Car Alarms Do Little But Annoy City Folk, According to Panel

Car Alarms Do Little But Annoy City Folk, According to Panel

They honk, they beep, they blare and screech like sirens on emergency vehicles. But one thing car alarms don’t do is deter crime, according to panelists at a town meeting hosted by Fordham on March 13.

Panelists at the forum titled “Car Security in New York City” shared their experiences with car alarms as well as research that demonstrates how the devices do more harm than good.

“There are 25,000 people per square mile in Manhattan. When a car alarm goes off, it affects a lot of people,” said Steven Brautigam, J.D., who published a 1994 report about car alarms in the Columbia Journal of Environmental Law.

According to a recently released report by Transportation Alternatives, a local advocacy group for pedestrians and cyclists, the noise produced by car alarms is louder than an ascending airplane. It boosts stress hormones and has been linked to cardiovascular disease, gastrointestinal illnesses and psychological problems.

Approximately 80 percent of the 97,000 calls to the city’s quality of life hotline last year were related to car alarms. According to the 2000 U.S. Census, traffic noise and car alarms are more of a concern to residents than crime; they are the primary reasons why families leave New York City.

The city is filled with exciting sounds, such as screaming fans at Yankee Stadium, squealing children at the Thanksgiving Day parade and the cheering masses in Times Square on New Year’s Eve, said Arline Bronzaft, Ph.D., a member of the New York City Mayor’s Task Force on Noise.

“We have wonderful sounds and we’re not trying to silence them,” Bronzaft said. “But when you come home, as a reasonable person you expect your home to provide a quiet environment.”

Not only are alarms unpopular, they are also ineffective, according to panelists. A 1997 analysis of insurance-claims data found that cars with alarms showed “no overall reduction in theft losses compared to cars without alarms.” Authorities estimate that 95 to 99 percent of alarms are false, according to the Transportation Alternatives report titled “Alarmingly Useless: The Case for Banning Car Alarms in New York City.”

Harold Takooshian, Ph.D., an associate professor of psychology at Fordham, has conducted research on the subject and found that most people ignore car alarms.

“Widespread public hostility toward car alarms seems to cut across demographic groups,” said Takooshian, who organized the town meeting. “[People annoyed by the alarms displace] their anger from the criminal onto the car owner.”

This is not the first time car alarms have drawn such ire. In the early 1990s, there was a movement to ban car alarms in New York City. However, the City Council abandoned the idea because it would deny residents their insurance discount. Insurance companies in New York State offer car owners a discount on vehicles that have alarms. According to the current code, which was amended in 1992, car alarms are not permitted to ring longer than three minutes.

The panelists offered several possible solutions to the car alarm problem, including handing out tickets to car owners who violate the city’s three-minute alarm rule and encouraging alternatives such as pager car alarms and locator devices that can track a stolen car’s movement. These locators have dramatically decreased thefts in cities such as Los Angeles, where they led police to bust 53 chop shops—places where stolen cars are stripped of salable parts.

The forum was sponsored by the Fordham University Psychological Association, the New York Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, Psi Phi and the Fordham Institute.

—Michele Snipe