If you have a car alarm story you'd like to share, please send it to aaronsfriedman at gmail dot com. "I think you should have a section of your website devoted to people's miserable experiences with car alarms. For instance, this morning I was awakened once by a car alarm in front of my Brooklyn home that went off for at least 20 minutes at 6am. Subsequently, the alarm would go off for 3 minutes roughly every 15 minutes. Obviously, someone had parked their car blocks from where they live. It was awful. If you have a car alarm don't park too far away from home to hear it go off! Are passersby supposed to come to the rescue in case of burglary? Give me a break!" "I live in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. On June 30, 2004, a car alarm near my building went off all night, from 11 p.m. until 9 a.m. the next day. On July 27, a car alarm went off from 9 p.m. until 3:30 in the morning. Throughout the night, I called 911 three times and the 88th precinct four times, but the police never came and the alarm just kept going. These two cases are only the most dramatic examples -- the alarms go off every day, during dinner, in the middle of the night, whenever. My heart is pounding, I am exhausted, and my husband, who gets up at 5:30 a.m. and works a twelve hour day, is having health problems related to exhaustion and stress because of these alarms. I am in despair over this absurd and yet terrible problem." "Back in my tender youth, the night before my SATs, the test that I believed would determine my entire future...you guessed it: A car alarm went off right outside my bedroom at about 1 a.m. and continued, uninterrupted, ALL NIGHT. As I left for the test in the morning, having gotten zero sleep whatsoever, I wrote a "nasty" note, saying something like "Thanks for keeping me up all night, you inconsiderate jerk." When I found the car (the alarm was still blonking away), I saw I wasn't the only one with that idea. The car was already plastered with notes, including some very colorful threats. But that was nothing. The windows were all smashed, the tires slashed, and someone had even keyed in his thoughts on the owners on the side of the car! A giant note made sure to explain that the damage was IN RESPONSE to the alarm, NOT the cause of it. I'd be lying if I said I didn't snicker just a little." "Learning there's an organized group of car alarm haters is like wandering a deserted island for months and stumbling upon a cruise ship with friendly faces and a free buffet. My hatred of car alarms has always existed but it grew quickly once I began working from home in Seattle, WA. Now that I live in New York, the problem is the same and in some instances worse. Thank you for taking this issue seriously." "Picture this: at 3am a car alarm goes off in the vicinity of my home in Brooklyn and wakes me up from what was going to be my first restful night in weeks up to this point. I wait for it to stop but it doesn't. It plays cycle after cycle of that multi-tune siren for two hours straight amidst tossing and turning and trying to block it out in vain. So, inspired by stories I read on Silent Majority, I get up, grab a bucket of white paint I had left over from painting some furniture and a brush with which I intended to write "turn off your alarm" on the culprit's windshield. I get out into the night and follow the direction of the sound. It takes less than 30 seconds to locate the offensive Suzuki pickup but lo and behold it is locked behind a gated fence in front of a newly constructed building with no tenants. So close and yet...I returned home resigned, climbed back into bed and began engaging my ultra-deep meditative state when as suddenly as it began the sound stopped. I like to think someone saw me with my bucket and alerted the driver." "The stinging auditory assault of blaring car alarms is by far the WORST aspect of New York City. Worse than inflated living costs. Worse than honking horns. Worse than August humidity. I live on 12th Street b/w 1st Ave and Ave A, and I literally hear a car alarm activate every hour. Perhaps twice an hour. Every single day of every single week. Trying to sleep through the screaming whirr and whine of a car alarm is complete agony. It is my Torment." "Dozens and dozens of times I have gone to work tired because of car alarms. An SUV parked directly in front of P.S. 15 on East 4th Street in the East Village had an alarm blasting away the entire day. What is the effect on these students?" "My husband and I had grown somewhat used to the rumbling trucks, buses, garbage trucks and bells (we're across the street from a church), but one night we finally called the police on a car alarm that was going off from 3:00 - 3:30 a.m. My husband went downstairs to wait for the police and was met by a priest carrying a hammer. The priest was circling the car until my husband warned him the police were on their way." "It is common in my neighborhood for cars with blaring alarms to get egged, keyed, or worse. A car was burned a few months back whose alarm was going off all night. Car alarms causing crime is a point you made, but to be the cause of vandalism because the alarms are going off in the first place, suggests a deep anger that is causing people (at least in my neighborhood) to take matters into their own hands." "I live in Ridgewood, Queens, which is a reasonably quiet neighborhood most of the year. However, as soon as the weather gets warm, the cars with LOUD stereos and motorcycles without mufflers (illegal, btw) come roaring through, often setting off every car alarm on the street. 