Home Security Checklist
Remember, burglary is primarily a crime of opportunity, and your basic goal in crime prevention is to discourage the criminal. Make the burglar believe there are easier targets than your house. In more than 90 percent of home burglaries, the home was entered through a door or window, many times the door or window is unlocked. The following are some of the most important and the least-expensive preventive measures you can take to secure your home.
1. Trim the bushes and trees that are close to your house to make it difficult for anyone to hide while breaking in and to make it harder to climb to a second story.
2. Store any ladders or tools that could help a burglar gain access to your home in a locked tool shed, garage or in the basement.
3. Do not display your family's name on mailboxes or doormats. With your name and address, burglars can acquire your phone number and simply call to see if anyone is at home.
4. Always lock your doors and windows, even if you're just running outside and especially if you'll be working in the yard, garage or outbuildings.
5. Give extra protection to any doors that are out of sight. Put a hardened-steel padlock on basement doors.
6. Make sure all doors leading outdoors are at least 1: inches thick and solid, without large (and sometimes flimsy) decorative panels that could be kicked in and crawled through.
7. Check the door frames of outside doors to ensure that they are sturdy and well-constructed.
8. Have deadbolt locks on all doors leading outside and on the door from your garage to your house. The locks should have a throw (the part that fits into the door frame) of at least one inch. The strike plate (the part that attaches to the door frame) should be attached with three-inch screws.
9. Locks on doors should be placed at least 40 inches away from windows, glass panels and other openings such as mail slots and pet doors in order to make it hard for a burglar to reach in and unlock your door.
10. For sliding-glass doors, place a metal bar or thick wood stick the length of the panel in the track of the sliding door.
11. Lock your windows shut whenever you leave your house; close and lock your first-floor windows before retiring to upstairs bedrooms.
12. "Pin" double-hung windows. Drill a quarter-inch hole through the inside window frame and into the outside frame on each side of the window. Insert a nail or metal pin in the hole, leaving a quarter-inch out so it can be removed easily from the inside. This prevents the window from being raised high enough to crawl through.
13. Cover basement window wells with locked-well covers, especially the emergency-exit wells. These are usually available in fiberglass, plastic and steel mesh.
14. Install exterior motion-sensor lights. These lights will automatically come on when motion is detected. They are inexpensive and you can retrofit your existing lights by adding sensors. Some manufactures have an outdoor/indoor motion-sensor light control with a lamp module that not only turns on the exterior light when motion is sensed, but turns on an interior light as well, giving the impression that someone inside has been alerted.
15. Never leave keys outdoors. Burglars know where to find "secret" hiding places.
16. Use timers to make it look and sound as if someone is at home. The timers can turn lights and radios on and off at specific times. Like the rest of the security market, timers are getting more sophisticated. Some timers allow you to program randomly patterned times for several days.
18. If you'll be away on vacation or an extended business trip, stop the mail and newspaper; make arrangements for someone to mow the lawn, shovel the snow and put out the garbage. Put lights and radios on a timer. Radios should be set to a talk program to give the impression that people are home. Keep your telephone ringer turned down so anyone listening from outside would not hear it. If you have a telephone answering machine, the message should not reflect that you are not at home. Better yet, if you'll be gone some time, turn your answering machine off and get call forwarding to your relative's or friend's house. Lock all doors and windows. Unplug the electric garage-door opener.
