Just ran the math on false alarm fines in my city and it floored me

I was going through my old invoices last night from a job in Portland and decided to look up the city's false alarm fee schedule. Turns out if you get 3 false alarms in a year it's $150 each. 4 or more jumps to $500 a pop. I had a customer last spring who got hit with 6 false alarms because their motion sensor was picking up a cat. Total fines were over $2500 in one year. That's more than the cost of replacing every sensor in their house. Has anyone else seen fines climb that fast in their area?

2 comments

2 Comments

faith_perez19d ago

Wow, that's honestly wild. I used to kind of roll my eyes at false alarm fines, thinking people should just be more careful. But seeing it broken down like that, with a cat triggering six alarms and costing more than new sensors, that really changes my perspective. It's insane that a city would punish someone that hard for a faulty device they didn't even know was broken. I'm way more sympathetic now to people getting hit with those fees.

noahward19d ago

That cat story got me thinking about how everything in modern life is set up to punish people for stuff they can't really control. I live in an apartment where the building installed those cheap smart locks that freak out if you jiggle the handle wrong, and they charged me $75 for a lockout when the battery died at 2am. It's the same deal with parking tickets when snow covers the signs, or late fees on bills when the payment portal goes down. The system just assumes you're being careless when really you're dealing with broken sensors and bad design that someone else decided was good enough. Makes you wonder how many of these fines are just built into the budget as expected revenue rather than actual deterrents.