Why are car alarms legal?

Factual Questions
1

Why are car alarms legal? Presumably if I stood out on the street at 3 a.m. and honked an airhorn for twenty minutes, I could get some sort of citation for disturbing the peace. So why is it okay that an alarm does it?

They don’t alert the owner–they just make noise. I can’t remember ever seeing a car owner come to see why their alarm was going off. I can’t remember the last time I really looked around or did anything about an alarm going off. It seems like all they do is create a loud nuisance.

So why are they legal?

2

Because they haven’t been outlawed where you live yet.

Helpful primer on how laws get made.

3

Helpful primer on tautology

4

My point being: the exact same thing (making loud noise at an inconvenient time for no apparent reason) is illegal in one case, yet legal in another. So what’s the distinction?

5

I can’t remember not seeing the owner rush out and turn it off.

6

It’s not for no apparent reason. It’s theoretically because someone broke into your car. If you stood outside at 3 AM and screamed at the top of your lungs, “I’ve just been robbed” over and over, and you had actually been robbed, I don’t think the police would arrest you for disturbing the peace. Same thing with car alarms.

7

Indeed. The cimre here is the person breaking into your car, not you for shouting “thief!”

There’s certainly an argument to be made against over-sensitive alarms reacting to passers-by. But the concept of an alarm? Not really.

8

Greetings. I am an earthling, and on my planet most of the time no one comes to turn off the alarm. What planet are you from?

Oddly enough, most of the time, there is no theft in progress, either, which sort of accounts for the owner’s lack of interest.

Tris

9

After how long? IMO, even thirty seconds is too damn long, and I’ve many times heard the things going off for five, ten, fifteen, twenty minutes at a time. My cite is living in a city (and, for one semester in college, living across from a parking structure).

ETA: **Triskadecamus **nailed it.

Car alarms don’t go off when the car has been robbed. They go off when someone passes too close to the car, someone touches the car, someone brushes the car, an animal walks past and farts, lightning strikes nearby resulting in a particularly loud peal of thunder, etc. (The alarm that woke me up before 6:30 this morning didn’t appear to be going off for any reason at all–it was on and off for at least twenty minutes, and I stood and watched it from my balcony for a while and saw nothing nearby.) If the idea is to alert the owner of the car, why don’t the alarms instead involve transmitters that play a screechingly loud sound inside the owner’s home, or from their keychain? (Gee, 'cause then people would actually have to be bothered by their own alarms at all hours instead of bothering everyone else.)

If I stand in the middle of the street screaming I’d been robbed everyone time someone bumped into me, you can’t tell me I wouldn’t get into trouble for it.

10

And it can be illegal.

At least in my neighborhood, the police have come out at 3am and given car owners a warning that “this is the third time in a week that your neighbors have called in about a false alarm from your car – get it fixed, or next time we will charge you with disturbing the peace.” We’ve even had them issue a ‘fix-it ticket’, where you have 15 days to bring a repair receipt from a mechanic to show at the police station.

Don’t know if they would actually arrest them for disturbing the peace – nobody has yet refused to get their car alarm fixed (or just disconnected) after the warning.

11

My objection, I think, is to (a) the oversensitivity of the alarms and (b) the fact that they’re an automated broadcast (i.e., not initiated by a human being observing the scene) to the world at large.

ETA:

t-bonham@scc.net, good to know. I did write down the plate of the car in question, along with a description, so when I get home I’ll call the non-emergency police number to see if I can report it.

12

Did you contact the police about the disturbance of the peace, and then press charges for same against the owner of the car? It may be that it is against the law, but unless someone reports it how would the officer(s) know to issue a citation?

13

I think you meant "Car alarms don’t go off ONLY when the car has been robbed (or broken into). Yes, there are an enormous number of false alarms, but that doesn’t mean the alarm isn’t also serving its primary purpose.

Both your objections are certainly valid ones, but it’s a stretch to say that legislators will pass a law that because car alarms are loud, automated, and can be triggered falsely, all car alarms are illegal. Fire alarms can do the same thing. Better to have it on a case by case basis as t-bonham said above - you get too many false alarms in a short period, you get fined.

14

Actually, I think it does mean that the alarm isn’t also serving its primary purpose. When was the last time an alarm went off and you went over to see what was happening? No one cares about car alarms because so many of them go off for no reason at all.

And yes, I do mean the car alarm doesn’t go off when the car is being broken into. The breaking-in is not the defining factor in when the alarm goes off. The two things may coincide, but there are many (many, many, many) times that the alarms go off when no theft is taking place, and I’m sure there are ways to steal a car that won’t trigger the alarm.

