Monday, October 17, 2011

Hello? Who's There?

image: Michelle Meiklejohn
I have mentioned how to lock down the items in your home and what kind of security system you should have. Ok.  Now what?  Imagine you are sitting in your home after a long day at work.  Your spouse is due back from work any minute with an armload of groceries.  Dinner is ready to be started (got to have those tomatoes from the store!).  One of your kids are is upstairs on the computer doing homework, and the other is in the back yard playing.  There is a frantic knock at the door, so your spouse must be here (hands full) with the groceries. All is well with the world, dinner can start.

No one knows what they would do if the person at the door is an intruder, intending to enter your home and take what (or who) they want.  Any person that thinks they would be the hero and fight the bad guys to protect their family is, quite frankly, equally likely to seize up in fear and be totally unable to move or stop crying.  It is a fact of nature...fight or flight.  You do not always get to consciously choose which you do under even the best case of the worst-case scenarios.  If the intruders above were to grab my son out of the back yard before they came to the door, I would be a nervous wreck, and I would fall all over myself to make sure that he did not get hurt.  So the question is, what kinds of things can we do to make sure that this situation is less likely to present itself in the first place.  Any one of these topics is worthy of several articles by themselves, so we'll summarize them here.  Let's start at the first occurrence of the would-be bad guys and work our way in to the home.

If you are like most people, in most parts of the civilized world (though certainly not all!), in order to get to your home, the bad guys had to get past the most important security feature anyone can have.  It should be no surprise that people that live in populated areas are safer than those that are isolated.  While there is still a high possibility of a criminal getting to your house unnoticed, your neighbors are an asset that should not be overlooked.  Get to know your neighbors, and form a neighborhood watch association if there is enough interest.  If there are not enough people interested, at least you will have met people and raised some awareness.

Next, everyone must stay in the home with bars over the windows and all the doors quadruple bolted and nailed shut.  No...not really, but some precautions should be taken to make sure that the safety of all the family members is considered.  Let's start with your children.

Children are interesting, in that the more secure they are the less happy they - and you - are.  The kid in the back yard could be 8, 12, 15, or 20 and they should still be watched over and protected.  Hopefully, if your son or daughter is playing alone outside, they are in a fenced yard and have been trained to not leave the yard or talk to strangers.  You should also be watching them in some way.  The strictest among us will say that we should be standing in the yard watching like overlords, but many of us remember that when our parents did that we were not as free to explore things (granted - that may have been a good thing!).  A simple, inexpensive webcam and a laptop could do the job without being overbearing. 

The indoor child is doing her homework...yeah, right! On the computer, he or she is instant messaging, video chatting, facebooking, etc. Sometimes it is with friends, but sometimes it is with "friends." Your kids, unfortunately, do not know the difference between a person that they know and a person that they can trust. Learning that is part of growing up, but when many of us were kids, the biggest downside of being wrong was getting humiliated in rumor at school the next day.  Today, telling someone online (who could be anybody) that "Mom isn't home" or that your parents "never lock the doors" could be dangerous and even fatal.  There are many ways that online activity can be monitored, but education should be the first line of defense, because none of the other methods are foolproof.

Your spouse is on the way home with an armload of groceries.  She will need to have a safe mode of entry into the house.  First, one of my favorite, low-cost, underrated security measures is motion-detector lights.  A well-lit house as she is pulling up in the driveway will go a long way to avoiding trouble.  Next important is a simple phone call to tell you that she is on the way home.  This does several things, but the most important is to inform you that she will be pulling up in a few seconds and that you should be watching out for her.

Lastly, let's take a look at you.  First, watch your kids, you lazy bum!  You can read the blogs, watch TV, or take a nap after your kids have gone to bed.  Also, doors should be locked when family members are in the house and also when they are not.  If you have the money, get a door lock that is always locked and requires a code to be entered.  They have disadvantages, but they are typically very secure, because no one forgets to lock the door.  Next, do not answer the door without looking to see who is there first.  If do not like peep holes in the door, install a good quality chain latch or bar guard (like those in hotels).

As I mentioned at the beginning of the post, this is just a shotgun approach to the subject of occupied home security.  As time goes on, I'll expand on the topics above and offer more detail on tips and suggestions.  In the meantime, remember that the key to family and home security is usually as simple as common sense, and where we go wrong is getting lazy.

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