Home & Safe

After a house is burgled, the risk of another burglary increases for that house and the houses around it. The effect is strongest in the first days, fades over the following weeks, and reaches down the street. Researchers in England found it by borrowing the statistics epidemiologists use to track how a disease spreads, and the same pattern has since turned up in the United Kingdom, the United States, the Netherlands, and Australia.

That sounds like bad news, but a measurable pattern is one you can act on. This episode starts the morning after a break-in and treats it as information: where your house is weak, which houses near you are at higher risk for a while, and why the person best placed to act on that is often the household that was just burgled. 

Host Mackenzie works through the research, why police have struggled to use it, and what to do in the first 48 hours and the weeks after. Almost all of it is free.

In this episode:

• Why a house that was just burgled is at higher risk rather than lower, and the comparison that makes the opposite assumption feel true
• What the person who broke in now knows that they did not know before
• What research from The Hague and from England found about who comes back, and how they tend to get in
• Why the way they got in is the most useful piece of information the break-in gave you
• The near-repeat pattern: how far it reaches, how long it lasts, and why it is worth acting on even though the risk stays fairly low
• The two explanations researchers consider for why burglary spreads down a street
• What happened when police departments tried to interrupt the pattern, including the first randomized trial in the United States
• Why the delay between a burglary and any outside response eats most of the window, and who is actually inside it
• The first 48 hours in order: close the way they came in, account for every key, code, and remote, pull the footage, and document before you tidy
• Why blocking the entry point comes before photographing it
• Who pays for the repair if you rent, if you own, and if you have neither insurance nor a landlord
• What to tell your neighbors, and the one question to ask about their own cameras
• What research says about how long a burglary affects the people who live there, and the one thing associated with recovering faster

The week after a break-in is when many people buy security equipment. We know that, because it is when a lot of people buy it from us. It is also a strange time to be deciding, with the household under stress and the repair still waiting on an insurer. So we suggest waiting until week two and sitting down with the incident recording, if you have one. It shows the actual approach, the actual entry point, and the actual light at that hour. A figure at the edge of a wide frame tells you what to change. Nothing at all tells you where the next camera should go. A decision made from that footage with a clear head is usually a good one. A decision made from a catalog on day two usually isn’t.

Sources named in this episode: Wim Bernasco’s research in The Hague, Kate Bowers and Shane Johnson’s work in England, including “The Burglary as Clue to the Future” (2004), a 2007 comparison across four countries, the Baltimore County and Redlands randomized trial, Arizona State University’s Center for Problem-Oriented Policing, a 2024 systematic review in Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, and the Department of Justice’s Office for Victims of Crime.

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

In a growing number of American cities, a home alarm going off is not, on its own, enough to send the police. Somebody has to confirm there is a real emergency first. The siren still sounds, and the alarm company still calls, but the last step, the one most people assumed was guaranteed, has changed.

Most people paying for an alarm have no idea whether that is how it works where they live. This episode is about why cities made the change, what it means for how you set up your home, and why the camera you may already own could be the thing that decides whether anybody comes.

Host Mackenzie works through the policy, the numbers behind it, what police count as confirmation, and what to do, and not do, when your own alarm goes off. None of it requires buying anything.

In this episode:

• Verified response, the policy Salt Lake City adopted in 2000, and the other cities that have followed it
• What actually happens between your sensor tripping and a dispatcher’s screen, and where an unverified alarm lands in the queue
• How to find out what your own city does, and why you want to know before the day you need it
• What the Department of Justice’s own guide for police says about how many alarm calls turn out to be false
• The three causes of false alarms, and the one that accounts for most of them by a wide margin
• The counterintuitive result from Salt Lake City, and why we are careful about what it does and does not prove
• The cost to your street that almost nobody mentions
• The three ways an alarm can be confirmed, and what a dispatcher does and does not count
• The exception that matters most: if you are home and calling for help, none of this applies to you
• The police advice repeated more than any other on this subject, and why people keep ignoring it
• Look first, call second, and what to tell a dispatcher that is worth more than any amount of alarm history
• The common false-alarm fixes that cost little or nothing
• Why your camera becomes the second signal, and the three things from earlier episodes that suddenly carry real weight
• The test to arrange with your alarm company, and the number it gives you

