What Actually Stops a Break-In?

Somebody is standing on a sidewalk on a Tuesday afternoon, looking at two houses. In about forty seconds he'll pick one and walk away from the other. This episode is about what he's actually looking at — not what the security industry thinks he's looking at.

Researchers at UNC Charlotte surveyed 422 incarcerated burglars across North Carolina, Kentucky and Ohio and asked them directly how they chose houses and what made them walk away. Their answers are the most useful thing we've read on this subject, and almost nobody has seen them.

Host Mackenzie walks through what the research says in order of what it costs — which means the first several things are free, and the one we'd rank first we don't sell at all.

In this episode:

• Why burglary in America has fallen by two-thirds since 2005, and why you don't feel like it has
• The number that reframes everything: fewer than one in six property crimes ends in an arrest
• Why the useful question isn't how do I catch someone — it's how do I not get chosen
• The five findings from the burglar survey, including what they actually check before committing
• Lock picking is a movie thing: seven in eight forced a door or walked through an open one
• Deterrence vs. evidence — the same camera bought for two different jobs, and why the beautiful wide shot of your front yard is nearly useless
• The sign without the system: what a bluff buys you
• The 13 percent who said nothing would stop them, and why we're telling you about them
• A free half-hour exercise: stand on your own sidewalk and look at your house the way he would. Then do it again after dark.

Home & Safe is from Deluxe CCTV — the practical side of keeping a home, and the people in it, safe. deluxecctv.com

