You may have seen some SimpliSafe advertisements from a few years ago claiming that the company could dispatch police 3.5 times faster than other security companies. In 2020, the National Advertising Division asked SimpliSafe to stop including this claim in its marketing materials because it couldn't be verified.3 More recent SimpliSafe advertisements claim that the company "alerts police in just 16 seconds."  It's easy to assume that the "16 seconds" is counted from the time your alarm goes off to the time a police officer starts heading your way. But that's virtually impossible because SimpliSafe—like all alarm monitoring companies—will attempt to contact you to verify the alarm before sending the police. This can take minutes and is intended to ensure police officers and other first responders aren't sent to investigate a bunch of false alarms.  It's more likely that "16 seconds" is counted from the time an alarm is verified to the time SimpliSafe finishes requesting a police response. But this is a hard one for us to confirm through testing, since we don't want to waste police resources. Just take that claim with a grain of salt and learn more about the security industry's average response times.