-point code of ethics. The code does not explicitly address what one salesman candidly described as “our version of ambulance-chasing.” It does, however, call on members to “maintain a wholly professional attitude towards those we serve.”

Asked whether that code provision would restrict its members from soliciting newly robbed clients, association spokeswoman Pamela DeSanto in Washington said, “I don’t know the answer to that.” Reflecting for a moment on the practice, she finally said: “That sounds sort of tough.”