Living Area - Last Line of Defense

If you've been keeping up with my series to date, we've gone over quite a few pointers on creating a burglar proof home. If you start a DIY project to burglar proof your home and you stop at the door and window layer, you're probably stopped 99% of the attempts from people to steal your stuff. 99% may not be good enough, however. One of the more disturbing trends, especially in places like the Southwest of the US, is the increase in the number of home invasions.

By this point in time, if you've followed my other tips a prospective burglar would have had to run a gauntlet of nosy neighbors, landscape obstacles, limited points of entry and Myst-like locks on the door.  If that isn't enough to deter someone, well a little insurance and diversion are in order.  We'll look at insurance and diversion.

One of the first things you can do is engrave or put some sort of identifier on your stuff like TV's, DVD players, Stereo's etc. You can't really hide stuff like that, so the next best thing is to make it easy to identify. Some people advocate putting things like your SSN on your stuff, but that's just crazy. We have enough problems with identity theft, do you really want to give the guy who steals your suff access to something like your SSN?

Laptops are a prime target for burglars.  They're small, portable and you can sell them anywhere.  You might consider putting software on your system that will give you a GPS location of where the computer is when it connects to the Internet. LoJack for Laptops seems to be the industry standard, or at least one of the more popular services out there.

The key here is to make it as hard as possible for someone to be anonymoous and get away with your stuff. You might also consider redirection and confusion. Most people with jewlery keep it in a nice woood-carved box. That's usually the first place theives look. So why make it easy on them. Keep good looking junk jewlery in the box and use diversion safes to keep criminals from finding your good stuff.

One of the more unreliable forms of evidence in a trial is an eyewitness. You can have 20 people at a crime scene and get 20 different stories about what happened. One of law enforcement's greatest tools is the security camera. Cops have them everywhere now, in their cars, in stations, heck even in their Tasers. You, too, can harness the awesome power of the Cybernetic Eye, to keep your stuff safe. Or catching the guy if all of your precautions come to naught. You might get your stuff back, even if you don't, you'll still get revenge on the punk and that's a heck of a lot better than being a helpless victim.

Depends. A lot of that is determined by how desperate you are burglar is to get at your stuff. Ultimately the best you can do is make it as hard as possible for burglar to get in, make it easy to identify your stuff, and as much as possible generate video or photographic evidence of whomever breaks into your home. By the final stage, rather than deter people you're just making sure that you get your stuff back and that the guilty parties are charged and brought before a judge.

Many of these tips also serve when defending against a home invasion, which I will cover in another part of this series. I like to conclude by saying I hope that nothing like this ever happens to you, but if it does I hope you're prepared.