An interesting essay about
the paradoxical effects of security systems, by scifi author Kristine Kathryn Rusch:
Police departments, especially in small communities, began to slow their
responses to homes with security systems--always assuming that the alarm
was tripped by user error or by a bug in the system. In larger communities,
people who triggered their own alarms often were flagged so that the
department wouldn't waste its resources on them. The net result was that the
illusion of safety made these people less secure than they had been before.