One of the items on the agenda of Wednesday’s session of the Bolesławiec City Council was a “report on the state of public order and safety in 2024,” presented by the commanders of the uniformed services. Senior Brigadier Andrzej Śliwowski, district commander of the State Fire Service in Bolesławiec, was asked about the high number of false alarms (there were as many as 61 last year) and explained:

As far as false alarms are concerned, they fall into three categories. The first are malicious alarms, meaning deliberate deception. The second are related to detection systems, that is, monitoring systems. We have more and more facilities both in the district and in the city connected to our monitoring and fire detection systems. The third category consists of alarms raised in good faith.

He immediately added: – There are the fewest malicious alarms; they do occur sometimes, but only sporadically. These are isolated cases. Obviously, if we have clear evidence that someone deliberately misled us, we refer the matter to the police. Last year, we submitted requests to the police several times. I know that in at least one or two cases, the perpetrators were identified and the cases were taken to court.

Such situations occurred, for example, yesterday. And there were as many as two of them. Commander A. Śliwowski stressed that they may not have been false alarms, but they were classified as unjustified calls to open an apartment:

For example: there were two men drinking alcohol together, and one of them went to sleep. The other, concerned, notified us so that we could open the apartment. When we arrived, it turned out that the intervention was completely unjustified. The person was fined at the scene. Yesterday we had two such interventions, and there were also several last year.

As we established, both people who made the reports were fined PLN 500.

Reports made in good faith

Most reports subsequently recorded as false alarms are those made in good faith. For example, someone used deodorant near a detector and triggered it. Someone else panicked when the device mentioned above “demanded” that its battery be replaced.

Accidental activation of detectors occurs in places such as hotels, shopping centers and industrial plants, for example during renovation work involving dust and debris. The commander stressed that units in large cities, such as Wrocław, record as many as 300 false reports a year.

He added:

I have a worrying conclusion: we are beginning to rely too heavily on technology and trust all the solutions it offers us. Unfortunately, one manufacturer—I will not say which—of mobile devices, or smartphones, introduced a service whereby, when the device falls from a height or hits something, it is interpreted as an accident. We are alerted without the device owner’s knowledge. This year we have had at least four interventions triggered by a mobile device: we arrive, and the owner was not even aware that their falling phone had set off an alarm.

He added: – Unfortunately, this is a problem.

Worse still, none of the situations in which a smartphone notified the emergency services “on its own” turned out to be genuine. Not a single device owner needed help.