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Abstract. The alarm industry has been estimated at 8‐11 billion dollars in 1993. There are approximately 17 million alarms installed nationwide. The annual growth of installations has been 8 percent over the last five years. At the same time, the number of false activations per system is 1.1 to 1.4 per year, with 20 to 30 percent of police manpower devoted to false activations. 94‐98 percent of all activations are false. Indeed, false activations pose a severe problem for local police departments which respond with stiff fines for false activations and reduced response to alarm activations in general which are not high risk such as jewelry stores, banks or government facilities. This paper identifies the social benefits and costs which result from burglar and fire alarms in a given community. Included benefits are reduced burglary, assault, and rape incidents as well as fewer incidents of fire which are detected early and controlled. Costs include police response to alarms, costs of installation and monthly monitoring fees. The‐results demonstrate that, indeed, burglar and fire alarms provide a net social benefit to the locality. The paper suggests that charges for false alarms should be allocated directly to the police which service them. Such users' fee method will improve resource allocation, and prevent a situation where alarms become useless.

The "journey to crime," or the study of the distance between an offender's residence and offense site, has been a subject of study within criminology for many years. Implications arising from such research touches the majority of criminological theories. An overriding conclusion from this line of research is that most crimes occur in relatively close proximity to the home of the offender. Termed the distance‐decay function, a plot of the number of crimes that an offender commits decreases with increasing distance from the offender's residence. In a recent paper, Van Koppen and De Keijser raise the concern that inferring individual distance decay from aggregate‐level data may be inappropriate. They assert that previous research reporting aggregated distance‐decay functions conceals individual variations in the ranges of operation, which leads them to conclude that the distance‐decay function is an artifact. We do not question the claim that researchers should not make inferences about individual behavior with data collected at the aggregate level. However, Van Koppen and De Keijser's analysis raises four important issues concerning (1) the interpretation of the ecological fallacy, (2) the assumption of linearity in offender movements, (3) the interpretation of geographic work on profiling, and (4) the assumption of random target selection within a delimited range of operation. Using both simulated and nonsimulated data, we present evidence that reaches vastly different conclusions from those reached by Van Koppen and De Keijser. The theoretical implications of our analyses and possibilities for future research are addressed.