"If I am in red alert status and discover that it was a false alarm, I will stay in red alert for a while before standing down."
While on The Infiltration, planning for The Caper (or playing Xanatos Speed Chess), The Crew is unable to avoid setting off an alarm. So what do they do? Set it off but convince the guards it's nothing!
Essentially Right for the Wrong Reasons applied to an intruder alarm, and an invoked Crying Wolf if done repeatedly. Related to Convenient Decoy Cat. May happen because The Guards Must Be Crazy, but this can also fool even competent guards if done well enough.
Compare Insecurity Camera.
Examples:
open/close all folders
Anime & Manga
- Variant in Naruto. Pain (with his 6 bodies) and Konan are about to infiltrate Konoha village, when they detected a dome of chakra sensors that covers the whole village that will alert the guards whenever someone enters it. Then Pain devises a tactic: Using his bigger body, he throws another body specializing in Summon Magic to the air, through Konoha's borders, to fool the guards about their number, and after that, the summoner will summon other bodies of Pain as well as Konan as surprise.
Comic Books
- Batman: In "The Malay Penguin", the Penguin rents the theatre next door to gallery he intends rob and hires a troupe of dancers to rehearse a huge dance number. The constant vibration from the dancing keeps tripping the vibration and motion sensors in the gallery, forcing them to turn them off.
- In the What If? story "What If The Punisher Had Killed Spider-Man" (vol. 2 #58), The Punisher sets a trap for Spider-Man by hiding a bomb in a dummy made up to look like Doctor Octopus. When Spidey closes in, he assumes that his Spider-Sense is going off for the obvious reason (he's about to tangle with a dangerous supervillain) and doesn't really pay attention to it.
- During the World's End event in WildStorm, Nemesis, Savant and Backlash trigger an alarm in a rabbit colony. The rabbits stampede, triggering the motion detector in the place they actually want to break into. It's apparently a regular occurrence.
Film — Animated
- A possibly unintentional example in Bibi und Tina: Bewildered and Bewitched, Falko von Falkenstein decides to install an alarm system in his castle after he is burgled. However, his utter incompetence in programming the alarms leads to constant false alarms. Finally, on the night the burglars return, the alarm is triggered by the simultaneous arrival of his date, leading him to assume it was another false alarm.
- Catwoman: Hunted. Selina Kyle sends out her cat Isis to trip the motion sensors so the guards will turn them off to prevent false alarms, relying on the CCTV cameras which Selina just uses Camera Spoofing on.
Film — Live Action
- In Bad Boys II, the heroes toss dozens of cats and lizards into the bad guys' bungalow, until they decide turn off the alarms.
- One of the first things Detective John McClane does in Die Hard to thwart the terrorists that have seized control of the Nakatomi Tower is set off a fire alarm, knowing it will bring both firemen and police to the scene. Villainous mastermind Hans Gruber simply phones the LAFD to report a false alarm at the site, and then disables the fire alarm for good measure. It disheartens McClane to see the approaching fire trucks suddenly kill their lights and sirens before turning back.
- In Foolproof, the heroes know that they cannot break into a ultra-secure safe. Only one person outside the security company knows the combination and if they enter the wrong combination too many times the safe will go into lockdown. They use dry ice to trigger the safe's lockdown procedure and quickly leave the premises. By the time the security company arrives, the dry ice has melted and there is no sign of anyone tampering with the safe. Convinced that it was just a false alarm, the security company resets the safe's combination which is exactly what the heroes were hopping for. They use a hidden camera to record the new numbers and when they break into the building the next night, they open the safe by simply entering the combination.
- This is a major plot point in the 2019 Argentine caper film Heroic Losers, where the protagonists attempt to get their own back at an unscrupulous lawyer by convincing him that the alarm system to his vault carrying their money is repeatedly faulty. They get the idea by watching How to Steal a Million.
- In How to Steal a Million, quite possibly the Trope Codifier, the protagonists carry out an art theft by hiding in a museum during the night and repeatedly triggering the alarm. Eventually (and just as anticipated) the museum officials are tired of being woken up by false alarms and order the alarm system shut off.
