How much crime is there in your area?

We once bought a newish house in an area of randomly placed and sized large lots. We had a fenced in area for our dog but the lot was otherwise open. We didn't have a house security system. (We actually still don't where we are now.)

An adjacent house was sold and the new owners moved in. They were a tad reclusive but that's not so unusual in these parts. Anyway, within a few months, a rather high wall was built around the perimeter and an electrically controlled gate was installed down the lane where their driveway access was (ie, long flag lot driveway, gate was at the end). Lights and cameras on poles, almost like a mini version of a Fort Knox (which is what we called it).

We didn't see much of them. The lights would come on from time to time, cars would come and go from time to time. Just as we were moving to another house in a different area, we learned from one of the neighbors that the guy made his living in the drug world. I don't know if it was true or not, but it did explain their behavior.

Sushi, there’s the normal stuff, but I imagine this particular property is also guarding against trespassing. but maybe Elmer’s old neighbor moved here!

I know a property, in a very normal suburban neighborhood, that has a most forbidding, high, steel fence around it, right down to the sidewalk, with a really good lock. But, they have a child who, at about 13, thwarted a locked door when mom went to the bathroom, went out the the street and was hit by a car. Spent much time in hospital and with rehab, which was challenging with a teen with autism. So, when another house in our neighborhood put up a similar fence, lock and all, in a neighborhood where people don’t fence the entire lot all the way to the sidewalk, I put it down to a similar situation.

Elmer, I suppose there could be a benefit to having neighbors with cameras, if they pick up activity at properties without.

bpath, maybe so for some. I know it varies by area and circumstances.

With that neighbor, the type of activity they were concerned with monitoring wouldn't have provided me any benefit. The place was tucked away down a long driveway, in a manner that the cameras on its walls and at the gate couldn't have been much use for others

Where we are now, I'm sure many houses have front area and or door facing cameras. The property crime rate is near zero, save for every few years there can be some teenage vandalism. Not much else. Maybe I should be more concerned but as before, I don't have an alarm system and no outside cameras.

At the second property we bought some years ago, in a suburban near-beach locale, the prior owner was quite proud of his alarm system. We tried coexisting with it and found it a needless hassle. A few months after closing, we call a security tech and had the system disconnected and made inoperable. Here we are 6 or 7 years later, we're at that place less than 50% of the time, and neither we nor any neighbors have had any burglaries or issues. Also, in neither place do we have anything of value to be concerned with. If someone wants to break in and take a sub $500 TV, they're welcome to it. Everything can be replaced.

My parents’ home, at the end of a long driveway on a quiet lane, was burglarized while we were putting it on the market. It should have been completely obvious that the house had been cleared of valuables, the windows were mostly uncovered. We had just removed the tv that morning so we could watch the winter Olympics on a screen larger than ours, maybe they were after it? but it would have been a challenge to carry it out across the icy terrace and field to wherever they had parked (not on the lane). So we don’t know what they were thinking. The neighbors’ cameras on their gates at the lane showed no activity, except the police responding to the alarm.

They set off the motion alarm inside, then took the trouble to find the source and pull it off the wall. Why? The call had already gone in.

I think of locks on residential windows and doors as being intended to keep reasonably intelligent honest people honest. Someone breaking into a house may not fit that profile and pulling a sensor off a wall after it presumably has done its duty, thinking that might accomplish something, is funny but not too surprising.