A Burglar's Guide to the City (12 page)

The caveat, however, is that everything I just described also explains why police patrols can be so thin in those neighborhoods. Burglars will, ironically, have more time to get away and are also far less likely to be caught in the act by a police car coincidentally driving by. During an afternoon spent with the Burglary Special Section of the LAPD—a tight crew of veteran detectives assigned to some of the country’s most difficult burglary investigations, from diamond thefts to stolen Picassos—I met an enthusiastic detective third grade named Chris Casey. Over multiple conversations with Detective Casey about burglary in Greater Los Angeles, I filled nearly half of the notebook I had been using at the time—a notebook I’d been expecting to last me through several weeks’ worth of reporting—with stories about returned-merchandise schemes targeting Home Depot, San Fernando Valley pawnshop burglary rings, and even a man whom Casey and his colleagues had dubbed the Copper King, committing industrial-scale retail fraud from a warehouse-size machine shop somewhere in Los Angeles.

One of the high points of Casey’s career, he told me, had come from a bizarre burglary case back in the 1990s, when a prized baseball signed by Hall of Fame pitcher Sandy Koufax was stolen from a home in the Hollywood Hills. Casey and his partner at the time, Detective Mike Fesperman, convinced Koufax to sign another baseball for the bereaved homeowner; it arrived in a protective plastic case. Casey still laughs when he tells the story. But he was unequivocal that—as the theft of a baseball from a home even in the mazelike, twisting streets of the Hollywood Hills shows—burglars go where the money is. Or, the autographed baseball. They’re not going to waste time overthinking something like the local street layout, especially if they just need some quick cash.

Nonetheless, let’s continue with the checklist. Is your house on a cul-de-sac? If so, you’re less likely to be hit, as a burglar can easily be boxed in: the police only have to block one street. Or is your house on a corner? Bad news: houses on corners are more likely to be broken into, as they offer multiple escape routes and clear lines of sight in all directions, allowing burglars to look out for returning residents or a patrolling cop car. Is your house set back farther from the street than the other houses around it—perhaps even within a ring of large bushes or luxuriant trees? If so, you’re more likely to be a target: lush landscaping offers prospective burglars the same privacy as it gives you, wandering around in your robe at night, glass of bourbon in hand. The importance of clear visibility both into and out of your home was strongly emphasized to me when I spoke with Mark Saunders, one of five crime prevention design advisers working full-time with the Surrey Police in England. Saunders’s role is to advise local homeowners on how to discourage the attention of passing burglars, even offering architectural input into how suburban homes and downtown business districts should be designed to deter future crime.

Perhaps your house is close to an on-ramp, bus stop, subway station, or train depot. If so, it is more likely to be burglarized: think of all those strangers coming and going through your neighborhood, given such an easy way to get both in and out. If that just sounds like a cynical attack on public transportation—access to public transit often makes land values
fall
in parts of Los Angeles out of fear of itinerant criminals—take heart from the conclusions of a study written by former U.S. secretary of housing and urban development Henry Cisneros, suggesting that pedestrian-friendly environments are less likely to be targeted by criminals. While his research offers a great argument for rethinking neighborhood design, it also somewhat ominously implies living in a community where everything you do is under surveillance. “To deter crime,” Cisneros explains, “spaces should convey to would-be intruders a strong sense that if they enter they are very likely to be observed, to be identified as intruders, and to have difficulty escaping.”

Further on the checklist, is your house near a school—and thus more likely to receive police patrols or to be carefully watched by paranoid parents? Is a park or a forest nearby—offering a broad swath of darkness into which a burglar can quickly disappear? Does your house have a back door or a garage? Those are common routes of entry for residential burglars. Further, is your back door a sliding glass door? Sliding doors can easily be popped off their tracks without breaking the glass—then just as easily reset upon departure. Perhaps burglars have already broken into your house using this all-but-undetectable method of entry, and you just haven’t noticed yet what they stole.