- In The Real McCoy the thieves cannot disable a bank's security system and the police response time is too fast for them to break in, steal the loot and get away. Instead they incorporate the security alarms into their plan. They break down the bank's security one layer at a time, hide their actions and leave before the police arrive. (eg. they cut away the locks on a side door and replace them with identical looking locks that they have keys for). The police see nothing out of the ordinary and leave. With each alarm, the response is slower and less thorough until finally the security company turns off the alarms completely and leaves two rent-a-cops to guard the bank till morning. The thieves then have free reign to break into the bank's vault.
- Sneakers. During the bank break-in at the beginning the team deliberately sets off a fire alarm so the doors will unlock. When the guard calls for help, Whistler (who has taken over the phone system) tells him to just reset the alarm and wait to see if it goes off again (which it doesn't because they're already inside).
- Star Wars: A New Hope. When Luke, Han, and Chewie attack the prison section of the Death Star to rescue Leia, one of the guards trips the alarm. Han tries to play it off as a weapons malfunction but fails completely.
Live Action TV
- Angel. Angel wants to infiltrate Wolfram & Hart, but they have a vampire-detecting alarm. Solution: Angel's street friend Gunn tosses a captured vampire through the front door of W&H at the exact same moment that Angel sneaks in under the sub-basement. The detector goes off, but security assumes it's because of the vampire they can see instead of suspecting a vampire they don't see.
- Blake's 7. In "Rumors of Death", the rebels knock out a camera with an electronic device, ambush the squad sent to investigate, dress in their uniforms and send a message back claiming that a squirrel was building a nest around the camera's microwave transmitter.
- Burn Notice
- In one episode Michael and his accomplice, disguised as janitors, set off the metal detector with an industrial vacuum cleaner (hiding the guns) and the bomb-sniffing dog with fertilizer (hiding the bomb).
- In "End Run", Michael has to steal something from a secure office with limited resources. So, disguised as a janitor, he steals a bottle of whiskey out of one of the desks to make it look like he's drunk, then breaks the alarmed office window and steals the MacGuffin, then cuts himself to make it look to the guards like he was drunk on duty and fell into the window. He then gets them not to call the police by spinning a sob story about how if he loses his job he can't make child support and his ex is going to take the kids to the other side of the country.
- The very first thing seen on the short-lived series Heist was the leader of the crew and his partner intentionally setting off the alarm at a jewelry store repeatedly. After a while, they note that the police response time has tripled since their first intrusion. Having sufficiently "cried wolf", they perform the robbery for real.
- Happens often in Leverage. Some examples:
- Parker trips a door with a silent alarm, leading to an art vault, using a Fake-Out Make-Out with Hardison.
- Motion detectors are tripped with a bird, of a species with a large wingspan that fits in a small cage.
- Hardison sets off all the car alarms in the area at the same time Parker sets off a vibration alarm. As they're in Los Angeles, the guards assume it's a small earthquake.
- In an episode of My Name Is Earl we see a flashback to Earl & Joy stealing a diamond ring from a jewelry store. Earl's brother Randy (pretending to be an unrelated customer) "accidentally" wanders too near the door while holding a pearl necklace in order to see it under natural light, triggering the alarm. The clerk goes to deal with Randy while Earl & Joy walk out of the store with the diamond.
Tabletop Games
- Shadowrun. The Corporate Security Handbook supplement suggests that runners arrange for an alarm in the target location (such as a motion detector on a perimeter fence) to be repeatedly triggered. When the team finally goes in, hopefully the security guards will regard it going off as just another false alarm and ignore it.
Video Games
- Grand Theft Auto V: In the Paleto Score. Whilst casing the bank Michael, Lester and Trevor trigger the bank alarm to test the response time and scope of the police. Somewhat inverted as they decide that the bank's defenses are too great, skip any hint at subtlety and just out and out go to war to get away with the cash.
- In Hitman: Blood Money, 47 can plant his gun in a tourist's bag which sets off the metal detector. The tourist is arrested, 47's guns are now in the White House and he can pick them up without setting off an alarm.
- Sly 2: Band of Thieves has the Code Capture job in Level 4 where Sly pickpockets the keys to nearby security terminals, set off the alarms and then take a photo of the alarm shutdown codes.
Web Original
- This is one of the tropes that are defied on the Evil Overlord List: Explicitly, any type of alarm, no matter if it appears false, is to be answered with full force and maximum effectiveness.
Western Animation
- Variant: In the first episode of South Park, in order to help the boys leave the school to find the alien visitors, Chef pulls the fire alarm, claiming it's a fire drill.
