The Thing That Screams Wolf

By LANCE MORROW

They erupt like indignant metal jungle birds, and they whoop all night. They make American cities sound like lunatic rain forests, all the wildlife affrighted, violated, outraged, shrieking.

Like the hungry infant's cry, the car alarm is designed to be unignorable -- that is, unendurable. One popular model from Code-Alarm, for example, puts out 125 decibels: "Louder than a police siren," says a publicist, "louder than a rock concert." A good car alarm is a sharp blade of sound: it pierces sleep, it goes into the skull like an oyster knife. In a neighborhood of apartment buildings, one such beast rouses sleepers by the hundreds, even thousands. They wake, roll over, moan, jam pillows on their ears and try to suppress the adrenaline.

Car thieves, however, pay no attention to the noise.

Or not much. "Whoop! Scream! Whoop!" goes the traumatized Lumina. A passerby hearing the alarm rushes toward the beleaguered car, shaking his umbrella and addressing the car thief, "See here, my man! Unhand that vehicle!" Right.

A scene, by contrast, from real life: One recent evening on West 68th Street in Manhattan, the alarm on a little red sports car goes off. Who knows what started it? The passing thunderstorm, a bump from a car pulling into the % parking space ahead, someone leaning against the fender? The plates on the wailing car indicate that it comes from Long Island. After 15 or 20 minutes someone puts a note on the windshield: GO BACK TO LONG ISLAND WHERE YOU BELONG AND LEAVE YOUR ALARM THERE. Two hours pass; alarm still wailing. Someone else scrawls some impolite advice in lipstick on the windshield. An hour after that, the car is sprayed with shaving cream and pelted by wet trash and rotten food. Eons later the alarm is still relentlessly screaming. By this time the police have arrived, summoned not by the alarm but by the lynch mob.

Car alarms started out as luxury items and boomed in popularity about 1970. Since then, car thefts have nearly doubled. In 1989, 1,564,800 motor vehicles were stolen in the U.S., up 9.2% from 1988 and 42% over 1985. Would the losses be even greater if car alarms did not exist? No one knows. Police generally side with car alarms. Having one, after all, can't hurt, might help. An amateur thief might be scared off; a professional, however, knows how to disarm the system quickly.

The real problem is not the stolen car. Says Ronald Clarke, dean at Rutgers University School of Criminal Justice: "Car alarms may protect the individual owner, but at a cost to everyone else. At a societal level they're not of any use at all." Perhaps car alarms, like gun control, are an urban vs. rural issue: different cultures need different rules. What is tolerable and useful in the country may become a monster in the city.

In an intelligent society, a citizen shredding the peace of the city and the nerves of its sleeping people would be fined and made to stop it. But 10 leading American auto-insurance companies offer discounts of 5% to 20% for antitheft devices. Six states mandate such breaks. Car owners are paid to be antisocial.

If police responded whenever an alarm shrieked wolf, they would waste time and taxpayers' money, and dull their own crime-fighting reflexes. The endless ululations of alarms in big cities fray people's nerves, inure them to noise and, on a deeper level, undermine their civic morale, their subliminal expectations. Crime, no crime -- the distinction vanishes in undifferentiated wailing and rage. The machine screams. The quality of life within earshot dies a little more.

With reporting by Elizabeth Rudulph/New York