The Crime Prevention Website

Last week I visited a detached house in the South-East to carry out a home security survey. I do a few of these throughout the year and like to do them, because it forces me to keep up-to-date with what’s going on in the security world.

In this case the house is over one-hundred years old and is situated in a village in a conservation area. Most of the sliding sash windows are original and in good condition and so are going to stay. The doors too are original and are to remain and so any thought of replacement with enhanced secure versions was never going to be an option.

During my inspection the client informed me that he had a number of small items around the house that were valuable in either financial or sentimental terms. This included items of jewellery and some paper documents.

I also had to take into account that whilst the house stood along a village street of many houses there was a lot of open access into gardens and they were all rather visually excluded from one another. Opportunity for crime was therefore most definitely present and the low level of crime probably had more to do with the remoteness of the village and an absence of burglars to take advantage of those opportunities than anything else.

Although the level of burglary in the area was very low indeed (compared to other places I have visited) it is not completely absent and, in fact, the neighbouring house was broken into only last year.

Having talked the client through my recommendations, which he is going to follow almost to the letter, I raised the matter of a safe. “A safe”, I told him, “is useful when all other defences have been broken down”.

Let’s just think about that for a moment:

Crime prevention for the home is about reducing your chances of experiencing a crime and although you can reduce those chances to very low levels no amount of security can guarantee a total absence of crime. This is because it is impossible to account for every type of thief or ‘MO’ or eventuality, because to do so would result in living a very restricted life indeed. To that end I have to make sure that my recommendations realistically reflect the prevailing crime risks in the local area, which means that I have to study the frequency of crime before I visit the person’s home. I then ensure that sensible precautions against burglary are put in place, but I always recommend a safe as the very last line of defence.

You can list the defensive properties of a home quite easily. Here are just a few of them:

  • Appropriate external and internal lighting to ‘light up’ the intruder and to give evidence of occupancy when there is none
  • Controlled access down the side of a house and into the rear garden using fences/hedges/gates so that it is difficult for the thief to access the more vulnerable and out-of-the-way doors and windows
  • Appropriately locked doors and windows to create a secure shell to the building
  • An alarm system to warn neighbours (or the police) that an intrusion has been made through the first line of defences, which may also include a CCTV system to obtain evidence to capture the intruders at some later time
  • Insurance rated safe (with fire resistance)
  • Marked property (TV, laptop, gaming machines etc) to increase the chances of getting the property back and to help convict the person in possession of it.

You can see that I put the safe next to last in my brief list of defences, simply because it is! Property marking would fall into the ‘last hope’ category if I’d listed them that way.

Now, imagine a burglar has got into your otherwise secured home and the alarm is ringing. The burglar won’t know what the reaction to the alarm will be and probably won’t know if the police are on their way. So he or she has only got a few minutes to grab something and make good their escape.

Anything contained in an insurance rated safe that has been installed correctly, i.e. bolted into a concrete floor and maybe also the wall is not going to be accessible. Don’t forget that the most common items stolen during a burglary are small things like cash, jewellery, credit cards, passports, driving licenses, car keys and so on, all of which can be kept in the safe.

So how many people actually possess an insurance rated safe? Nowhere near enough!   

The data from this website’s Home Security Survey tell me that of those who take the survey only 27% are using a safe of some type and of these only 33% of respondents tell me that this safe is acceptable to their insurers. This means that only 9% of people who complete our home security survey have an insurance rated safe. I know that this figure is a little high, because people who take our survey are the sort of people that will actually do something about it, so my guess is that nationwide less than one in twenty homes have an appropriate safe.  The rest simply hide their stuff around the house, or don’t hide it at all.

A safe is sensible, because it acts as your last line of defence when all else has failed and it protects the very items that are most commonly stolen in a burglary.

If you want to know more please follow this link to SAFES  

If you want to survey your home’s security then follow this link

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