Short answer: UK police requirements for alarm systems devote their most exacting section not to equipment but to people — a minimum of two named keyholders, a keysafe explicitly ruled out as a substitute, transport at all hours, access to all relevant parts of the premises, attendance within 20 minutes of notification, mandatory cover for sickness and holiday, and a withdrawal of police response after two failures to attend in a rolling year. If you run a phone or any other camera at home, none of it binds you and all of it is worth stealing, because it is the only written specification of the half of the problem that no product has a settings screen for.
The half you can configure, and the half you cannot
If you have ever set up a camera at home — a bought one, or an old handset in a window — you will recognise the shape of the decisions. Which device. Which corner of which room. How long recordings should survive. Whether capture keeps going when the screen goes dark. Whether the live view works when you are not on the same network.
Every one of those is a real question, every one is answerable in an afternoon, and every one is about the sensing half of the arrangement.
I write software on that half, so I know exactly how much attention it gets. Everything I can put in a release note lives there.
Recently I went looking for how the professional end of this problem is specified, expecting equipment standards. What I found instead was a document that spends its most exacting language on the other half entirely.
The document
It is the National Police Chiefs' Council's Revised Police Operational Advice and Security Industry Requirements for Response to Security Systems (March 2024). It sets out what a security system has to satisfy before a UK police force will attach a police response to its activations.
Much of it is what you would expect: standards the equipment must meet, thresholds for how often a system may raise a false call, a route back after response has been withdrawn.
Then section 2.8 arrives, and stops being about equipment at all.
It is UK-specific. It does not describe police practice anywhere else, and nothing below should be read as a claim about how any other force operates. What travels is not the jurisdiction — it is the fact that somebody was finally made to write this half down.
2.8.1 — redundancy, and the shortcut it closes
"All premises with Type A Systems shall have at least 2 keyholders, details of whom will be maintained by the monitoring centre. The provision of a keysafe type device is not an acceptable alternative."
Two things are happening in those two sentences.
The first is a minimum of two, held by the monitoring centre rather than by the police — the clause is explicit that "the maintenance of keyholders records is the responsibility of the monitoring centre, not the police."
The second is more interesting, and it is the sentence I keep coming back to. A keysafe — a lockbox on the wall with a key in it — is the obvious way to make one person's availability stop mattering, and it is ruled out in writing.
Read as a design decision, it is a statement that a passive credential store does not satisfy a requirement for a decision-maker. A box can grant access. It cannot look at anything, and it cannot decide anything.
2.8.1 continued — the person, specified
The same clause goes on to specify the human being in unusual detail. Keyholders shall be:
- trained to operate the alarm
- contactable by telephone
- in possession of "adequate means of transport to attend the premises at all hours"
- given "access to all relevant parts of the premises"
- "able to attend within 20 minutes of being notified"
Note what is being defended against in each line. Untrained: someone who arrives and cannot silence or interrogate the system. Uncontactable: someone who is nominally available and cannot be reached. No transport at all hours: someone who is available at 2pm on a weekday. No access to all relevant parts: someone who can get through the front door and not into the room the activation came from. No time bound: someone who will get there eventually.
Every one of those is a failure mode that a household discovers the hard way, one at a time.
2.8.2 — the fortnight you are away
"If a keyholder is not available for any reason (e.g. sickness, holiday) a replacement must be provided to cover for any keyholder unavailability."
This is the clause that converts "two names" from a nicety into a live requirement. Redundancy that lapses the moment one person goes abroad is not redundancy; it is a single point of failure with a spare listed next to it.
The standard does not hope the case away. It names sickness and holiday specifically and makes cover mandatory.
2.8.5 — a signal is never sufficient authority
"Requests for police response should only come from the monitoring centres. Keyholders should not contact the police asking for their attendance unless they have arrived at the protected premises and there is a crime in progress or a crime has been committed."
For anyone who has built alerting, this reads as an escalation policy, and a strict one. The alert cannot escalate itself. A human has to be physically at the site and has to have seen something before the request goes up.
It is also, incidentally, a restraint worth noticing on its own terms: nobody is dispatched to anybody's door on the strength of a picture alone.
2.8.6 — and attendance is not open-ended
"Due to operational demands, responding officers may not always be able to remain at the premises and wait for the keyholder if there is no obvious sign of a criminal offence."
The response has a duration, and it is not guaranteed to outlast your journey.
2.8.4 — the clause that ought to be uncomfortable
"Failure of keyholders to attend when requested on 2 occasions in a rolling 12 month period may result in the withdrawal of police response for a 3 month period."
That is a sanction aimed at a person, with a counter attached to it.
Twice in twelve months, and the equipment is unchanged, fully functional, compliant in every respect — and no longer qualifies. Nothing about the system degraded. The staffing did.
Stealing it for a house
None of this binds a household with a handset in a window, and there is no monitoring centre in the loop. But the standard has already done the thinking on the half that products do not cover, and the transfer is nearly direct.
1. Write down a second name. Not who could be called — who has actually been asked. The first name is almost always whoever set the thing up, which means it is almost always you, which means the arrangement is at its weakest precisely when you are furthest away.
2. Check that they can get in. Willingness is not access. Someone who has to wait for you to arrive with a key has not shortened anything. (And note the standard's position on solving this with a lockbox rather than a person.)
3. Agree a brief in advance — for the boring case. The standard's version is that keyholders attend first and escalate only on what they find. Your version is the conversation nobody has: what would you like this person to do when they arrive and there is nothing obviously wrong? That is the overwhelmingly likely outcome and the one nobody plans for.
4. Cover the cover. If both names are away the same fortnight — which for households that travel together is most fortnights — you have one name, seasonally.
None of the four is a purchase. None of them is a feature. That is precisely why nothing you buy will prompt you to do them.
Why this changed how I describe what we build
We make an Android app that runs a spare handset as a screen-off camera, with remote viewing that does not put a third party between you and the footage. It is a sensing-half product. Everything on our roadmap is sensing-half work.
Reading 2.8 made the boundary of that uncomfortably clear. The half we can build, ship and improve is the half that has been largely solved for years by several people including us. The half that decides whether any of it mattered is a staffing arrangement, it is free, and no product on the market — ours included — asks you for it.
If a camera is on your list this month, the camera is the cheap decision. Make it cheaply: an old phone you already own will do the job, which is the whole premise of what we build.
Then spend the afternoon you saved on the second name.
Source: NPCC, Revised Police Operational Advice and Security Industry Requirements for Response to Security Systems, March 2024 — section 2.8, page 9. Every quotation above was checked against the document rather than a summary of it: https://www.policesecuritysystems.com/images/Policy%202024/NPCC%20Police%20Requirements%20for%20Security%20Systems%202024.pdf
The post this grew out of, which reads §2.8 in full: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7502832881124417536/
Related, on the other end of the same process — what having footage does to which reporting channel is open to you, in two US departments' own published criteria: https://dev.to/superfunicular/having-video-can-take-you-off-the-online-police-report-form-two-departments-criteria-read-side-3baf
The app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.superfunicular.digicam
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