None of these factors is universal, and you have probably begun to see the contradictions already: a pedestrian-friendly neighborhood might offer a degree of protection from burglary—unless a subway stop or a train station is nearby. Grids are bad—unless you live on a cul-de-sac. Lush landscaping gives burglars more privacy once they’ve broken into your house—unless those trees also seem likely to prevent them from seeing whether the police are on their way. Any golden rule is fallible when it comes to predicting or deterring burglary. To say that walkable, nongridded urban environments are somehow resistant to crime would make absolutely no sense in England. England is hardly a global hot spot for rationally gridded, car-centric towns, yet it boasts the highest rate of burglary in the entire European Union. Italy, another nation not known for its automobile-dependent, gridded megacities, is a close second for residential burglaries (in some years, it is actually worse than England). On paper, they should be nearly burglary-free.

When seen through the eyes of a burglar, many architectural features take on an unexpected dual role. Such things as back doors and side windows often double as potential getaway routes, for example, and experienced burglars will often only target houses with at least two points of exit. Burglars have been known to walk through a house and, before stealing anything at all, unlock another door from within or pop open a window—to ensure a quick escape route.

Even the type of glass in your windows can matter. Do you have storm windows, for example, thus doubling or even tripling the amount of glass a burglar would have to shatter? Multiple panes can make so much noise when broken and pose so much more of a safety risk that good windows can deter even the bravest criminals. Of course, some burglars will carry a roll of tape, throwing up a quick X across the window glass—as if anticipating a hurricane—before shattering it. That way, broken pieces of glass will just hang there, stuck in a web of tape, far less likely to fall and noisily shatter. In one unsettling example, criminologists Cromwell and Olson met a burglar who once worked for a glass-repair company; his specialty had been in expertly replacing whole windowpanes. He, like George Leonidas Leslie, realized that he could use his skill and training for nefarious purposes. He could remove an entire windowpane without causing any visible damage, then reaffix it in its frame on his way back out. You might never even notice that you’d been burglarized.

Now, what about the actual layout of your house? If your house is architecturally unique, or in any way confusing, it can be a less tempting target. But if you live in a suburban development where only two or three original home plans were used, then once a burglar knows these few, he or she knows all the houses—down to where the bedroom closets are and where safes or jewelry cabinets are most likely to be kept. Your neighbor’s weakness is your weakness, too. The same is true for large apartment complexes, where each unit’s floor plan will be repeated multiple times from floor to floor, giving burglars advance knowledge of where to look and greatly decreasing the amount of time they might need to spend inside the building. Repeat burglaries on the same building are so common as to be expectable, and this is sometimes considered proof that burglars will go back to what they already know, familiar with a given house, its floor plan, its entries and exits.

Think that means you’re safe because you live in a unique home or apartment design? All a savvy burglar often needs to do these days is look at the website of your home builder or the property agency in charge of your apartment building to pull up a floor plan; these innocuous online tools ostensibly made for real estate bargain hunters are also amazingly helpful burglars’ guides.

Alternatively, perhaps the burglar has already been inside your house and is already familiar with its layout. Perhaps he or she once delivered a package there, did housework for you (or the previous owner), decorated one of your children’s bedrooms, fixed the plumbing, painted the living room, or performed any number of other home renovations—perhaps even because he or she is one of your friends or family members. Do you keep track of everyone who comes and goes, and do you really know where all your extra sets of house keys have gone?

One burglar interviewed by sociologists Richard T. Wright and Scott Decker in their book
Burglars on the Job
admitted that he used to work as the family gardener at a particular house; he had a duplicate key cut for access to the house, but he had since used the key over and over to reenter the house and steal things. Incredibly, the house had changed ownership twice since he was last employed there nearly ten years ago, but the door lock had never been replaced; this meant that the ex-gardener no longer had any connection to the current homeowners. His methods were equally devious, making his crimes hard to detect. He would steal only one thing at a time, which helped make it all but impossible to tell if something had been stolen or simply misplaced, if your kids had innocently moved it or if your spouse had put it away somewhere without telling you. You might think it’s memory loss or early-onset senility; it’s actually a patient burglar robbing you and your family in slow motion.

