KDPS officers offer tips on preventing burglaries

By Josh Holderbaum
Western Herald

With spring break just a few weeks away, police want to make sure residents know how to keep burglars out of their homes.

Kalamazoo Department of Public Safety community policing officers presented burglary prevention tips to the Stuart Neighborhood Association Wednesday at the Woodward School for Technology and Research.

Out of all the crimes in the city, only breaking and entering has risen in the past few years, from 1,083 in 2007 to 1,577 last year, officers said.

They also encouraged residents to use signs to indicate they might be at home if someone breaks in.

“The people who are doing these things look for the signs that someone might be there,” Community Police Office Greg Magnan said. “They’re not stupid. They’re doing their homework.”

Signs could include leaving lights on, leaving a car in the driveway, setting inside lights on timers to go on or buying security system or “beware of dog” signs even if the residents don’t own either, he said.

Many burglars strike between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m., when most everyone works, and 34 percent of the time go straight through the front door, the officers said.

“Most all of these guys use the same thing: they’ll go up to the door, knock, ask if anybody’s there and if somebody responds, they take off,” Magnan said. “If nobody responds, they might just head right in.”

Solid wood and metal doors work best against burglars, while screen doors and wood panel doors can be busted through easily.

Some houses feature hinged outside doors with the hinges on the outside of the house – an extremely easy target for burglars.

“If your door works like that, they can just walk up, pop out the hinge bolts and take the door right off,” Magnan said. “You’d be amazed how many houses have those if you drive around.”

Many thieves force doors open near the lock, hinges or strike plate, the three weakest parts of a door, so CPO Aaron Wiedbrauk suggested replacing strike plate screws with three-inch screws instead of quarter-inch screws to make the door stronger.

“If you replace the strike plate screws, you might as well replace the hinge plate screws,” Wiedbrauk said. “If you replace the strike plate screws and someone tries to force their way in, they might just break the door down at the hinges instead.”

Ground-level windows and sliding glass doors make easy targets for burglars, too.

Magnan and Wiedbrauk suggested securing windows and doors with rods, either wood blocks stuck in-between sliding windows or wooden dowels put in the track of sliding doors so they won’t open.

Many criminals can also simply lift sliding doors up and take them right off, so Wiedbrauk suggested screwing a hole in the top of the track, then leaving the screw about a quarter of an inch down so that the door can’t be lifted up from the outside.

“It would take some fiddling to get it set up just right in your door, but if you do it right you won’t be able to lift the door up,” Wiedbrauk said.

Many other simple things, like not leaving cars unlocked or leaving garage door openers in cars, can be found just by trying to break into your house yourself.

“If they want to get in, they’ll get in,” Wiedbrauk said. “What you need to do is try to figure out what’s on a burglar’s mind at 2 a.m. If you can break into your house, they can get in, too.”

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Posted by HeraldAdmin on Feb 18 2010. Filed under Local, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry

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