Beating Burglars at Their Own Game

By Catherine Powell

Image courtesy Pixabay

Being a homeowner means always fretting over the security of your home.  The problem with having nice things is there are always some people looking to take them away from you.  In fact, there are those who make their living doing exactly that for a living.  The police refer to them as burglars.  These marauders come in a variety of shapes and sizes.  There are daylight robbers that specialize in breaking into your home while you are at work.  There are cat burglars who creep into homes in the dead of night while you sleep.  Last but not least, there are home invaders that don’t think twice about staging a raid on your domicile while you and your family are wide awake.  The trick to warding off burglars of all stripes is to make your home a hard target.  This week, I will show you how to think like a thief in order to ward off burglars.

How Big of a Target is Your Home?

Face it, burglars aren’t looking to work any harder than they must.  If they did, they’d be doing something else for a living.  While the payoff from a house robbery can be substantial, so can the penalties should the thieves get caught.  This means burglars can be choosers when it comes to deciding which homes to target and which to avoid.  What cagey burglars are after are homes that aren’t bristling with things like alarms, video cameras and reinforced doors.  What they search for are lackadaisical homeowners whose lack of security sense make gaining entry easy.  Unfortunately, this describes all too many homeowners.

Image courtesy Pixabay

Another thing that homeowners seem to be blissfully unaware is that they can all too easily telegraph vulnerabilities to burglars if they aren’t careful.  Think about the last time you went on a vacation.  Did you post your departure and return date on Twitter or Facebook?  Social networks are one of the first things modern burglars scout.  Or, did you fail to tell a friend or neighbor to collect your mail while you were away?  This is like posting a welcome mat for burglars.

Another thing that most homeowners don’t realize is that professional burglars don’t wear black masks.  They usually sport polo shirts emblazoned with the logo of a legitimate business.  That’s right, Sparky, your friendly neighborhood handyman, delivery driver, or pest control specialist could well moonlight as a burglar.  Let them into your home and a week or so later you could come home to find the place burgled.   While he was fixing that short circuit, the electrician could have been casing your home.

What can you do to say, “Burglar Beware?”

Even though I pointed out the fact that burglars are adept at hiding their true profession, that doesn’t mean you should be too afraid to allow workmen into your home.  After all, you don’t want your home falling down around your ears.  The bad news is you need to be aware that the easiest way for a burglar to case your home is from the inside.  The good news is you can use this information to your advantage.

What a Burglar Doesn’t Want to See

Since the last thing a burglar wants to happen is to get caught in the act, there are a number of things you can do to make your home more burglar-resistant. 

Image courtesy PxHere

      1.      Smile for the birdy. – While alarms and guard dogs can be effective deterrents, the one thing that puts the fear of God into burglars are video cameras, especially the kind that stores the results on the cloud and perhaps alerts the homeowner that a break-in is underway.  In fact, in the case of home invaders, well-placed cameras can prevent them from entering the domicile, since they sometimes require the homeowner to open the door in order to gain entry.  For daylight robbers and cat burglar, a well-designed video system is a deal killer, since they don’t want to leave their photo around for the homeowners to hand to the police.  The trick to using video as a deterrent is to make sure the system covers all the first-floor windows and doors.  Leave a blind spot for burglars to exploit and they’ll soon find it.

      2.      How Alarming – While burglar alarms offer some sense of security, many times these systems have vulnerabilities that can be easily exploited by burglars.  For instance, if your system fails to secure upstairs windows, this is the first thing a cat burglar or daylight robber will note.  If you turn your alarm off while you’re home, this is another easily exploited vulnerability that a home invader can turn to his advantage.  While a well thought out alarm system can deter some burglars, again it is only as good as long as there aren’t simple solutions that can be used to thwart it.  (The same goes for dogs who can easily be lured away with a few treats.)

     

Image courtesy PxHere

3.      Gaining Entry – More important to a burglar than alarms are how easy or difficult it’s going to be to gain entry to your home.  This boils down to assessing your windows and doors.  While you may have a deadbolt lock on your front and back door, if you have a sliding glass door that doesn’t have a loop lock and burglar bar, it is child’s play to lever the door off its track.  While many homeowners spend big money on deadbolts,  a burglar can sometimes kick down or cut through a door to gain entry.  If you like to sleep with the windows open at night, you could make a cat burglar take note.  Speaking of windows, most window latches can easily be defeated by either using a pry-bar or by cutting a small hole in the window pane to open the latch.  While this vulnerability causes some homeowners to install burglar bars, this could prove problematic were your home ever to catch fire.  A better bet is to install motion-detecting floodlights and add aftermarket sash locks that require a key to open.  (This way even if you can’t find the key in the event of a fire, you can still break the window to escape.)

      4.      Who has the time? – Since most burglars prefer to hit a home when the owners are away, installing light timers and television simulators that help make it look as though someone is at home is an inexpensive deterrent.  So too is avoiding the boo boo of telegraphing the fact that you aren’t at home on social networks. (To be effective, this last tactic has to be explained to your children as well, since burglars can zero in on their posts as well as yours.)

      5.      How smart is your home? – With the advance of the Internet of Things (IoT), there are a myriad of smart-devices that can be used to help thwart burglars.  Smart-sensors and IoT-enabled motion detecting cameras can be configured to monitor your home while you’re away.  If you have a smart-home, make sure all the devices including your wireless router come equipped with both a battery backup as well as embedded security if you don’t want to wind up having your smart-home hacked.

Catherine Powell is the owner of A Plus All Florida, Insurance in Orange Park, Florida.  To find out more about saving money on your homeowner’s insurance, check out her website at http://homeownersinsuranceorangeparkfl.com/