Toronto police may stop sending officers to alarm calls, arguing the overwhelming number are false alerts and it’s a bad use of resources.

In 2012, just 300 of the 20,000 private alarm calls Toronto police responded to turned out to be legitimate.

It’s one of 12 areas identified by an internal police steering committee reviewing the cost-saving potential of scaling back on a variety of services, including alarm response.

“It’s not looking at saying ‘under no circumstances,’ but they (the committee) haven’t started their work on it,” police spokesman Mark Pugash said Friday.

“We’re looking at how we can reduce the drain on resources so we can put more in frontline services.”

The committee, part of Chief Bill Blair’s Internal Organization Review process, has already recommended scrapping police reports for lost Canadian I.D. and licence plates.

“These reports were found to be largely redundant” since the issuing government agencies can handle them, according to a police newsletter.

The committee estimates the police force will save $613,222 or 10,960 officer hours annually on this alone.

Lost property reports for debit and credit cards and cellphones are also redundant, the committee found.

“The issuing financial institution and service provider have the technological capabilities to disable the cards or phones remotely and immediately,” Sgt. Shari MacKay, a committee member, told the newsletter.

The committee has also recommended police stop taking reports on lost or stolen property when “certain parameters are met and property falls below a certain value.”

Pugash identified the limit as $500.

Toronto police will also no longer report on fires when there are no fatalities or when the cause of the fire is determined or if no criminal offence was involved. Nor will officers attend industrial accidents and file reports if an injury is “not deemed critical and the nature of the event is not criminal.”

Areas still under study include animal complaints, which “are generally outside the core responsibilities of police,” and when other city agencies manage demand for this service. The committee found that eliminating 90 per cent of this type of calls would result in an average annual savings of 3,668 officer hours, or $205,225.

Overall, the committee identified potential savings of $2.1 million and almost 41,903 person-hours.

Christian Leuprecht, a political science professor at the Royal Military College who has studied policing costs, said it makes sense that police not respond to private alarm calls.

“Police were essentially subsidizing a private business model: ‘alarm goes, we call police now,’ ” he said. “Toronto homeowners need to be aware, because it means, and rightly so, that alarm companies will need to provide their own people to attend an alarm.”

Alarm calls are not, generally, where “genuine public safety is at risk,” Leuprecht added.

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He was in Toronto on Friday addressing the Ontario Association of Police Services Boards.

While Leuprecht praised the Toronto police review, he cautioned that it doesn’t get to the “fundamental problem” that current policing costs are unsustainable. More than 90 per cent of Toronto’s $1-billion police budget goes to salaries.

“We’re taking steps in the right direction, trying to identify what are priorities, given constrained budgets, but it doesn’t make it any more sustainable if the money we save is going to get more than eaten up by next year’s salary increase.”