Many of our cameras can be viewed on your phone with no subscription, which is exactly what this episode is about. What we do not sell is the service that does the looking for you. That is a monitored alarm; it is a monthly fee, and plenty of people reasonably prefer it. A camera lets you confirm. It does not make it certain that you will, because you may be in a meeting, driving, or asleep in another time zone. If the moment that matters is likely to be one where you cannot look, paying somebody else to is not a failure of self-reliance. It is matching the setup to how you actually live. The one thing we would push back on is paying for that service and assuming it means police will come. It means somebody will check. Sources named in this episode: the Department of Justice’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, police departments in Salt Lake City, Milwaukee, Seattle, Los Angeles, and Dallas, York Regional Police, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Home & Safe is from Deluxe CCTV — the practical side of keeping a home, and the people in it, safe. deluxecctv.com 

You hear something outside at night and go to the window. You can barely see anything, and not because it is dark out there. Your porch light is on, and that is the problem. Your eyes have adjusted to the bright patch by the door, the glass is throwing your own lit room back at you, and you are standing next to a working light seeing less than you would with no light at all.

This is one of the few episodes where our commercial interest is weak, because we do not sell lighting. It is also a subject where the research is stronger than most of what gets recommended for home security, and stranger than the usual explanation suggests. We sell cameras, we do not sell lights, and by the end of this episode we are telling you to fix the light first.

Host Mackenzie works through what the studies found, the point where they stop applying to a single house, and the cheap change that can often do more for a camera owner than a better camera.

In this episode:

• What a systematic review of street lighting studies spanning about four decades found, and why the method matters as much as the figure
• The randomized trial in New York City public housing, and why random assignment is so rare in this field
• Why the effect showed up more strongly for property crime than for violent crime
• Why the British and American studies came out so far apart, and how the estimate changed when the review was updated
• The limit that matters most to you: all of this research is about street lighting, and none of it measured one brighter fixture over one front door
• What light at your own house does reliably get you, starting with seeing who is at the door before you open it
• Why being able to assess your yard from a window removes one of the few genuinely risky things an ordinary household does
• Disability glare, and why past a certain point more light helps you see less
• Why professional lighting guidance favors even light over bright light, and what that means for a single floodlight over the door
• The two-minute test after dark: stand where a stranger would approach from, and look back at your own house
• How a bright patch next to a dark path forces your camera to choose, and why a light behind someone gives you an outline
• What infrared quietly takes away, and why the color of a jacket is often the most useful part of a description
• The number on a camera spec sheet that almost nobody looks at
• Why a motion light is good at getting your attention and awkward for a camera

Then the part that does not add up. When the review pooled those studies, crime fell during the day about as much as it fell at night. If lighting worked only by making people visible after dark, that should not happen, because a street lamp does nothing for a Tuesday afternoon. The researchers’ own reading is that better lighting may work on the place rather than the person, signaling that a street is cared for, drawing more people onto it, and strengthening the attention residents already pay. That is an inference rather than a measured mechanism, and we say so. It also changes how you might think about what your own property signals.

Sources named in this episode: Brandon Welsh and David Farrington’s systematic review for the Campbell Collaboration (2008) and its 2022 update with Stephen Douglas, the randomized lighting trial in New York City public housing led by Aaron Chalfin (2021), the Illuminating Engineering Society, and the Federal Highway Administration.

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

For a few hours on one evening a year, households do the opposite of everything this show usually recommends. You want strangers walking up and down your street. You put something on the front steps to attract attention. Then you open the front door to people you have never met, over and over, in the dark.

That is not a security failure. It is the holiday, and we are not going to tell you to stop. What changes for those few hours is that the ordinary signals your household runs on stop working, because everything that would normally look unusual is exactly what everyone is doing.

Host Mackenzie covers the people coming to your door, the house you leave behind when you go out with your own kids, and the statistics the security industry publishes every October, most of which do not hold up.

