2
Feb
2016
By Calvin at 16:02 GMT, 8 years ago
There’s an article in the Nottingham Post today (online) about a spate of burglaries in the Lenton area of the city; eighteen in just one month.
The police are making the point that two-thirds of them could have been prevented by simply closing and or locking doors and windows. As a consequence greater attention is being paid to the area by both the police and the local authority. Nothing wrong with that, but what caught my eye was some guidance being given at the end of the article, which appears to have come from Nottingham City Council
The advice is this:
- Lock doors with both a Yale lock and mortise lock for full security.
- Lock all windows with keys.
- Ensure bathrooms have extractor fans, so that you don't need to leave the window open to ventilate it.
- Flat roofs can be climbed on, so don't leave any upstairs windows or doors open.
- Keep valuables, and keys, out of sight.
Spotted the problem?
It’s bullet point number one. Saying to someone who has a multipoint locking door that they should lock it with a Yale lock and a mortice lock can be very confusing. The advice should be to make sure they lift the handle, turn the key in the lock and remove the key. Even if the door is a timber door that will take the locks described then what type of ‘Yale’ lock, because there are several models and if the house has been converted into flats/ bedsits then means of escape will have to be taken account of as well. Also, there are mortice deadlocks and mortice sashlocks, there are lever and cylinder driven ones and there are those that meet British/European Standards and those that don’t. And some are acceptable to insurers and some are not! And...what door is being talked about, because locks for final exit doors are often quite different from a back door or French door, for example.
A bullet point is a very limited way of offering home security advice and if you’re tempted to provide advice in this way it is better to keep it very general indeed and not to mention lock brands and types, which may have no relevance to the reader and or the door in question.
I see this problem of inaccurate advice all the time, which is one of the reasons I wrote this website. Giving advice is good, but it’s got to be the right advice for the individual risk. That’s why the highly trained police Crime Prevention/Reduction Officer was such an important role and why it’s been sad to see such a reduction in their numbers.
Source Nottingham Post: http://www.nottinghampost.com/Spate-burglaries-Nottingham-suburb-prompts-new/story-28646596-detail/story.html
