In California’s richest town, the home alarms are usually false. But the cost is very real 13%
By Lucy Hodgman19%
8/2/2026, 4:00:00 AM
Topics: City Council, Atherton Police Department, Ebay, Golden State Warriors, Steven Mcculley, Rick Degolia, Jan Koum, Meg Whitman, Stephen Curry, Daniel Larsen, California, Bay Area, Atherton, San Francisco, Fremont, Shanghai, Whatsapp, Palo Alto, Law And Government, Public Safety, Security Products And Services, Home And Garden, Home Safety And Security, Crime, Home Security, Peninsula
BS Summary: This article contains 19 faulty reasoning types, including Confirmation Bias, Post Hoc (False Cause), and Appeal to Authority, with Biased Writer Voice as the most egregious example at 13.3% saturation with 117 hits. Analysis detected 565 faulty-reasoning hits from 878 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 24.4% and a BS Rank of 13% (22,659 of 25,925 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 87.40% of the article peer group.
Every year, more than a thousand home security systems go off in the ultrawealthy Bay Area suburb of Atherton.
Almost all of them are false alarms.
At a City Council meeting this spring, Atherton Police Chief Steven McCulley said his department spends about $70,000 a year responding to residential alarms, sending pairs of officers out to the palatial homes of California’s wealthiest town.
An estimated 99% of the time, he said, nothing is amiss when they get there.
The actual share of false alarms is likely even higher.
Just two of the 1,408 residential alarms the Atherton Police Department processed in 2024 were designated “valid alarms with crimes in progress,” according to the department’s annual report.
The year before, there was only one.
Atherton’s false alarm problem is well known to local officials, who have tried for years to offset some of the costs by fining residents for frequent false alarms.
More recently, the town has narrowed its focus to roughly a dozen of the most chronic offenders.
But so far, the penalties have done little to change behavior — a reflection not just of the town’s extraordinary wealth, but also of its unusual arrangement with a police force that provides a level of service rarely found elsewhere.
It’s not hard to set off a residential alarm.
A pet can trigger one, as can a window left ajar or even wood swelling as the weather changes.
San Francisco charges a penalty after residents’ second false alarms in a year, and Palo Alto charges after their third.
In 2005, a deluge of false alarm calls drove Fremont’s police department to stop responding to alarms without a verified burglary.
The problem has driven most cities to rely on third-party monitoring companies to verify alarms before they’re forwarded to police.
Not Atherton.
The police department encourages the town’s roughly 7,000 residents — who reportedly include Golden State Warriors superstar Stephen Curry, former eBay CEO Meg Whitman and WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum — to register their alarm systems directly with the police department.
“Our police department, unlike probably any other police department that I’m aware of, directly contracts with residents to monitor their alarm,” said Vice Mayor Rick DeGolia.
He called it a “very good community service,” albeit an expensive one.
It’s easier for police to manage that responsibility in Atherton because the town is almost entirely residential, he said, giving officers more time to spend securing private homes.
Crime in the town is also relatively uncommon, with 19 burglaries in 2025 and just one robbery.
The department directly monitors about 1,500 home security systems, the majority of the town’s roughly 2,500 residences, according to McCulley, the police chief.
But he said the “vast majority” of the remaining thousand homes still have alarm systems that eventually connect with the department’s dispatch center.
All told, after some are called off, the department investigates about 900 alarms annually, he said, dispatching at least two officers to spend between 30 and 45 minutes securing each home.
The department has tried to recoup some of the costs by charging chronic offenders $400 for their fourth false alarm in a calendar year, increasing up to $600 after subsequent false alarms.
The town updated that fee schedule in 2018, but the revised penalties have still made only a small dent in the service’s total cost.
Data from the department shows that it issued 20 fees last year, billing a total of $9,800 and collecting only $2,600 — less than 4% of the annual $70,000 expense.
There’s been “no effort to collect those fines,” McCulley said, making past enforcement efforts “kind of meaningless.”
And whether residents pay the bills or not, they’ve had little impact on the number of false alarm calls — perhaps in part because the fees are a pittance compared to Atherton’s $646,000 mean household income.
“They just don’t pay attention,” Vice Mayor DeGolia said.
“There’s quite a number of residents who are only here a few weeks a year.
I’m here all the time, but my next-door neighbors live in Shanghai, and they’re here three months a year or three weeks a year.
People just totally ignore it.”
McCulley estimated this spring that many of the false alarms come from the homes of “10 to 12 residents that we would deem chronic.”
The department has recently shifted its efforts to work with these residents more directly, police Cmdr.
Daniel Larsen said in an interview.
It’s part of the department’s broader public education effort around the false alarms, including a push for residents to give the department up-to-date contact information and directions into their homes, which are often heavily gated.
Police have also encouraged residents to alert the department to potential alarm triggers, like scheduled landscapers or construction workers, before police initiate a full response.
The department still sees value in monitoring the alarms itself, Larsen said, despite the cost.
Atherton has had burglary issues in the past, he explained, and the current system allows for a much faster police response without the middleman of alarm companies.
“If we directly monitor the alarm, it gives us a much faster response,” Larsen said.
“It’s just a free service that we offer.”
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