Law limits local penalties tied to businesses’ requests for help

Cities and towns cannot adopt, enforce, or keep rules that penalize businesses based on the number or frequency of requests for public safety or emergency help, or the value of their damaged or stolen property. The rule covers businesses and other commercial entities at any of their locations. Cities and towns may enforce or keep these penalties if requests are malicious, knowingly false, or frivolous and written notice tells the business that prior requests were of that kind. The restriction does not apply to faulty or repeated nonemergency alerts from alarm systems.