5-10 times per day. Making life unbearable, especially for a self-employed person working mostly from home." "Banning car alarms would drastically improve the liveability rating of New York. I hope a law can be passed against them. I've long been convinced that the sensitivity of a person's car alarm is inversely proportional to their intelligence." "One time, a woman from Boston parked her car in front of the church that's across the street from us on a Friday night and didn't return to get it until Sunday evening. Her car had a motion detector and so when ever anyone walked passed her car, it went off. Now, the church has 1,800 worshippers who attend Mass there so the alarm went off constantly. Several of us called the police. They wrote her a ticket, but there wasn't much they could do after that." "It's time for the Rockefeller Car Alarm Laws. Mandatory sentencing." "I sold my co-op in Park Slope, Brooklyn and moved from NYC, in part because of the useless car alarms wailing and honking all night long right outside my window. My sleep was interrupted so much that my doctor said it was affecting my health, contributing to my chronic fatigue and adrenal stress. Once at 3 AM, after a particularly loud alarm had been going on and off all night long for weeks in a row, I called the police for the um-teenth time and they gave me the address of the car's owner. I went to the guy's apartment, pounded on the door, which he opened right away, as he was awake doing drugs with a female guest in the living room. I tried to reason nicely with him to disconnect the alarm, (which could clearly be heard in his own apartment) but when he refused and slammed the door in may face I went ballistic. Luckily, my husband, who had followed me to the apartment, dragged me off, otherwise I think I might have tried to tear down the guy's door and physically harm him. On the way back to our apartment we passed the offending car and saw that someone had attacked it and scratched it all over. (I am ashamed to say that I was happy to see that.)" "I am a fervent supporter of gun control and wish our laws were tougher and better enforced to keep weapons off the streets. There is one exception. I would like a big, nasty, mean, ugly automatic rifle or grenade launcher that I could fire at any car whose alarm blares repeatedly. I fantasize about blowing up car after car, right from the comfort of my living room. Boom! Boom!! Boom!!! I am a 52-year-old lawyer with a responsible job, a boring wardrobe and tri-focal glasses. But for car alarms, I am The Avenger." "I live in Fort Greene, and lately it seems like every other night I am awakened by a car alarm. I know there's nothing I can do to stop it from going off, but I have taken to looking out the window to see which car it is, then leaving a mildly menacing note on the windshield in the morning ("your alarm woke us up at 3 a.m.; don't park your car on this block again or we will egg it.") Is this petty?" "Last September my husband and I were married in a rear courtyard garden of a historic NYC building. A car alarm went off a short way into the ceremony and continued blaring until the conclusion of the ceremony! It was a disturbance to us all and has been immortalized on our wedding video. While we expected a certain level of noise, the seemingly unending blare of a car alarm was unbearable." "The alarm started going off around 8 on Christmas Eve, on 106th street, between Broadway and Amsterdam. It went on for hours. My children asked me to do something about it, so I turned up the music. The police came, at least twice, and sat in their cruiser, next to the car, for at least a half hour, each time. I guess they were trying to show the flag, but they couldn't do much else. My elevator man said that in Russia, after 5 minutes someone would come and throw a brick through the window, open the hood, and kill the alarm. Tempting." "Just last night, I was taking a yoga class, and the alarm on a car parked right outside went off at least 5 times. It was so awful--made me think: I have to get the hell out of this town!" "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. Unfortunately, they didn't get any video of it." "I can confirm the report on your website regarding mockingbirds imitating car alarms: In 1993, when I was a Prospect Heights resident, I was frequently awakened by a car alarm, and one morning, an odd sounding car alarm variation - a mockingbird imitating this persistent car alarm. I made an audiotape recording (here) which I subsequently sent on to the Audobon Society. I also gave a copy of the tape to an ABC News colleague, Bill Blakemore, who used it on a radio program." "Car alarms interfered with my sleep much more when I lived in Manhattan. That was when my husband and I took action against a car whose alarm blared for an hour or so, starting at about 3 AM. We were bothered by car alarms here in Brooklyn, too, until we moved to the back bedroom. Our children are in the front, and they've grown up with the noise, so they're not bothered--for now!" "I just suffered through 4 sleepless nights because of some asshole's car alarm under my window. Called the cops 10x,"Qual of life Hotline" 3x, and my worthless councilmember (debalsio) 1x. Nobody did jack -- was told that if the alarm shut itself off, it wasn't illegal -- despite the fact that it went off every time a truck or bus drove by -- 1+ times/hour all night, more during day (I try to work at home). obviously i was forced to take the law into my own hands..." "Car alarms are perhaps the single worst quality of living in my low-income mixed-ethnicity neighborhood, worse even than the sum total of neighbors' screaming domestic fights, out-of-control children/teenagers, the drug trade, cars idling on the street with thumping rap or salsa music coming out of the windows, the drunks who live on the street, the feral cats, the endless and mobile piles of trash, cars that park in the middle of the street, honking horns of livery cars, blaring horns of trash trucks and other behicles trying to get by the cars parked in the middle of the street, police laughing when we call to ask for assistance with fights...The