Homeowners and others worried about keeping crime out of the home shouldn’t relax for the summer. More burglaries occur during the summer months than in any other months of the year, according to the FBI.
The FBI reports that almost 5 million families around the nation become the victims of household burglaries every year, often while they’re on vacation.
“Summer is always the time when homes are more vulnerable. Between the kids’ erratic schedules and vacations, people are in and out of their houses more often,” Marshall Marinace, owner of Marshall Alarm Systems in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., told the Journal News.
The National Burglar and Fire Alarm Association (NBFAA) says there are a number of things homeowners can do to minimize the potential problems that could occur while they’re on vacation. The NBFAA says the best way to prevent break-ins is by using a combination of common sense and state-of-the-art security technology to protect your home.
Homeowners can use the people around them as “watchdogs”, letting friendly neighbors know they’ll be gone and giving them keys to periodically check on their homes. Vacationers can also call their monitoring service to update their emergency contact lists and let service operators know how to reach them while they’re gone.
Other tips include installing motion-detecting outdoor floodlights around the home, leaving air conditioners on to create the illusion someone is home and alerting the local police department, which usually has a community policing patrol, that they’ll be gone.
A study by Drs. Simon Hakim and Andrew Buck, economic professors at Temple University in Philadelphia, reports that most burglars target track homes in the middle of a block or on a cul-de-sac, and townhouses, particularly end-units. The study also confirms what many security system providers have always maintained: burglars avoid neighborhoods with security systems.
