COURTESY: MACIEJ KUCKO

By Sydney Chisholm

Security Alarm System Bylaw

North Shore business owner speaks out against Kamloops Security Alarm System Bylaw

Nov 13, 2024 | 6:45 PM

KAMLOOPS – Drago’s AutoPro, a longtime fixture on the North Shore, is grappling with a situation that’s becoming all too familiar for local businesses.

Maciej Kucko, co-owner of Drago’s, feels like much of his time is spent cleaning up garbage and vandalism at his business.

“People lighting fires and defecating on our property and leaving garbage and dirty tampons and drug paraphernalia and all this stuff that I, for one, don’t like cleaning up,” said Kucko. “I shouldn’t have to clean up. That’s disgusting in my eyes. But we continue – we’re doing that every single week.”

After an attempted break-in, the business received a letter from Kamloops RCMP about a false alarm at the premises.

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“Our alarm was set off at our business,” said Kucko. “Probably from somebody rattling a door trying to break in again,””

While there’s no charge for this incident, future false alarms could result in hefty fines — $200 for the next occurrence and $400 for subsequent ones.

Alisha Beday, City of Kamloops municipal support services manager for the RCMP, says the letter came as part of the city’s Security Alarm System Bylaw.

“The intent for the Security Alarm System Bylaw is to help to reduce the number of emergent calls of the RCMP responding to that were relating to false alarms,” Beday explained. “What the bylaw does is it helps to regulate three sort of common alarms that they respond to, which are intrusion alarms, hold-up alarms and panic alarms.”

The incident at Drago’s falls under situation two of the updated bylaw.

Alarm System Bylaw situations (City of Kamloops)

Ryan Moffett, owner of Kamloops Alarm, says there are lot of reasons a system will go off, including a system malfunction.

“A lot of times, we’re finding that it’s an attempted break-in, so [perpetrators] are trying to get in the doors – they’re hitting the window but it’s not breaking and the system’s going off and the perpetrators are leaving the scene” said Moffett, adding that by the time RCMP show up, the perpetrators are gone, deterred by the alarm system going off.

“Unfortunately, the owners of business are then being penalized for that perceived false alarm, which isn’t always the case. Many times it’s that they are trying to get in, they are caught by the system in place, but they haven’t gotten inside the building yet.”

Kucko says he and his business partner have invested thousands of dollars trying to protect the property, so when he received the letter from police deeming the attempt a false alarm, he was perplexed.

“We were forced to spend all this money on security and fencing and all this stuff and obviously that’s not deterring anybody. We’re still having the problems because we’re still cleaning up a mess almost every single day,” said Kucko. “We tried to do the right things, and then, you know, if an alarm goes off and the police get called, I really don’t understand why we should be charged an extra fee for that. It makes no sense.”