car alarms, which are so utterly needless and useless seem engineered by their owners simply to stake out auditory territory. Of all the noise here, the car alarms are the sound that make my husband and I simply angry." "After months of hearing a car alarm go off nightly at all hours I tracked the owner down, confronted him, and contacted the police and my city councilman. The owner knew he had a defective alarm but just hadn't gotten around to taking care of it until pressure was put on him." "Car alarms are the kind of absurd, self defeating invention that also makes like unbearable that only Kafka could have thought up." "Car alarms disrupt classroom teaching -- I have to stop talking until the alarm is through -- what a waste of class time! One summer I counted alarms and in 41 of 43 cases, near my home, they were set off and shut off by owners (I knew that since they lasted only a few seconds. Once when an alarm outside my window went on for four hours druing the night I called the local precinct. I was told that the owner could not be given a summons (except in person) for his broken alarm that had kept a neighborhood awake most of the night (compare this with a broken directional signal in terms of social harm)." "I recently moved to New York City and find that car alarms are an amazing problem in my neighborhood. I feel like I have road rage and I don't even have a car." "A friend of mine once peed on a car with an alarm going off once and I cheered him on." "I live in Boerum Hill Brooklyn, and people drive from further out in Brooklyn and park their cars on my block and then commute into the city on the F train which is at the top of my block. When one of those car alarms goes off, it goes off all day and into the evening when the commuter gets back from work and dinner in the city. It happened this summer and was torture combined with the blistering heat trying to work from home having small children who couldn't nap because of the noise and no respite in the backyard from the noise either. Absolute torture. People smeared dog feces on the car, egged it , left angry notes, called the police and the community board. The police came and could not get the noise to stop. It was almost comical. People who leave their cars for any extended period of time should not be able to alarm them, which makes the whole idea of alarming a car stupid and irrelevant." "I once had to call police about a year ago, because an alarm was going off for more than an hour. What was astonishing is that other people were not complaining. The police did come quickly and were able to somehow turn it off." "This is one of the annoyances that rises to the attention even of life-long NY'ers like me. I don't hear fire engines (even though there's a stationhouse on my block) but I do, painfully, hear these car alarms - while I'm sleeping, when I'm trying to read or think or just live. They're all different, they're all useless and they're all loud and extremely disruptive." "Not only have car alarms not prompted me to take action against a possible thief, they have prompted me to inflict damage on the blaring car in an effort to unwire the alarm." "One sunday on my block (9th St. betw. 1st & A), a car with CT plates was going off all day (starting at about 10 am, I remember it vividly as I was studying for a physics exam on sound transmission) and night (until 3am) despite repeated calls to the police until people on the block started damaging it. Then the cops were able to suddenly able to locate the owner (after claiming all day that as it was out of state, they couldn't) and get it turned off but they arrested the two people they caught vandalising it, not the owner." "Broken car alarms that sound for hours on end during the evening are my worst nightmare. I've called the local precinct several times about this problem, and the police always say that they're too busy to investigate it. I have to suffer through sleepless nights. Many times I was so irate I thought of using a hammer to smash the car windshield -- maybe then, and only then, would the owner of the car appear to turn off the despicable alarm." "I've gone down in the middle of the night in my pajamas to wake car owners and once I was housesitting for a friend and an alarm went off. It kept up for 20 minutes so I called the police and was incredibly embarassed to find it was my friend's car--she'd never told me there was an alarm because it had been broken for over a year." "When I was recovering from coronary bypass surgery, I could hear the sound of car alarms in my hospital bed. Hospitals are designed to be quiet. Hospital windows can shut out all but the loudest and most persistent of noises--car alarms. Hospital patients shouldn't have to hear such sounds." "I think the common perception about alarms is that they are 'too sensitive' and go off when a bus or motorcycle passes by. What enrages me more is the thoughtless lazy person who double parks, locks his car, runs into a store, comes back and forgets or doesnt care to disarm the alarm, setting it off for a few, maybe twenty sconds. I've asked people about this and they shrug, saying 'it's just a minute' or some sort of lame excuse. I think a pedestrian has the right to some level of peace and quiet on the street. Motorists are thoughtless because the police allow them to be." "I live right across the street from a city bus stop in Brooklyn. All night, each time a bus stops and idles for a few minutes, the vibrations set off the car alarms and wake me up. This is detrimental to my health, as I have rheumatoid arthritis, an auto-immune disease that is aggravated by stress and sleep deprivation. I have also become more and more angry at my neighbors (one in particular) who won't turn off their alarms. I am definitely not motivated to get out of bed to try to prevent anyone from stealing a public nuisance!"