A Burglar's Guide to the City (11 page)

It is not hard to imagine some utterly gonzo future court case in which ambitious lawyers square off against each other, describing increasingly unwieldy architectural shapes based on the geometry formed by branches of trees and household shutters, of far-flung property fences and automatic garage doors, all woven together in some unbelievable spatial narrative that nonetheless results in a person walking down the sidewalk being accused of burglary.

For a glimpse of legal imaginations run wild, we needn’t look any further than the constantly growing list of structures inside of which burglary can now legally occur. The recognized list of burglary targets has become a surreal cascade of seemingly random constructions, from telephone booths to fishing boats. Explaining all of this with the patient voice of a disappointed parent, attorney Minturn T. Wright III wrote for the
University of Pennsylvania Law Review
in December 1951—nearly seventy years ago—that the list of possible legal targets for burglary was, even then, already getting out of hand.

Wright laments that burglary law has strayed from its original, specific, and spatially limited use. Legal theorists have since lost the plot, Wright suggests, engaging in a generation’s worth of free interpretation, “as if they took special delight in inventing hypothetical situations” and the spaces those situations would occur within. “Burglary was becoming less a criminal problem and more a mathematical exercise,” he warns. Wright calls this “useless conceptualism.”

His text soon explodes in a riot of footnotes, more like a David Foster Wallace short story than a legal brief. Individually referencing nearly every phrase back to a specific legal case, he details the ways in which the definition of breaking and entering has mutated over time. We’re back to angels on pins, lawyers quibbling over what Wright calls, as if rolling his eyes, “the nature of an aperture, or the invisible line of the threshold.” It is more theology than legal theory, he suggests, more abstract physics than anything that should be admissible in a court of law. In many ways, though, this is an architectural argument in an exquisitely pure sense, reduced to narrative descriptions of volumes and openings, negotiations over area and edge, as if deliberately “leaving loopholes and creating anomalies,” Wright adds, for the sheer rhetorical joy of it (and the resulting spiraling legal fees).

Wright recounts a “comprehensive list of buildings and structures” that can now be legally burglarized, citing, in particular, a Nebraska statute. Like the fictional “Chinese encyclopedia” of Jorge Luis Borges, Nebraska’s burglary statutes are bafflingly specific—and they do not stop at dwellings. Far from it. Nebraska’s statutes fractally expand to include smokehouses, slaughterhouses, schoolhouses, storehouses, chicken houses, malt houses, meetinghouses, barns, mills, potteries, railroad-car factories, railroad cars themselves, “private telephone pay stations,” and public telephone booths. Considering both cultural and historical influences on lists such as these, it would not be hard to continue unspooling one in the present day, from wine cellars to cheese caves to Pilates studios to home golf simulators. Even airplanes can now be burglarized.

Wright, remember, was discussing burglary from the perspective of 1951. Since that time, it is not just Nebraska whose burglary laws have become bewilderingly overdetermined. Illinois, for example, defines burglary as a crime in which someone “without authority … knowingly enters or without authority remains within a building, housetrailer, watercraft, aircraft, motor vehicle, railroad car, or any part thereof, with intent to commit therein a felony or theft.” New York State goes out of its way to define the word
building
. “In addition to its ordinary meaning,” the state’s lawmakers explain, a building “includes any structure, vehicle or watercraft used for overnight lodging of persons, or used by persons for carrying on business therein, or used as an elementary or secondary school, or an inclosed [
sic
] motor truck, or an inclosed motor truck trailer.”

So we’ve got “inclosed” trucks—potentially used for business or sleeping—as well as housetrailers, watercraft, secondary schools, elementary schools, and more. California law actually adds to this list. In California, burglary can be charged of anyone “who enters any house, room, apartment, tenement, shop, warehouse, store, mill, barn, outhouse or other building, tent, vessel … floating home … sealed cargo container … or mine or any underground portion thereof, with intent to commit grand or petit larceny or any felony.” Think about this: if you step into an abandoned mine “or any underground portion thereof” with no plans to steal anything, but instead simply intending to shoot an unlicensed handgun (a felony), you are legally guilty of burglary. Why? Because it took place inside a legally recognized artificial structure (the mine).

Wright himself points out that even a hole in the ground—in this case, a powder magazine for storing explosives—could be considered a building for the purposes of burglary law. “A company stores property in a cave dug out of a hillside,” he writes, referencing
People v. Buyle
, a 1937 court case in California. “An employee tries to make off with some of the goods. A burglary has been committed.” Indeed, the court’s instructions for the case specifically stated that a small bubble of negative space dug into the landscape, even if lacking a complete front wall, “is none the less a house merely by virtue of the fact its walls and roof may be produced by an excavation in the hillside.”
None the less a house.
Because of burglary law, architecture is suddenly everywhere. We are surrounded by invisible buildings.

