San Jose police answered 21,680 alarm calls in 2025, about 59 a day and 8.3 percent of all calls for service in the city. Officers wrote a report on 102 of those calls, roughly one in 213, and 11 ended in an arrest or criminal citation.
By Jacob Ross, Security Specialist · Guardian Integrated Security · PPO #121089 · Last updated August 1, 2026
Every figure on this page was produced by counting records in the City of San Jose’s own published Police Calls for Service dataset, the file the city releases for each calendar year. No figure here is estimated, and none is carried over from another city. The method section states exactly which records were counted and which were not, and the counting rule is given at the point of use so anyone can reproduce the number from the same file.
Alarm Calls to San Jose Police in 2025
San Jose publishes one record per incident for every call its police department handled. Counting the records whose call type is one of the department’s four alarm codes gives the volume below.
- San Jose police handled 21,680 alarm calls in 2025 (call type codes 1033A, 1033S, 1033 and 1033L).
- Those calls were 8.3% of the 262,095 records in the 2025 file — calculated as 21,680 ÷ 262,095.
- That is an average of 59.4 alarm calls a day, or 21,680 ÷ 365.
- Audible alarms alone accounted for 18,448 calls, making “ALARM, AUDIBLE” the fourth most common of the 205 distinct call types in the file.
- Silent alarms accounted for 2,419 calls, the generic alarm code for 776, and the fourth alarm code for 37.
- The monthly count never fell below 1,547 (February) or rose above 2,098 (December), so no month is missing from the file.
For scale, audible alarms alone produced more calls than theft (5,962), malicious mischief (2,460) and vehicle burglary (1,568) combined. Only vehicle stops, general disturbance calls and welfare checks were logged under a single code more often.
What Happened to Those Alarm Calls
Each record carries a final disposition assigned by the department. This is where the alarm picture separates itself from every other high-volume call type.
- Officers took a report on 102 of the 21,680 alarm calls — 0.47%, or about one call in 213.
- 11 alarm calls ended in an arrest or a criminal citation, about one in 1,970.
- 12,934 alarm calls, 59.7% of the total, were closed as “Canceled”.
- 5,849, or 27.0%, were closed as “No report required; dispatch record only”.
- 2,449, or 11.3%, were closed with the department’s disposition “Unfounded event”.
Read those dispositions precisely. “Canceled” is the department’s own label and the dataset does not record who cancelled a call or why, so a cancelled call is not the same thing as a proven false alarm. What the file does show without interpretation is the outcome rate: on more than 21,000 alarm calls, fewer than 1 in 200 produced a written police report, and roughly 1 in 2,000 produced an arrest or citation.
How Alarm Calls Compare With Other Call Types
The same disposition field applied to other call types in the same file, over the same year, gives the fairest available benchmark. The share below is the proportion of each call type that ended in a report or supplemental report.
- Stolen vehicle calls produced a report 77.1% of the time (4,947 of 6,420).
- Vehicle burglary calls produced a report 66.3% of the time (1,039 of 1,568).
- Malicious mischief calls produced a report 55.8% of the time (1,373 of 2,460).
- Theft calls produced a report 54.1% of the time (3,227 of 5,962).
- Trespassing calls produced a report 1.2% of the time (101 of 8,246).
- Audible alarm calls produced a report 0.42% of the time (78 of 18,448).
Among these categories, alarm calls are both the highest in volume and the lowest in report rate. When somebody physically observes a crime and reports it, an officer writes something down most of the time. When a sensor reports it, an officer almost never does.
When Alarm Calls Reach San Jose Police
- 11,446 alarm calls, 52.8% of the year’s total, arrived between 6:00 p.m. and 5:59 a.m.
- The single busiest hour was 8:00 a.m. with 1,104 calls across the year, consistent with premises being opened.
- The quietest hour was 11:00 a.m. with 682 calls.
- Saturday was the busiest day of the week with 3,463 alarm calls; Monday was the quietest with 2,910.
The distribution is much flatter than the city’s overall call pattern, which falls away sharply in the small hours. Alarm calls keep arriving through the night at close to their daytime rate, because the equipment does not sleep and the premises it watches are empty.
Priority Levels Assigned to Alarm Calls
The dataset carries a priority value for every record. San Jose does not publish a definition of its priority scale on the pages retrieved for this page, so the counts below are reported as values in the file, without interpreting what each level commits the department to.
- 18,478 alarm calls, 85.2% of the total, carried priority 3.
- 1,597 carried priority 2 and 1,535 carried priority 1.
- Silent alarms were treated differently from audible ones: 1,111 of the 2,419 silent alarm calls, 45.9%, carried priority 1, against 344 of 18,448 audible alarm calls.
- Across all 262,095 calls in the file, priority 1 was used 8,264 times, so alarm calls accounted for roughly one in five of the city’s priority 1 assignments.
Alarm Call Volume in 2024 and 2025
The city publishes the same file for 2024, built the same way, which supports a like-for-like comparison.
- San Jose police handled 24,088 alarm calls in 2024, against 21,680 in 2025.
- That is a fall of 10.0%, or 2,408 fewer alarm calls — calculated as (21,680 − 24,088) ÷ 24,088.
- Total calls for service fell more slowly over the same period, by 3.8%, from 272,506 to 262,095.
- The report rate barely moved: 0.48% of alarm calls produced a report in 2024 (115 of 24,088), against 0.47% in 2025.
Alarm volume fell faster than the department’s overall workload, but the outcome of an alarm call did not change. Fewer alarm calls came in; the ones that did were no more likely to find anything.
