North Yorkshire and Devon & Cornwall are the latest police forces to become ECHO connected having joined in August and November 2024 respectively. Their addition brings the total number of ECHO connected police forces in the UK to 13, enabling the efficient handling of over 70,000 intruder and hold-up alarms incidents annually, improving police response times and outcomes for victims.
ECHO connected ARCs including ADT, Secom, Cougar/K-SOC and Banham are now reportedly delivering automated alarm signal service levels in excess of 90%, facilitating quicker police response and ensuring faster, more effective action.
James Sharp, operations director at Cougar Monitoring/KSOC explained: “Using ECHO to contact the police has provided several benefits, particularly in enhancing the efficiency and accuracy of our response. The uniformity of the data being sent to the police has meant a consistent response and timely dispatch. It has also enabled us to keep track of our live URNs (alarm incidents) in a more efficient way. The speed of (alarm signal) delivery to the police has made a marked improvement. The time taken to pass alarms significantly reduces and gets a more accurate and instantaneous response. This allows for better scalability, reliability and time efficiencies overall. We are also able to better report against activations as our AMS (Alarm Management System) logs the case in a step-by-step sequence removing the need to listen back to call recordings to investigate an incident.”
Eight additional police forces – Dorset, Durham, Gwent, Lancashire, Leicestershire, Merseyside, Surrey and Sussex – have installed their ‘Alarms Interface’ and are currently awaiting activation.
In 2025, ECHO is planning to further enhance its alarms interface package to include the Unique Property Reference Number (UPRN) data some forces rely on, as well as police responders ‘time of arrival’ (at incidents) and incident reason codes to better inform ARCs and their customers about incident status in real time, further improving links between ARCs and their police counterparts, whilst saving call handlers’ time.
