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 A family’s home should be a safe haven where the inhabitants are protected from the outside world. Here are a few things a homeowner or a renter can do to make his or her home a safer and more burglar resistant place to live.
Doors
Proper doors are an important part of burglar proofing a home. All exterior hinge doors should be solid wood core construction or be metal clad. Doors made of wood panels, or those with glass panes may be aesthetically appealing, but they are not as safe as solid doors because the panels or glass panes are easily broken.
Sliding Glass doors can be a safety hazard because they are easy to lift off the tracks and remove. To make such a door safer, use track screws, installed in the upper track of the door. The frame or the door should just clear the heads of the screws making it impossible to lift the door up. This leaves the criminal only one option, breaking the glass, which takes time and makes noise and will usually deter the average burglar.
The importance of proper locks
The lock on a door knob is simply a privacy device, not an effective lock. The Sheriff’s Office recommends a double-locking dead bolt on the door, one that uses a key on both sides. When someone is at home, the key should be kept either in the lock on the inside, or hanging somewhere nearby to ensure a quick escape in case of fire. Make sure the key does not hang near enough to a window or a pane of glass for a burglar to reach inside and get it.
A 180 degree see-all viewer, commonly known as a peephole, is another safety device to include in a solid door. It will give a full view of anyone coming to the door, even if the person is standing to the side out of the normal line of sight.
Lighting
Another way to make it difficult for someone to break in your home, and easy for a patrolling officer to check on it, is to install adequate lighting in the yard as well as inside your home.
There are many types of yard lights to choose from. Traditional lights are mounted on the outside of a home, or on a pole in the yard. They are manually turned on and off, usually in the morning and the evening. These lights work well, except when a homeowner goes on vacation. Then, they must either be left on or left offeither way, it makes it easy for a burglar to tell you aren’t home.
It is relatively easy and inexpensive to buy timers for yard lights that will turn them on and off when you aren’t at home. The Sheriff’s Office highly recommends you have timers on your yard lights.
Another option in yard lighting is installing motion detector lights. Motion lights are yard lights that come on when their sensors detect body heat or motion nearby. This can be useful for several reasons: if you come home at night after dark, the lights will automatically come on when you approach; and, if a burglar enters what appears to be a dark yard, the lights will suddenly come on, scaring him or her away.
If you are an energy conscious person, most hardware stores market solar lights for the yard. Most of these lights will store enough energy during the day from the sun to stay lit for up to eight hours during the night. In any case, lighting your yard is a must for a safe and secure home.
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 House numbers
Many people don’t realize how important it is to put visible house numbers on their homes. Posted addresses are not only used by the United States Post Office to deliver the mail, they are also crucial for law enforcement, fire department or ambulance personnel trying to locate a house in an emergency.
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To make it easy for the sheriff’s office, or other emergency personnel to respond in an emergency, put house numbers in a prominent and visible place. Having house numbers on a mailbox is important, but the mailbox is not always in a good spot for quick viewing.
When purchasing the numbers, make sure they are four to six inches high, and a contrasting color to the background color of the building.
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