• February 17, 2015

The Burglar’s Journey - Predicting a robber’s route around the home

home security advice

  • Experienced burglars enter via back door
  • 50% immediately head for bedrooms then downstairs living areas
  • 50% chart same course but in reverse
  • Kitchens and bathrooms mostly ignored
  • Most time spent in downstairs living areas
  • Unusual rooms, like music studios, largely avoided
  • Typical haul of experienced burglar more than £1,000 more value than novice

An experienced burglar will chart a very specific course around your home during a robbery. That is the verdict of a psychological study about burglary. Why is this so important? Because it could help you to safeguard your valuables, even if you can’t steer clear of a break-in.

We may not like to admit it, but a burglary, like anything else, requires a degree of skill or expertise to pull off. Ok, it’s a cowardly and despicable skill but a skill nonetheless; and by understanding it better, we can learn to deal with it a lot better. That’s where Dr Claire Nee comes in:

A reader in Forensic Psychology at the University of Portsmouth, Dr Nee ran a study to discover the systemic and predictable routes that a typical burglar takes around the home. Serial burglars were sent into real homes wearing head-mounted cameras and motion capture suits. Inside, they were asked to touch items that they would like to steal. Afterward, a second trial was run on a bespoke computer platform, through which the burglar charted their course around a virtual home on computer and clicked their mouse on the items they wanted to pinch.

Dr Nee discovered that all burglars entered test homes via the back door, while novices tried the front. Burglars also made their way around the home in very systemic ways, although a near fifty-fifty split approached this system in two definitive ways. Half made immediately for the stairs to hit bedrooms before heading back down to focus on the high value downstairs rooms. The other half began downstairs before finishing off in bedrooms. All avoided bathrooms and kitchens.

Burglars spent more than twice as much time in downstairs rooms than novices did and this makes a lot of sense, since living rooms and lounges a thought to contain a greater number of high value items. Novices spent the same amount of time in every room and took haphazard routes around the home which did not demonstrate the same level of forethought. As a result, while burglars and novices took a similar number of items on average, the typical haul of a burglar was worth around £1,000 more than the equivalent from the novice. This extra value was made up of handbags, wallets, cash, phones and leather jackets which were largely ignored by novices.

The real and virtual homes included in the test all featured one unusual room set-up, such as a recording studio. While novice burglars were like kids in a sweet shop here, the experts largely avoided this extra temptation, taking less time and fewer items. This demonstrates how systematic and efficient the typical burglar can be. They have a plan and they stick to it. They also focus on the items that they know to look for and know what to do with after they’ve made their escape.

This makes the average burglar much easier to predict than the chaotic first timer.

So what can we take from these discoveries? What can we do to look after the things that matter most?

For starters, we can take a look at our back door security, since most of us focus on our front doors more, when they might not even come into play.

We can also think about hiding items in the bathroom, where burglars aren’t going to waste their time. Home gyms, art rooms or music studios are also likely to be avoided giving you as good a reason as any to make time and space for a beloved hobby.

Since we already know that a burglar spends 8-12 minutes on average within a home, and we also now know that they spend more of their time downstairs, it’s up to us to make things as tough for them as possible. An underfloor or wall safe in a bedroom will likely be ignored since criminals don’t have time to even attempt to get inside. Even more cost effective home safes can serve as deterrents too.

It’s all about making life as difficult for the burglar as possible -- and that means shaking them out of their tried and tested routine.

  • February 17, 2015