In this episode:

• What the National Fire Protection Association actually records about decoration fires, and the two numbers in it that tell you nearly everything about avoiding one
• Why an open flame on a front step next to dried cornstalks would look obviously wrong on any other night of the year, and why nobody flags it on this one
• The indoor version at a party, where crepe paper and a long costume meet a hot bulb in a room with more people in it than usual
• Why exits are not a place for decorations, indoors or out, which is the same argument we made in episode seven about bars and key-both-sides deadbolts
• The walk down your own path before dark, looking for the cord, the step you stopped noticing, and what a fog machine does to visibility for someone who cannot see over it
• The genuinely odd combination at the center of the night: you dress the front of your house to say come up here, and then you leave
• Why locking up matters most on the night it feels least necessary, when you have been in and out of that door forty times
• Dressing the inside as well as the outside, and why a lamp in a room people actually sit in does more than the porch light
• The bowl you should be willing to lose, and the most likely property loss of the evening
• Why every behavior that normally earns a second glance is what the whole street is doing, and why the people who would do the noticing are occupied
• Why asking somebody what they are doing never crosses your mind on this one night, and what that does to the threshold for anyone reporting anything
• The point where we are reasoning rather than citing, and why we are telling you which is which
• The other way to read all of it: more potential witnesses on the street than on any night of the year
• Motion alerts, the mute that goes on at 6 on the 31st, and the number of people who never turn it back on
• Why your footage will be poor that night, and the free camera test you get on November 1 that you cannot buy any other way

We also went looking for the crime evidence, and we cannot give it to you. The figures you will find on nearly every security company’s website in October trace back to a handful of insurance press releases from around 2016 to 2018. The same insurer has been quoted at three different numbers in three different years. A 60% burglary spike sits next to a 24% overall spike in the same article. And insurance claims are not crime statistics anyway, since they measure what people choose to claim above a deductible that removes most of what actually happens on Halloween. We are not saying those figures are wrong. We are saying we could not verify them, and a number we cannot verify is not one we are going to read to you as though it were settled. There is one Halloween figure that is properly measured, and it has nothing to do with crime. It is about children walking in the road between 5 and 8 in the evening, and it is the most useful safety thing in this episode.

Sources named in this episode: the National Fire Protection Association, and a 2019 analysis of federal crash data published in JAMA Pediatrics.

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

Somebody has broken into your property. You call the police, and fairly early in that conversation they ask whether you have cameras. If you can say yes, it feels like the good part of a bad morning. Then the follow-up questions start. Was a camera pointed at that part of the property? Was there enough light at that hour to see a face? Was the person close enough to the lens? How long does your system hold footage?

Most people find out they don’t know the answers all at once, on a terrible morning, after years of believing this was handled. Owning a camera and owning usable footage are two different things, and the gap between them is where this episode lives.

Host Mackenzie goes through what the research says a camera is worth after a crime, the failures that turn a recording into nothing, and an afternoon of fixes that require no new equipment. We sell security cameras, so you can expect us to argue that one is worth having. We think the evidence supports that. We also think almost everything that would improve yours costs nothing.

In this episode:

• The one study that measured this properly, covering 251,195 crimes on the British railway network, where footage existed in 45% of cases and was judged useful in 29%
• What happened where useful footage existed, and why the picture for theft without it is as bleak as it is
• Why we are not handing you a figure from a British railway network and letting you assume it describes your driveway, including what the author himself says about private homes
• Deterrence and evidence are two different jobs, and a camera positioned well for one is usually positioned badly for the other
• The benefits that never appear in any crime statistic and are the ones households actually use, including the disputed insurance claim and the noise at 2 a.m.
• Why a camera is quite often a device for finding out that nothing happened, and why that is worth saying out loud
• The five failures that separate footage that exists from footage that works: direction, distance combined with width, light in both directions, an uncertain time window, and retention
• Why the instinct to fit as much of your property into the shot as possible is the instinct that ruins the recording, and why small is the one problem that cannot be fixed afterward
• The failure that did not come from the study but shows up constantly in home systems, where motion-triggered recording starts a second or two into the event
• The retention arithmetic nobody does before a holiday, when a system holds seven days, and you were gone for 10
• Why most camera owners have never watched their own footage under the conditions that actually matter, and the free test that takes about 15 minutes tonight
• The walk test, and the gap between whether you can see somebody and whether an officer can describe what they were wearing
• The clock on your recorder, the detection zone that ignores the pavement and therefore ignores the person walking up it, and the export function nobody finds until somebody asks for a file
• Why roof-level mounting gives you the tops of heads, and the height that gives you faces
• What to do the same day something happens, before the week between reporting it and anybody asking to see it

