Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) "shocked his staff when he showed up at an office whitewater tubing outing wearing bikini briefs".

Date: Wednesday, January 26
Time: 10 AM
Location: Council Chambers -- City Hall

Date: Thursday, June 10th, 2004
Time: 10 AM
Location: Council Chambers of City Hall

New York Press, Way to Legislate, June 2-8, 2004

New York Observer, Ban Car Alarms, June 7, 2004

New York Times, Shushing the Big City, June 9, 2004

"We have sort of reached an agreement on sort of merging them and modifying them," Moskowitz said of the two bills [to ban car alarms]. "I would expect in early June that this would have a second hearing."

Moskowitz added that with "tremendous support" among her colleagues, it's likely that the ban could win passage by the end of the year.

If the City Council passes a bill on car alarms, it would go to the mayor for his signature.

"Obviously, the mayor finds loud and egregious noise to be a major offense and affront that people should not have to live with," said Chris Coffey, a Spokesman for Mayor Michael Bloomberg. "But we do not comment on any pending legislation."

Police have better things to do than to stand around for three minutes timing alarm noises (as required in 24-221 (d)).

Police cannot easily verify that an alarm was set off by vibration or motion sensors, rather than by direct physical contact (24-221 (d)). The only way to tell for sure is to dismantle the car.

No mechanism even exists for registering one's car with the local police precinct, as 24-221 (g) requires.

Stillman, speaking before a packed courtroom and often over the relentless sound of a car alarm from outside, asked the jury to ignore many of the salacious details of the case. "It's not about someone's lifestyle or spending habits," he said. "I beg you to stay focused."

WHEREAS, Complaints about noise are the leading type of complaint called into the city's 311 central complaint line by residents of Washington Heights-Inwood; and

WHEREAS, Audible car alarms are a major cause of such complaints and have been described by the New York Police Department as an "annoying and sometimes unbearable disturbance for residents in their homes"; and

WHEREAS, Vehicles with such alarms show "no overall reduction in theft losses" compared with vehicles without alarms, according to a study of 73 million vehicles by the Highway Loss Data Institute; and

WHEREAS, Over 50 New York City car alarm installation companies have pledged to disable car alarm sirens without cost, if they are banned; and

WHEREAS, Car owners can readily protect their vehicles with many affordable and truly effective silent devices, which immobilize cars or page motorists directly; and

WHEREAS, Int. 115, introduced in the City Council by Council Member Eva Moskowitz, would ban the installation, sale and use of car alarms in the five boroughs of New York City and grant authority to the Police Department to enforce its provisions; and

WHEREAS, The State Insurance Law requires insurance companies to provide an automatic discount to owners of cars equipped with anti-theft devices, including audible car alarms; now

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED That Community Board 12-Manhattan urges the City Council to enact Int. 115 into law at its earliest possible opportunity; and

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED That Community Board 12-Manhattan calls upon the State Legislature to amend the State Insurance Law to remove the automatic discount afforded to owners of cars in New York City with audible alarms.

The car alarm intones a central irony in the history of alarm technology. The automobile itself, as we know, represented the mechanical triumph of individual over collective. Enthroned in his roaming, honking intransigence, the motorist becomes a creature against all others. With alarms, this territorial self-acclaim can be sustained even when the motorist has called it a day. The early horn-triggering alarms of the seventies clearly evinced this surrogate function, emitting an autistically methodical honk like an enraged driver pounding his forehead on the horn. As later car alarms grew more ubiquitous and expressive, filling neighborhoods with their now-familiar idiom of whooooops, dweeeeps, and whirligig wails, they clearly demonstrated a paradox evident in so many areas of human progress: that our achievements tend to expand to the point of their own self-diminishment. Here the very line of technology first designed to protect the sanctity of the home has evolved into that sanctum's most persistent disrupter.

[...]

In the end, we grow inured. For who today actually responds to these mechanical invokers of civic duty? When a car alarm shrieks under our window at night, don't we all simply curse, pack the pillows over our ears, and burrow back to sleep?...sleeping until startled awake by yet another alarm: the peep, jingle, or buzz of our bedside alarm clock, that most intimate of all security devices, the alarm by which property itself secures our daily labor, guarding its ever-expanding claims against the trespass of our dreams."

The Edmonton Police Service doesn't even respond to calls about car alarms as "crimes in progress" anymore. They treat them as noise complaints.

"They are crap," says Const. Terry Jordan, alarm program co-ordinator for the police service's crime prevention unit.

"Inherently, the audible car alarms, they're so common now that people just ignore them. All it takes is a minor wind vibration to trigger them. They don't have the deterrent value people seem to think."

Watch what happens, says Jordan, when an alarm goes off in a parkade or outside a mall. No one rushes to the rescue.

"People say, 'Just another damned car alarm,' and walk away."

I asked the constable if he'd heard of one case where a theft was foiled or a thief caught because of a car alarm. There was a long pause while he thought.

"Not that I recall."

One time, Jordan says, he responded to a car alarm and found a car with a broken window. But he couldn't tell whether the window had been broken by a would-be thief -- or by someone who just got frustrated, listening to the alarm ring on and on.

James Gennaro, the councilman who represents the area, has proposed a remedy that would ease the problem throughout the city. He is chairman of the Council's Environmental Protection Committee, which is ushering through two bills - introduced by Council members John C. Liu from Queens and Eva S. Moskowitz from Manhattan - that would ban the sale and installation of audible alarms in the city. A final hearing on the Council measures could be held as early as this month, but their passage is uncertain. The Bloomberg administration so far has sided with car alarm manufacturers.