Transcript

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Picture somebody standing on a sidewalk in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon looking at two houses. He's not looking at one with a nice landscaping. He's looking for something much more specific than that, and in about 40 seconds, he's gonna pick one of those two houses and walk away from the other. Here's the thing almost nobody realizes about that moment. It isn't really a story about stopping a break-in. It's a story about a competition you didn't know you'd entered between your house and the one next door. Today we're going to tell you what he's actually looking at. Not what we think he's looking at, what hundreds of people who've done it said when researchers sat down and asked them. This is Home and Safe from Deluxe CCTV, the show about the practical side of keeping a home and the people in it safe. I'm your host, Mackenzie. Today, what actually stops a break-in? Which sounds like the kind of question a company that sells security equipment would answer in a very convenient way. So let's put our bias on the table. We sell cameras and locks and we have an obvious interest in you buying some. What we're going to do anyway is walk through what the research says in order of what it costs, which means the first several things are free and the one we'd rank first we don't sell at all. If that costs us a sale this week, fine. We'd rather be the people who told you the truth about your own front door. Let's go. First, some good news because you will almost never hear this from anybody in our industry. Burglary in America has been falling for 20 years and it is not close. In 2005, the FBI counted about 2.2 million burglaries. In 2024, the estimate was just under 800,000, down roughly two-thirds, and it fell another 8.6% in the last year alone. If you feel like the world has gotten more dangerous, that feeling is being manufactured somewhere because the data has been moving hard in the other direction for two decades. We're not going to spend this episode scaring you. There's no need. And frankly, it's a cheap way to sell a camera. Now the parts that are actually useful. Everybody pictures a break-in happening at three in the morning. A guy in a mask, a broken window, the middle of the night. That is not what the data says. In the FBI's most recent numbers, more residential burglaries happened during daylight hours than at night. Businesses get hit after dark. Houses get hit while you're at work. So the real picture is a stranger walking up to a front door on a Tuesday at 2 in the afternoon when the whole street is empty because everyone is at work or at school. Your house is not most vulnerable while you're asleep in it. It is most vulnerable while you're at your desk. About half of all burglaries happen at homes, 405,776 of them in 2024. Average loss when it happens per the FBI is somewhere around $5,000. And then the number that reframes this entire subject, okay? In 2024, fewer than one in six property crimes ended in an arrest. And burglary sits at the low end of that range, almost nobody gets caught. Sit with that for a second, because it changes what you should be doing. This is not a problem you solve afterward. There is no afterword. Prevention isn't the sensible option here. It's the only option that does anything at all. It also explains something you've probably noticed. Everyone talks about this subject in terms of catching somebody. The footage, the arrest, the moment of justice. That's just not the story the numbers describe. The likely outcome of a break-in at your house is a police report, insurance claim, and nobody identified. So the useful question isn't how do I catch them? It's how do I not get chosen? So, what works? For a long time, the honest answer in this industry was that nobody really knew. People sold things based on what felt protective. Then a group of researchers did something obvious that almost nobody had done properly. They went into prisons in three states and asked 422 burglars how they picked a house. Here is the finding that should change what you do. 83% said that before going in, they would try to work out whether there was an alarm. 83%. That is not a few cautious ones. That is nearly all of them, running the same check every time. And 60% said that if they found one, they would go find a different house. Not stop, go next door. Which means this was never about building a fortress. It is about not being the easiest house on the block. And when they found out mid-attempt, about half stopped right there. Another 31% said they'd sometimes back off. 13% said they keep going no matter what, and we'll come back to that 13% because honesty about it matters. Deterrence isn't prevention in a moral sense. The majority don't stop, they move, which is an argument for something we'll come back to. The best version of this is a street where several houses looked occupied and watched rather than one fortress in a row of easy ones. A lot of people give up on home security because they picture a professional, somebody who watched the house for a week, knows the schedule, brought tools. Against that, nothing feels like enough. That is not who this is. When researchers surveyed 422 convicted burglars, only about 12% said they typically planned in advance. 41% called it spur of the moment. And only about one in eight had ever picked a lock. The rest came in through doors and windows that were open or that gave way. You are not defending against a professional. You are defending against a fast decision. And fast decisions are cheap to change. Lock picking is a movie thing, okay? The reality is a door that wasn't locked or one that was and gave way when somebody put a shoulder into it. And the fifth finding is the list to write down. When they were weighing a target, the things that mattered were how close other people were, whether there was a way out, and signs of increased security, which the researchers spell out as alarm signs. Alarms, dogs inside, and outdoor cameras. One more piece of context that changes how you think about the person on the sidewalk. 51% said the motive was getting drugs. Another 37% said money, often for the same reason. Nobody in this study was casing your jewelry collection. They needed cash quickly, and they were looking for the fastest way to get it with the least resistance. Alright, here's what falls out of all of that in order of price. We're doing it this way on purpose, and you'll notice how far down the list you get before anybody has to buy anything from us. Lock the doors and windows. We know. Obvious, right? But the study says most entries were through openings that were open or that were forced. Every conversation about hardware is irrelevant until the doors are actually locked during the day. And remember, daytime is when houses get hit. The backslider while you're out front gardening, the garage door up all afternoon, the window you open because it was 95 degrees. Make the house look occupied and watched. 