Then the part camera marketing works hardest to obscure. There are three different things a camera can do, and they are not the same job. Seeing that somebody is there works at almost any distance, and almost any camera can manage it. Recognizing, where you can tell an adult from a child or make out a light jacket, needs closer. Identifying, meaning a face somebody could match or a plate somebody could read, needs dramatically closer than most people expect. The measurement underneath all three is not megapixels. It is how many pixels fall on the subject, which depends on resolution, the width of the scene the camera covers, and how far away the person is. Which is why the number on the box tells you almost nothing by itself. A high-resolution camera aimed wide at a distance can put fewer pixels on a face than a modest camera watching a doorway. There is an international standard that defines these categories and the pixel density each one requires, and professional installers design to it. None of it is proprietary. It is just not in the advertising, because the advertising would rather say 4K. Some homes have four cameras all doing the first job and nothing doing the third, and that is the configuration everybody describes afterward as useless.

Source named in this episode: Matthew Ashby, “The Value of CCTV Surveillance Cameras as an Investigative Tool,” European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research, 2017.

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

When the power goes out, the first thing you notice is usually the sound. The refrigerator stops. Whatever was humming in the next room stops. The house gets quieter than you knew it could be. Then the mental inventory starts: flashlight, phone, batteries, how long the food will keep.

Your security system is somewhere on that list, and most people have no idea where. We sell equipment that runs on electricity, so this episode is about what happens when there’s none. We also went and checked whether crime actually rises during an outage, which is the premise behind most of what our industry publishes during storm season. It mostly doesn’t.

Host Mackenzie goes device by device through what stops and what keeps going, then through what the research says, then through a list of fixes that are almost entirely free.

In this episode:

• Why a wired camera system stops the instant the power does, cameras, recorder, and switch alike, which is our own equipment and our own thing to say out loud
• Why battery cameras feel reassuring until you remember what they talk to, since the router and the modem have no battery and nothing reaches your phone
• The backup battery in your alarm panel, why it is measured in hours rather than days, and why the one installed six years ago no longer holds what it did when it was new
• The brief flicker that is arguably worse for your equipment than a two-day outage, and what happens to a drive when a recorder loses power mid-write
• The manual release on your garage door and your gate, why you find it in daylight, and what a released garage door can do from the outside
• The free inventory that takes about 10 minutes, and why flipping your own breaker on a Saturday afternoon tells you something no manual will
• What researchers found in the Texas rolling blackouts of February 2021, where the outages raised neither overall crime nor any single category measured
• Why disaster researchers have called widespread looting a disaster myth for decades, the difference between a disaster and a civil disturbance, and why New York in 1977 went one way while the same city in 1968 and 2003 went another
• Where that research is genuinely contested, including the field survey after Hurricane Hugo that found stores stripped down to the fixtures and the carpets
• The two narrow risks a 2023 systematic review did identify, which turn out to describe the same house on the street, plus the Texas finding about what dropped even though crime didn’t
• The week not to post on social media that your street has been dark for three days, and why a household quietly becoming informal is the actual exposure
• What the Department of Agriculture says about a closed refrigerator, a full freezer, and a half-empty one, plus the well pump and the gas furnace with the electric blower
• The utility program worth a phone call today if anyone in your household depends on powered medical equipment

Our main business is wired camera systems, and a wired system stops when the power does. We are not going to dress that up. The thing that fixes it is an uninterruptible power supply, a box with a battery in it that sits between the wall and your recorder, and it is the one purchase in this episode we would actually defend. We do not sell one. It also covers the flickers that corrupt drives, which is the failure most people never see coming. There is one thing in our own catalog that genuinely fits this topic, and we spend more time on why it probably is not for your house than on why it might be.