You also have to look at the total effect; I’m sure making the car explode into flames all over the outside of it whenever anyone came within a six-inch radius would also prevent theft. But I doubt *that *would be legal. Why can’t car alarms be made to alert the owner instead of the general public? It would certainly give people a good incentive to set the sensitivity to a reasonable level if they were the only ones being disturbed by a false alarm. It would also ensure that the owner actually knew when the car was potentially being broken into.

I’d say it’s not remotely the same thing. You have to try pretty hard to set off a fire alarm falsely–for instance, by physically triggering a designated alarm point or by throwing something at a sprinkler. Fire alarms also do not disturb the general public; the fire alarm going off in my building will not affect the house across the street. Fire alarms also usually (always?) alert the fire department, and there are pretty stiff fines for setting them off frivolously. Imagine if the police department was alerted and required to respond every time a car alarm went off!

ETA:

@Dr. Drake: No, I haven’t reported it yet, but I wrote down the info for the car this morning before stumbling back to bed, and I was planning on calling it in when I got home. Also, my question is about the *general *legality of car alarms, seeing as they can be such a huge public nuisance.

15

The last few cars I’ve owned had built-in alarms. The big problem is that so few people bother to read the instructions for the thing, how to turn it on and off, which features you want on or off, how to control the sensitivity, etc. The same dimbulbs never read their owners manual at all.

I have never, ever, had the alarm go off, except one time in Orlando when the wind was blowing so hard, it rocked the car enough to set it off. It was across the street, but within a few minutes I got my car keys, pressed the alarm button and turned it off.

The cars I have owned recently are quite valuable, and the latest ones have really sophisticated alarm systems. The main deterrent is that if a thief tries to break in, when the alarm goes off he will likely skedaddle. Most thieves know which cars have very secure alarms, and they don’t bother with them, as there are so many cars parked everywhere that are not even locked. Many of these have the keys under the seat or behind the visor, or, believe it or not, right in the ignition.

In most case, they figure it is so easy to just stroll through a parking lot and find one of these, rather than risk the problem of breaking into a car with a secure alarm. And, of course, if a really sharp, experienced car thief wants a car, he can get it one way or another, without being bothered about the alarm.

So, I know what you mean by incessant alarms blasting away, but it is the price we have to pay to try to protect our property.

Funny thing happened a a while ago as I was going into the post office. An old guy got out of a new Buick, shut the door and the alarm and horn started off. He was walking toward the post office when another guy, thinking he might be deaf, told him his car alarm was blasting. The old guy said, “Yeah, I know. God, I wish i knew how to turn it off.”

I’m still thinking it probably goes off every time he parks the thing.

16

When I bought my car, it had the sensitivity part of the alarm set to on. I told them that I didn’t want that, so they reset it to off. It does however sound the alarm when anything on the car is opened. No more sounding off “when someone passes too close to the car, someone touches the car, someone brushes the car, an animal walks past and farts, lightning strikes nearby resulting in a particularly loud peal of thunder, etc.”:smiley:

17

See, now, that I could get behind–an alarm that only goes off when, say, a window is broken or some part of the car is physically opened. Then you at least know that the integrity of the car has in some way been compromised, and if a door or the trunk is opened, then the owner will be there to shut it off immediately for a false alarm (or it’s a legitimate alarm). So why isn’t that required to be the standard, instead of simply another option?

ETA:

Oh, and KlondikeGeoff, I’m so happy to see you willing to dictate the price *I *must pay to protect *your *property.

18

My ongoing experience with a neighbor’s too-sensitive alarm has been maddening to say the least. Any time a heavy vehicle, a motorcycle with loud exhaust, or even a car with a mega-bass stereo goes by, it sets off the 30-second alarm cycle. Depending on where he’s parked, the alarm sounds 10-15 times a day. And the owner NEVER comes out to check on it.

I don’t know who the owner is; he/she lives in one of the apartment buildings on my street. Multiple polite notes had no effect. Multiple no-so-polite notes had no effect. Calls to the police don’t work because the alarm resets before they show up. They won’t ticket a vehicle unless the alarm is going off in the presence of an officer, and they won’t contact the owner on the basis of a neighbor’s complaint.

It’s gotten better lately; I think he found an off-street parking spot somewhere. But man, that damn alarm had me ready to commit some kind of (minor) vehicular vandalism–and I am not that kind of person at all.

19

Could you get them out there, and then attempt to set it off without damaging the car? (E.g., test ahead of time that you could set the alarm off by putting your own car–or a friend’s–next to the offender with your bass cranked?)

20

Oh, I know I could set the alarm off without damaging the car…it went off when I put a note on the windshield and dropped the wiper blade on it.