83% are running a check. Give the check an answer. A car in the driveway, lights that come on at different times rather than all at once. Mail-in packages that don't pile up anything that says somebody is around and paying attention. Fix the sight lines. They cared about how close other people were and whether there was a way out. So trim back whatever hides your front door and your ground floor windows from the street. That overgrown hedge you've been meaning to deal with is privacy for the wrong person. The most effective home security upgrade we know of costs nothing and we cannot sell it to you. When researchers asked convicted burglars what made them pick one house over another, the thing they cited most was not equipment. It was the proximity of other people. So no one neighbor, somebody who notices a car that does not belong, who takes in a package, who has your number and would actually use it. That does something no camera can do, and it costs one conversation over a fence. We sell security cameras for a living, and we are telling you that this is the first thing on the list. Check the back in the garage. Everything anybody does about this happens at the front of the house because that's the part that we look at. Walk around the back. That's where the door nobody thinks about is, the window that doesn't latch right, the slider with the broken lock you've worked around for two years, and the attached garage is a door into your house that a lot of people treat as furniture. Sound. Dogs inside made their list. Not as a security system, as a signal, because a dog means noise, unpredictability, and attention, which is everything somebody making a fast decision is trying to avoid. If you don't have a dog and you don't want one, an electronic barking alarm triggers on motion at the door and does a surprising amount of that same work. We sell one, it's aimed squarely at the study's biggest finding. Lastly, a camera they can see and a door that holds. Outdoor cameras were on the list of things that moved them along, which leads to the point of this whole episode. And it's the one that makes us a little unusual in our industry. Here is the mistake we watch people make with the security cameras, and it is an expensive one. A camera that nobody can see cannot prevent anything. It can only document what already happened. If you want a camera to actually stop a break-in, it has to be visible. Obvious. Mounted where somebody walking up sees it before they've ever committed to anything. In the research, outdoor cameras were named as one of the things that sent burglars to a different house, but only the ones that they actually noticed. Documenting a break-in and preventing one are two different jobs. Most people buy for one and expect the other. So think about it as two purchases that happen to be the same device. Deterrence wants it seen at the approach, up high, angled at the path to your door. Evidence wants it close enough and sharp enough at that distance to capture a face rather than a shape, working in low light and recording somewhere the footage survives, which matters more than people think given how few of these cases get solved. The mistake we see constantly is a beautiful wide shot of the whole front yard. It looks impressive on a phone and it is nearly useless because everyone in it is 40 feet away and 11 pixels tall. Cover the approach and the entry points. Faces, not landscapes. And where the footage lives is not a technicality. The recording only helps if it still exists when somebody finally asks for it and if you can hand it over without a fight. That means knowing before you buy how long does it keep? Does it keep recording if the internet drops? And can you actually get a clip out of it and send it to somebody? A camera with footage you can't retrieve is just decoration. One more, and we'll be straight with you because people ask us this constantly. The sign without the system. Alarm signs were on the list of things they looked for, so assigned us something. But you're bluffing, and a bluff works until somebody tests it. We won't tell you signage is worthless because the research doesn't say that. We will tell you it's the one item here where you're buying an impression rather than a capability. Know which one you paid for. And the door itself. About one in eight picked a lock, meaning seven in eight didn't bother. They forced or they walked through something open. A solid deadbolt properly installed into the frame, not just the trim, is doing more for you than a camera. That's where our ultra lock deadbolt we mentioned last episode earns its place. It's a real lock, and the keyless part means there's no key under a mat for somebody to find. Not the honest part, because we said we'd get back to it. 13% said they keep going regardless of what they found. Nothing on this list is a force field. What you're doing is shifting the odds, okay? Moving yourself out of the easy category, which the research says redirects most of them and won't redirect all of them. Anyone who tells you a product makes your home impossible to enter is selling you something and it isn't security. If you want help sorting which camera actually covers your entry, that's the conversation we have all day at deluxecctv.com. Send us a photo of the front of your house and we'll tell you where it goes. Frequently, the answer is fewer cameras in better places than what people show up planning to buy. Here's the exercise, and it costs nothing but half an hour. Walk out to the sidewalk and look at your own house the way the person in the cold open would. Not as somebody who lives there, as somebody deciding between yours and the neighbors. Where would you go in? Almost everybody finds the same answer, and it's usually a side or a back out of you. What can you not see from the street and could a neighbor see it? Is there a way in that's currently open right now while you're standing outside? What signals are visible from where you're standing? A camera, a sign, a light, a car? And what does the front of the house say about whether anyone's paying attention? Then go stand at your own front door and look back. That's your camera angle. Not the pretty one from the corner of the roof. Then do the whole thing again after dark because your house is a different house at nine at night. The corner that felt open at noon is black. The light you thought covered the driveway covers about six feet of it. You'll find things on the night pass you cannot find on the day one. Take photos while you're out there, okay? A photo of your own front of the house is oddly clarifying. You see it the way a stranger does rather than as the place that you actually live. People who do this generally come back with two or three things to fix, and most of them are free: a hedge, a habit, a door that's been unlocked every afternoon for six years. Three things to take with you. It's a comparison, not a siege. 60% said they'd simply go to a different house. You're trying not to be the obvious one. They check before they commit. 83% look for a reason not to. Almost everything useful you can do is about making sure that check comes back with an answer. And the cheap things are doing most of the work. Locked doors, clear sight lines, a house that looks lived in and watched. The equipment is an important last layer. I'm McKenzie. This is Home and Safe from Deluxe CCTV. If somebody you know would benefit from this episode, share it with them and come see us at deluxecctv.com. Thanks for listening. Go get your peace of mind.