We also published the full outage dataset behind this episode, all 50 states ranked by hours without power and by how often outages happen, built from Energy Information Administration numbers. Free to read, free to download, no email form: https://deluxecctv.com/power-outages-by-state/

Sources named in this episode: the Energy Information Administration, a study of the February 2021 Texas blackouts, the Disaster Research Center, a 2023 systematic review of the social impacts of power outages in North America, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and the Department of Agriculture.

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

Picture a house with every possible protection. Bars on the windows. A deadbolt on the front door that takes a key from both sides, so nobody can break the glass, reach through, and turn the latch. That house is genuinely harder to break into. Then one night something ordinary goes wrong, a space heater or a pan or old wiring in a wall, and every window is a cage, and the front door needs a key that is hanging on a hook somewhere in a house filling with smoke.

The Tennessee State Fire Marshal's Office recorded 12 residents who died in home fires between 2012 and 2016 where security bars were a contributing factor. Ten of them were in one house in Memphis. Those were not careless people. They had thought about their safety and spent money on it, and they were protected against the wrong thing.

Host Mackenzie works through the gap between feeling safe and being safe, using the front door as the place that gap shows up most clearly. We sell locks and cameras, and most of this episode is about why buying more of them usually is not the answer.

In this episode:

• The three groups every security product falls into, including the ones that work until you quietly stop doing the free things that were already working
• Why careful, sensible people buy against the wrong problem, and why the version of burglary most of us picture came from television
• What the FBI counted in 2024: residential break-ins a little over 405,000, with daytime ones outnumbering after-dark ones, in the lowest national burglary rate on record going back to at least 1961
• The three questions worth asking about anything in your house, including anything you bought from us
• Why three or four in 10 burglaries involve no force at all, which means the hardware was never the thing that failed
• What the Bureau of Justice Statistics found about no-force burglaries where somebody was home, including the 18% where a resident simply let the offender in
• The utility company scripts police departments around the country describe almost word for word, and why they often arrive in pairs
• The free response that works better than any hardware we make, and what a real professional does when you use it
• Why the chain latch is worse than most people realize, since it mounts into the same thin trim with the same short screws as everything else
• A free walk around your own house: the sliding door you may be able to lift out of its track, the pet door, the gate latch anyone can reach over, and the three places everybody hides a spare key
• The $4 fix, the $15 to $30 one, and how to check whether your deadbolt throws far enough to reach anything
• Why a key-both-sides deadbolt is generally not permitted on a main exit door, and what the residential building code requires of any door you need to get out of
• The one-minute test on a barred bedroom window, why you do it in the dark, and why children especially should practice it
• Florida's building code, Miami-Dade Fire Rescue's wording on emergency releases, and the retrofit answer for anyone who has real reasons to want bars

There is one thing we sell that belongs in this conversation, and the reason is not the one in the marketing. A keypad deadbolt opens from the inside by hand, with no key involved on the way out, which gives you what people buy a key-both-sides lock for without the thing that makes it dangerous. It also retires every spare key you have ever handed out. The feature that matters most is the dullest one on the spec sheet, auto-lock, because it addresses the statistic that actually describes most break-ins rather than the exciting one. And here is the limit. A smart lock does not fix your door frame. Bolted to the same thin trim with the same short screws, it fails exactly the way the old one did, while telling you on your phone that it is locked. We would rather you upgrade the screws and skip the lock than the reverse.

Sources named in this episode: the Tennessee State Fire Marshal's Office, the FBI, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the Florida Building Code, Miami-Dade Fire Rescue, and the Harris County Fire Marshal's Office.

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

Detectives in Glendale, California, reviewed security footage after a run of residential burglaries, looking for the moment someone came through the door. There was no black screen, no static, no frozen frame, no timestamp jumping forward. The recording ran smoothly and continuously and was entirely ordinary, right up until somebody opened a drawer and found it empty. The sergeant's word for it was seamless.

