Fort Home, Suburbia

At first I laughed when I saw it. Someone had pinched some pampas grass from a nearby street and stuck the stems very neatly into the shared hedge that edges ours and the neighbour’s front gardens. It looked quite festive, a night time prank by some passing reveller. Then it was pointed out to me that to leave them there might invite more negative attention, suggesting that if we let this pass something less funny might follow. So I called on our neighbours to ask if they didn’t mind my removing them and was really surprised to find that they were concerned that the opposite might happen. They had left them there in case the person responsible retaliated.

This incident is typical of the kind that leave the average householder with what we are told is an exaggerated sense of threat. The statistics tell me that the crime rate in my area is at an average level compared to central London but the sight of an empty wallet abandoned in the street or broken glass on a pavement where someone has broken into a car remind me that someone suffers as a result of criminal activity every day within a few metres of my front door. It doesn’t matter how often the police remind drivers not leave anything, even cigarettes, on show in their vehicles or suggest that we keep credit cards zipped into our inside pockets. We still leave ourselves open to opportunists with no conscience. One hot summer evening I called at a house to point out that I could see a handbag, heavy with money, cards and keys from the pavement through a front door that had been left open to ventilate the house. Even a locked door is no deterrent to car thieves who use a hook on the end of a broom handle to steal car keys from stairs and tables in hallways. I was told of one incident where all three cars belonging to one household were stolen at once.

In my experience it is older people, often those who have been on the receiving end of this kind of attention, who are most switched on about crime. A former neighbour giggled as he showed me his latest ploy to ward off burglars, a recording of a barking dog that was triggered when I walked past his back door. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that it actually sounded like a recording of a dog and I suspect he was as aware of it as I was but it was certainly more convincing than the man who began barking when I slipped a piece of misdirected mail through his letterbox.

These attempts at putting off baddies may sound absurd but at least they were aware of the threat. Many people have no idea that they regularly leave their home in a state that screams “Come and get me!“ to burglars. I am left open mouthed at the naivety of the householders in my area. The enclosed porches that were meant to prevent heat escaping through the front door are often left unlocked. It is common for the post to be pushed through the letterbox in the glazed porch door so that bank statements, tax returns and all manner of confidential paperwork sit there for hours until the householder returns from work. Even if the door is locked there is barely anyone around to take notice if the glass panel is kicked in.

Those bold enough to go that far might take the opportunity to tackle the main door and help themselves to something more substantial than the cash, credit cards and jewellery left in full view. A surprising number of householders leave a spare key under a plant pot or somewhere similar and burglars know this. They are some of the most accomplished people watchers, reading the message sent out by the festering milk bottles and soggy newspapers that collect on your doorstep during your summer holiday. They know that a confident manner will reassure those passing by and that the average person is reluctant to sort out someone else’s problem, leaving them to get on with it.

“Kick ins”, where a driver waits in a car outside a target house while an accomplice literally kicks in the front door and carries out valuables, are quite common in the suburbs. I know because we were targeted in this way a few years ago. I was in the middle of a nap on a weekday afternoon when someone rang the doorbell and used the knocker rather too vigorously on the door . I took this to be an impatient courier and as I got to the top of the stairs in time to see the front door fly open I actually thought that some fool had lobbed the parcel at it in haste, bursting it open. It was the brief sight of a man stepping in and then very quickly out of the hall that put me right. I got to the bottom of the stairs in time to see him duck behind what was then an untidy and rather high hedge and into a car which tore off at speed. Being half asleep didn’t help as I tried to work out what had just happened but the one other person I saw in the street didn’t seem to realise that anything was wrong. It turned out that ours was not the only home to be targeted by this pair of thieves on that day. Their movements were tracked for some time on CCTV using number plate recognition technology. I was lucky in that I was in and did not come face to face with someone who would use violence rather than get caught.

Since then we bother to double lock the front door during the day and use the bolts and chain once we are both in. The hedge is now kept at a height that allows us to see the car when we are downstairs - we‘ve already lost one to someone who needed spare parts for his own similar car (he was kind enough to dump what was left of it a few streets away). The lawn is also kept in a reasonable state as it seems that untidiness suggests a vulnerable occupant who won‘t fight back. The hedge that the owner is no longer able to trim themselves also provides a screen for anyone busy at the front door for the wrong reasons. It seems that the message sent out by a house proud homeowner is “I am prepared to defend my castle” whereas an unkempt lawn and hedge suggest the opposite.

Suburban homes are particularly vulnerable because they usually come with front and back gardens. If a boundary fence comes down it often stays down until the owner establishes who is responsible for it. The fact that a long section of fence can be owned in part by several people doesn’t help as it can mean that the various sections don’t match up and a gap becomes a highway for cats, foxes and thieves. It is usually the police officer chasing a suspect who tells us about the intruder in our back garden. Reluctantly I have come to the conclusion that the low fence that has been in place there since 1936 between ours and the adjoining semi will have to be replaced with something much taller. It’s a sad comment on our times. We will also be replacing the gate to the front garden that was removed long before we arrived to reinforce the psychological barrier between the street and the house.

Those who lived in my area when the mock Tudor semis were newly built will tell you that there was a time when you could go shopping leaving the front door unlocked. If that really was the case I suspect it had more to do with the fact that there was usually someone around to put off a thief than with the general level of honesty. That generation knew their neighbours, married women were often housewives and strangers stood out. Ours inhabits a world where you can live next to someone for years and exchange no more than a few words with them in all that time. We no longer rely on our neighbours to inform and entertain us and are more likely to speak online to total strangers on the other side of the world than the person we know on the other side of the wall.

The irony is, of course, that we are as much at risk from the attentions of the dishonest online as we are in our homes. I have decided that I will never bank online as I’ve seen one news story too many about errors made by various banks. I get so many phishing emails mentioning HSBC that it has put me off becoming a customer. My partner spent Christmas Day eliminating a virus that had wormed its way into his PC. Fraudulent websites are so convincing that even the most alert are sometimes taken in. However, when it comes to emails Mr Musa Mohamad, Mrs Madina Dauda and Mr Hassan Karim should probably give it a rest as I’m unlikely ever to respond to their “urgent appeals” although I’m glad to know that I “remain blessed in the Lord”. It must be worth their while to keep up the relentless attempts to dupe people in this way although I can’t help thinking that it might be more fruitful to invest in the air fare to the UK and rifle through the recycling boxes out put every week by the trusting. Oblivious to the concept of shredding confidential documents, they discard bank statements and payslips, unaware of the goldmine they provide for those engaged in ID theft. Or they could just stick their hands into a few letterboxes.

I know that I will become much more vulnerable as I get older. An elderly neighbour told me that she is often the target of fraudsters via her telephone. Because she isn’t expecting the call she is not on her guard and before she knows it she has given away personal information to someone she cannot see and has never met. She has a piece of tape marked with a cross on the receiver to remind her to watch what she says when she lifts it. “Boiler room” fraud has deprived some of thousands of pounds in this way. I can see why some older people own the sort of dog you choose not to pat and that shreds their mail with enthusiasm. When I get to that age (and possibly even before that) I will have a pair of highly trained Dobermans called Heckler and Koch - I already fantasise about the next miscreant feeling the heat of their breath on his arse as he flees the neighbourhood.

http://www.met.police.uk/crimeprevention/burglary.htm