San Jose’s Camera Programs for Businesses
The city runs two programs that bear directly on what a business can hand police when an alarm goes off, both described on the police department’s own pages.
- Connect San Jose, the department’s camera registry, replaced the previous “CAM” system in April 2025, and existing registrations were migrated to it.
- Registration is free and, in the department’s words, “does not allow the San Jose Police Department access to your live video stream” — it records that a camera exists so investigators can request footage.
- A second tier lets a business connect a camera feed through a hardware device, with a rebate of $450 for eligible small businesses, funded by the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office.
- The rebate is limited to San Jose businesses with fewer than 20 employees that already have compatible cameras, is first-come first-served, and requires a receipt within 45 days of approval.
- After the first year, the connection subscription costs $150 a year, which the business pays.
Both programs exist because a signal on its own does not tell an officer what is happening at an address. Recorded or streamed images do. That is the same distinction the disposition data describes from the other direction.
How These Figures Were Compiled
All counts come from the City of San Jose’s Police Calls for Service dataset, downloaded on 1 August 2026: the 2025 file (262,095 records) and the 2024 file (272,506 records). The city states that “each record in this data set represents one incident” and that multiple calls about one incident appear only once.
Every number on this page is a count of records in those files rather than a figure the city has published as a headline. That means each one is reproducible: alarm calls are the records whose call type code is 1033A, 1033S, 1033 or 1033L; report rates are the share of records whose final disposition is “Report taken” or “Supplemental report taken”; arrests are the records whose disposition is an arrest, an arrest by warrant, or a criminal citation. Percentages are calculated from those counts and the inputs are shown next to each one.
Both years were checked for completeness before any comparison was made. Each file contains twelve months of records with no empty or short month, and monthly volumes sit in a narrow band, so neither year is a partial rollout. The call-type vocabulary is also stable across the two files: the four alarm codes appear in both, and no alarm code was added or retired between them.
This is dispatch data, not crime data. A call for service records that somebody asked police to attend an address; it does not establish that an offence occurred. It is a different kind of record from the offence counts a department reports to state and federal crime systems, and the two should never be added together or compared. San Jose’s police department separately reports offences under the National Incident-Based Reporting System, which it adopted in April 2023; none of that reporting is used here.
Several things are deliberately absent. The dataset labels these calls only as alarms and does not say what kind of alarm or what kind of premises, so this page does not claim that all of them are burglar alarms, and it does not split them between businesses and homes — neither claim is supported by the file. The dataset carries no dollar value, so no cost figure appears. It records no response time, so none is given. No comparison is drawn with any other city, because the same record-level file was not obtained for one. And no claim is made anywhere that cameras or monitoring change these counts by any particular amount, because nothing retrieved for this page supports such a figure.
What This Means for a Business That Relies on an Alarm
The figures describe a specific gap. An alarm sensor can tell police that something triggered at an address. It cannot tell them what. In 2025 that distinction ran through 21,680 dispatched calls and produced 102 reports.
What closes the gap is a person who can see the site and say what is actually happening there. Guardian Integrated Security’s live video monitoring is built for exactly that moment: AI flags activity on camera to a live agent in under a second, the agent looks at the scene, and can issue a two-way audio warning, dispatch Guardian’s own patrol units, and give police an eyewitness account instead of a sensor trip. Where a site needs cameras put in first, Guardian’s security camera installation covers the hardware side. For the offence counts behind business break-ins in the East Bay, our Fremont commercial burglary statistics report the Fremont Police Department’s own figures.
Protecting 2,700+ California businesses for 20+ years · BBB A+ · PPO #121089. To have a Bay Area property assessed, request a quote or call 800-400-3167.
Cite This Page
If you use these figures, please cite the page:
APA — Ross, J. (2026). San Jose false alarm statistics: 2025 police call data. Guardian Integrated Security. https://www.guardianintegratedsecurity.com/san-jose-false-alarm-statistics/
MLA — Ross, Jacob. “San Jose False Alarm Statistics: 2025 Police Call Data.” Guardian Integrated Security, 2026, https://www.guardianintegratedsecurity.com/san-jose-false-alarm-statistics/.
Chicago — Ross, Jacob. “San Jose False Alarm Statistics: 2025 Police Call Data.” Guardian Integrated Security. Accessed [date]. https://www.guardianintegratedsecurity.com/san-jose-false-alarm-statistics/.
These statistics may be used with attribution and a link to this page. Journalists and researchers who want to reproduce any figure can download the same files from the city links below and apply the counting rules given in the method section.
Sources
- City of San Jose Open Data Portal, Police Calls for Service — dataset landing page. data.sanjoseca.gov. Accessed 1 August 2026.
- City of San Jose, Police Calls 2025 (CSV, 262,095 records) — the file behind every 2025 figure on this page. CSV download. Accessed 1 August 2026.
- City of San Jose, Police Calls 2024 (CSV, 272,506 records) — the file behind every 2024 figure. CSV download. Accessed 1 August 2026.
- San Jose Police Department, Crime Stats & Maps — the department’s statement that “In April 2023, the San Jose Police Department implemented NIBRS,” cited here only to distinguish offence reporting from dispatch data. sjpd.org. Accessed 1 August 2026.
- San Jose Police Department, Security Camera Registration — Connect San Jose, the April 2025 system change, and what registration does and does not permit. sjpd.org. Accessed 1 August 2026.
- San Jose Police Department, Security Camera CORE Rebate — the $450 reimbursement, eligibility, and the $150 annual subscription. sjpd.org. Accessed 1 August 2026.