This episode is about burglars knocking wireless cameras offline, which you have probably seen described online as Wi-Fi jamming. A fair amount of what is being said about it is wrong in ways that happen to be convenient for companies like ours. We sell wired cameras that record locally, which is the one setup this attack genuinely cannot reach. We are going to spend most of this episode explaining why that still should not be the reason you buy anything.

Host Mackenzie separates two different attacks that share one name, works through what the police cases do and do not establish, and lands on a router setting that stops the common one for free.

In this episode:

• Two attacks sharing one name, why they are not equally common or equally fixable, and why neither one involves a password or a stolen anything
• The true radio jammer, which is illegal in the United States under two separate sections of the Communications Act, with no exemption for a business, a classroom, a residence, or a vehicle
• The cheaper version in most of the videos you have seen, which forges a single administrative message your camera has no way to verify, on hardware that costs about $30
• Why your phone shrugs this off and an outdoor camera cannot, since Wi-Fi is its only route to the recorder, the cloud, and the alert on your phone
• The $600,000 fine the Federal Communications Commission issued in October 2014 after a hotel used that same forged disconnect on guests' personal hotspots
• What Glendale police went public with in March 2024, the Los Angeles case disclosed two weeks earlier, and why CNET's read of the same public record came out considerably more cautious than the coverage
• The structural reason this is so hard to confirm, since a broken window leaves glass, a pried door leaves tool marks, and radio waves stop existing the moment somebody switches the device off
• The targeting profile the reported cases share, and why it looks nothing like the ordinary break-in from episode two
• The first thing to check, for free: whether your camera writes footage to a card or a box in your house rather than only to the cloud
• The alert most camera platforms offer, and almost nobody switches on, which turns a silent attack into a noisy one
• Protected Management Frames, the router setting that stops the forged disconnect cold, why it is already on if you run WPA3, and why optional beats required in a house with older equipment
• Everything a jammer still does not do, including the deadbolt, the $4 of strike plate screws from episode four, the window latch, and the dog

Our commercial interest here, stated plainly so you can weigh what we say against it. We sell wired cameras that connect to a recorder inside your house via cable, with no wireless link for anyone to interfere with. That is a real structural advantage against this specific attack, and it is still not a good enough reason to buy a system. If jamming is what made you reach for your wallet, you have been sold a feeling rather than a risk assessment. There is also an answer we do not sell at all: cellular backup, and we go through its one real drawback.

Sources named in this episode: the Federal Communications Commission and the Communications Act; the Glendale Police Department; the Los Angeles Police Department; CNET's analysis of the public record; and the 802.11w Wi-Fi standard.

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

The notification says delivered. There's a photo attached, taken from about waist height, showing a box on your step. You get home an hour later, and there's nothing there.

Most of what you'll read about that moment is a number: 58 million packages, 120 million, $14 billion. Pick a figure, pick a source, and you can find something that sounds authoritative. We sell security equipment, and we went looking for the real one. We couldn't find it. Neither could the Postal Service's own auditors.

Host Mackenzie starts with what isn't known, then works through what the research actually shows about how this crime happens. It turns out to be a matter of sightlines and distance rather than anything our industry sells hard.

In this episode:

• Why package theft barely exists as a countable crime: the FBI doesn't separate it from other theft, the Postal Service files it together with mail theft, and retailers, carriers, and police don't share what they collect
• The part nobody enjoys saying: a share of reported thefts are packages that were misdelivered, never shipped, or occasionally not stolen at all.
• The figure we do trust, and it's smaller than you'd expect: an average loss of about $106, from a survey where people's fear of package theft ran higher than their fear of burglary
• What 67 surveillance videos showed when criminologists went through them frame by frame, including the 73% who never checked whether anyone was home, and why the authors call their own recommendations provisional
• The one number that should decide where your boxes land, and why nothing at all was recorded beyond 51 feet from the curb
• Why this is nothing like the burglary decision covered in episode two, where 83% of offenders checked for an alarm before committing
• The free carrier settings most people never turn on, and what a postal official told the Inspector General about the one variable that actually matters
• Parcel lockers, hold for pickup, and redelivery: the options where the box never sits outside in the first place.
• The retailer loss prevention manager who told the Inspector General that his own company's branded boxes are taken more often said so repeatedly and was overruled by marketing.
• Two limits worth knowing before you spend anything: retailers can override your delivery instructions, and no carrier is obliged to use a lock box you put out
• The 10 states that have passed package theft laws since 2019, why California isn't one of them, and what Penal Code 484 does instead
• Why criminologists call those felony upgrades largely symbolic, and why we're still telling you to file a police report
• Who to report to, in the order that actually gets you made whole, and the one situation where this is a federal matter rather than a local one