The world has become full of stupid devices that are supposed to make our lives simpler, safer, better. When one of them proves not to work, there's no reason to keep going along with it just because it is there. We applaud the New Yorkers who are pushing to get rid of this senseless noise. Their effort may go down as New York's greatest contribution to civilized life since the bagel.

Do you have problems with car alarms?

We do, at least on Saturday nights, when the Village becomes what we sometimes call "Jerseyated." It's a wonderful time to rob houses in Ridgefield. They're constantly going off around here. I think there should be a definite rule about car alarms: You should have the right to break the window and turn it off.

No one is making it difficult for people to protect their cars; we certainly want to combat auto theft, which itself is a problem. The question at hand is whether car alarms actually reduce any kind of auto theft in any way. I submit to you that based on the research that I've conducted, there is no measurable impact that car alarms actually have on reducing auto theft...

Today noisy car alarms simply don't do the job; they're ignored by everybody on the street, they're ignored by people in the buildings, they're ignored by the cops. The only time that they are paid attention to is at 3:00 in the morning, when a car alarm goes off for no apparent reason and wakes up everybody in the neighborhood. That is the problem that we're trying to address today...

I will tell you that the cops in my area don't pay any attention to them. They told me that these alarms don't work, and they just bother people. I would challenge both of your departments to sit down with Council Member Moskowitz and Chairman Gennaro and myself and our colleagues, and let's randomly pick out a street near a police precinct in New York City. I will personally walk down that street and yell "boo" at a few cars to set off their alarms, and let's see how many cops actually pay attention to that.

Car alarms in 99% of the cases are set off by people walking by. It's hard to say if the product is defective or what the issue is, but noise complaints are the single largest area of complaints that the Mayor's new 311 number receiving. I chair the Education Committee, the schools are in crises, we have health care issues, we have many, many issues, and yet the fact that New Yorkers take out the time, because they are being driven crazy by these blaring alarms, I think makes a very, very profound statement...

Let's just suppose that two thefts were prevented a year by car alarms, would that be valuable enough to have thousands of New Yorkers not getting any sleep?

ASSISTANT COMMISSIONER PETITO [from the NYPD]: I think that would end up being a discussion, a judgment, a balancing of interests between the Council...

COUNCIL MEMBER MOSKOWITZ: You need a discussion if there are two car thefts in the City of New York that are prevented by car alarms? Two? I'm giving a hypothetical, I understand, but two in a City of eight million New Yorkers, it's the position of the Police Department that you would need to have a discussion?

With regard to enforcement of car alarms, do we have any sense of how many violations have been issued for car alarms, both from the PD and the DEP?

ASSISTANT COMMISSIONER PETITO: From the PD, we issued 196 car alarm [Environmental Control Board] summonses in 2002.

CHAIRPERSON GENNARO: One hundred ninety-six? You could do that in my district in one night.

The car alarm is ridiculous because it's obsolete. If there was a medicine that (say) cured one person but made 1,000 other people suffer, do you think that medicine would be allowed to be sold? It's absurd.

The principal impact of car alarms is to harass and disturb and annoy, vex, molest, degrade, frighten the innocent. Little children are woken up at night, they cry, they don't know what it is. People are trying to get to sleep, they can't, they're bad the next day, they have accidents because they didn't get a decent night's sleep...This is more than a whim or a luxury; sleep is a basic necessity of life...Remember Coleridge, The Ancient Mariner, "Oh Sleep, it is a gentle thing, beloved from Pole to Pole. To Mary Queen, let praise begin...it benefits the soul." It's sleep, it's not a whim...

It's an absurdity in this day and age, in the year 2003, which I've lived to see. If you want to stop theft, you have a little bottom that you press; this is the computer age. The town crier is gone. You don't have to scream and wake up the whole neighborhood just because someone is trying to steal a car. That's ridiculous. It's totally obsolete.

unfair to those car owners who spent considerable money on an anti-theft device that was not only legal at the time of purchase but actually encouraged through the mechanism of insurance deductions.

"Car alarms went off, like demons released from the earth".

Seattle Police Department Detective Gene McNaughton of the Auto Theft Squad notes that thieves have been known to hook up to a tow truck and haul off the vehicle, with the alarm blaring. "Most people don't look twice at a car being hooked up and towed away. We've become desensitized to car alarms."

Fifty years ago one would have described the bizarre warbled yelping of the gibbon as "unearthly." Today we say "it sounds like a car alarm." Through technology we've managed to completely invert nature, never mind entirely isolate ourselves from it. The unearthly now wholly earthly -- the proud product of some very organic human tinkering, yet simultaneously alienated from all that is natural. Who says of the car alarm: "It sounds just like a gibbon"?

"I was at a dinner party in Cobble Hill over the weekend and the hosts described how one day they heard an odd car alarm - it didn't sound quite right, so they went out to investigate. A mockingbird was in their backyard running through the entire rotation of car alarm sounds - and kept it up for about 15 minutes."

"I had hoped to speak the other day about the mockingbird that lives across the street from me. Clearly, and unmistakably, it sings, or rather mocks to the tune of car alarms. Even nature herself is mocking our stupidity."

Have you experienced any of the scenarios that appear in that book?

All of them! (Laughs.) I've done the car-alarm one ("How To Proceed When You Discover Which Car's Alarm Keeps Going Off in the Middle of the Night"). I actually found out whose car alarm was going off in the middle of the night, traced their license plate and started calling them up in the middle of the night myself. And the ones I couldn't find phone numbers for, I went out and started ringing their doorbells, just saying, 'So, how's your car? I want to make sure it's safe. We're all worried about your car.' And so they were just so angry.