A burglar’s typical list of considerations gets slightly more obvious from here. Do you own a dog?
BEWARE OF DOG
signs are, in fact, effective deterrents. Is anyone currently home? If not, are your neighbors around and likely to see something? Do you have a burglar alarm? One burglar explained to Wright and Decker how he would react to burglar alarms—and it certainly wasn’t with the desired level of fear. If anything, alarms signal to burglars that you own something worth protecting and that your house is thus a good target. As that same burglar reasoned to Wright and Decker: “If they got alarms, then you can look for gold and silver and tea sets. If there’s an alarm on the first floor, it probably ain’t hooked to the top floor. If it’s hooked to the top floor, then it ain’t hooked to the attic or it’s not hooked to the exhaust system.” In that case, following a rigorous process of elimination, he would just go in through the exhaust system. As we already saw with Bill Mason, every building is a puzzle for a burglar to pick apart.

At the same time, these considerations also get more subjective, becoming unique to each burglar and to his or her own fears or financial circumstances. Does the burglar need money
right now
? Does he or she have an addiction that needs to be serviced immediately? Incredibly, as many as 70 percent of residential burglaries are estimated to be committed by drug addicts.

Many burglaries are inspired simply by seeing someone leave a house. Think of the burglar who was just standing waiting for a bus one day when he saw a couple walk out of an apartment across the street, carrying suitcases. On a whim, he let the bus pass, waited till the couple had driven off in a taxi, then promptly broke into their place. He hadn’t been looking to commit a crime when he woke up that morning; he didn’t see it coming until the very moment he noticed the couple walking out their front door with their luggage, presumably thinking of anything but home security. But now he knew they weren’t there—so he struck.

Human variability aside, the idea of discovering some secret law of the built environment that will reveal exactly where and when a burglar will strike next has an undeniable appeal. The police in the U.K. think they are close to cracking the code, and they have instituted a remarkable architectural sting operation as a result.

Capture World

You first spot the apartment from afar, thanks to a light still shining in the kitchen window. Walking closer and pulling the brim of your hat down closer to hide your face, you see the top of what appears to be an open laptop computer sitting on the kitchen table. No one is there, working or surfing the Internet; in the minute or two you’ve had to study the place, you haven’t noticed any movement inside, no other lights turning on or off. In fact, it looks as if only one light is on in the whole apartment.

You step up onto a small brick perimeter wall across the street to get a better look—just a low fence framing the yard of a multistory housing block—and sure enough, the laptop is sitting there alone, without an owner to be seen. Astonishingly, a digital camera has been left out on the table next to it, as if someone had been transferring photos from one device to the other, only to leave, maybe for the whole night, maybe just for a quick errand. Either way, no one’s there right now, and that makes this your best opportunity.

Best of all, a living-room window partially hidden behind some bushes is slightly ajar—meaning that whoever lives there has taken zero precautions against burglary and thus practically deserves to be robbed (you tell yourself). It’s instant karma—payback for his or her absentminded naïveté. So it’s now or never. With one final scan of the surrounding street and a quick squint up at other windows in case someone might be watching, you confirm you’re all alone. It’s time to go. You cross the street, pop open the window, and slide in.

It’s almost too easy. Immediately, you head for the bedroom, both to make sure no one is there sleeping and also to grab a pillowcase to stuff everything in. While you’re in there, you notice it’s oddly furnished; it’s almost as if no one really spends a lot of time here, as if it’s just a place to crash, because nothing but a bed and a nightstand are in the room. It feels strange—but you’re in now, so it’s all about getting the job done, then getting out.