Regarding the cameras, we had to reconcile two pieces of evidence that appear to disagree. Those 67 videos all came from doorbell cameras, which means every theft in that dataset happened in front of one. But when Stickle and Jackson surveyed 309 people who admitted to stealing packages and asked what would stop them, a doorbell camera scored 4.54 out of five, beaten only by the homeowner being home. The resolution lies in how the researchers split the sample: people with four or more thefts behind them rated the same deterrent well below that of one-time offenders. A visible camera turns away the opportunist as they walk past. It does not turn away the person doing this every week. You're buying a filter, not a wall. And tied near the top of that same list, level with a neighbor: a lock box on the porch. We don't sell lock boxes. We're telling you about them anyway.

Sources named in this episode: the United States Postal Service Office of Inspector General white paper on package theft (May 2025), Stickle et al. in Criminal Justice Studies, Stickle and Jackson in Crime Science (July 2026), a 2022 study in the American Journal of Criminal Justice, Consumer Reports, and USPS, FedEx, and UPS delivery documentation.

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

You come out on a Tuesday morning and the car door isn't quite shut. The glove box is hanging open, the papers that live in it are on the floor mat, and the console is open too.

So you check: wallet, cash in the cup holder, sunglasses.

Nothing is missing.

You push the console shut and go to work. By lunchtime, you've mostly stopped thinking about it.

That they took nothing is not the good news in this story. It's the part that should have your attention.

Host Mackenzie follows one sequence of events from a car in a driveway, through a garage, to a door most people have never examined. It ends with the cheapest fix we've ever recommended on this show: a few dollars, about ten minutes, available at any hardware store, and not something we sell.

In this episode:

• Why a parked car on a residential street is closer to a row of handles than a locked box. Fremont Police Department calls this a crime of opportunity and notes that cars may be tried at random, whether or not anything valuable is visible inside.
• The habit many people have backwards: locking the car when they walk away from it in public, then leaving it unlocked in their own driveway overnight.
• The honest inventory of what's already inside your car, including registration and insurance information, a spare key, or a gate fob.
• Why the fact that nothing was taken may be the detail that matters most.
• Why two events may never get connected when nothing happens next that night or even that week.
• Why replacing a garage remote may not solve the underlying problem, and what the learn button on the opener motor does instead.
• Why a garage should be treated as an entry point to the home, not simply another room.
• One thing worth checking tonight: whether your garage is included in your alarm system.
• Why the door between your garage and the rest of your home deserves the same attention as any other exterior entry door.
• How this episode fits with episode two: one burglary pattern begins with an empty house. This one begins with an unlocked car. Two patterns, two different opportunities to intervene.
• The one alert in this episode you'd actually want waking you at 2:10 in the morning, and why the answer isn't going downstairs to investigate.
• And the recommendation we'd put above everything else: check the screws holding the strike plate on your doors.

On many doors, short screws secure the strike plate primarily to the trim or door jamb. Seattle Police Department crime prevention guidance recommends longer screws that reach the framing behind it. Check the hinge side while you're there.

A box of screws and a screwdriver.

It may be the least impressive-sounding recommendation we've ever made, but it's one of the simplest ways to strengthen a vulnerable point in a door.

Sources named in this episode: Fremont Police Department, Seattle Police Department crime prevention guidance, and FBI incident data analyzed by Everytown Research.

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

deluxecctv.com