While this might, at first, seem like a minor point to have made at such length, stop to consider its implications. If something as simple as a negative space carved into a hillside, without any defining exterior wall, can legally be recognized as a burglarizable architectural interior, then a whole new cavalcade of spatial questions arises. What is the smallest size such a space must be—would a thimble-size depression in the ground inside of which is a glass marble that I’ve pressed into the soil be considered a structure that could be subject to burglary? Conversely, what’s the largest size such a space can be before it’s no longer considered an interior but simply a landscape? For example, if I’ve removed hundreds of tons of earth from a mountainside in order to flatten the site for future construction, is anyone who steps across the invisible boundary into this formerly solid mass subject to a charge of burglary?

Having heard more than enough of this kind of fantasy architecture even in his own era, Wright concludes, “The inclusion of buildings other than dwellings represents a significant departure from the common law definition of burglary.” What’s unique about Wright’s disdain for endlessly proliferating microdefinitions inspired by and based on other microdefinitions is that he eventually, casually, and seemingly offhandedly suggests at the end of his article that we could simply rewrite the law altogether and eliminate the crime known as burglary. Some men just want to watch the world burn.

His logic rests on the fabulous conclusion that, legally speaking, architecture is a form of “magic,” one that has no place in an otherwise rational system. Architecture is the “magic of four walls,” he writes, referring to its power to fundamentally transform how certain crimes are judged and how their perpetrators can be sentenced. He describes nine examples in which someone was convicted of burglary. “In none of these cases is there conduct which the lay mind would consider a burglary.” They are, he emphasizes, “burglaries only by virtue of the ‘structure’ involved in each case … True, other crimes may still have been committed, but that is exactly the point.” Why not simply indict on the strength of these other crimes alone and be done with accusations of burglary? “The magic created by four walls should not be so strong,” Wright drily concludes.

Why, then, is burglary so beloved by lawyers and police? As Wright explains, it is often easier to convict someone of burglary than it is of other crimes, including, he specifically notes, rape. What’s more, a burglary charge also frequently increases—sometimes quite drastically—the possible sentencing. Think of burglary perhaps as something like an augmentation spell, always ready to be cast upon the crimes at hand: a little special something a prosecutor can tack on to any felony charge as long as it occurred inside a legally recognized architectural space. Conclusively determining a crime’s precise architectural circumstances—demonstrating unimpeachably that the accused was inside a built structure at the time of commission—thus takes on great forensic and punitive importance.

Rather than giving in to the spatial magic of architecture, endowing it with unreasonable power over legal sentencing and criminal indictments, Wright suggests that we could, instead, get rid of burglary altogether and replace it with varying degrees of trespassing, larceny, and theft. Crucially, Wright’s new classification of these crimes would no longer be determined
spatially
: where a crime occurred, or what its relationship was to architecture, would never again be a factor in sentencing. His ultimate goal was to eliminate the arbitrary nature of burglary, where all lawyers had to do was search for anything at all resembling an architectural structure—a telephone booth, a cubicle for selling train tickets, even a bathroom stall—in order to augment an already-existing criminal charge. As Wright despairingly described this legal tendency, “Place four walls around property, and the magic of the law will give it this added protection.”

Although the situations Wright describes took place more than half a century ago, a recent indication of how flexible the spatial circumstances can be for determining whether someone has committed burglary came after an escapade in New York City in the summer of 2014. Early in the morning of July 22, two American flags mounted atop the city’s iconic Brooklyn Bridge were mysteriously replaced with white flags. After two German artists claimed responsibility for the act a few weeks later, NYPD deputy commissioner Stephen P. Davis remarked to
The New York Times
, “At a minimum, it’s trespass, but there is a possibility you could charge burglary. If you go into a fenced-in area for the purpose of committing a crime, that legally constitutes a burglary.”

In this case, the artists climbed into a fenced-in portion of the bridge at the base of each tower. Neither of these spaces has a roof, as they are little more than chain-link cages open to the wind—yet this is considered an architectural interior, in the eyes of the law, transforming mere
trespass
into
burglary
with one enchanted close.

It does not take much imagination to suspect that, someday, an altogether-too-clever team of lawyers, police officers, and architects will combine forces to devise any number of speculative wall-like barriers peppered around the city so that other people can, rightly or not, be charged with burglary after stepping “inside” these imaginary spaces. Burglary, then, would fully and absurdly have become everything Minturn T. Wright III feared back in 1951: a pointless mathematical exercise in which unreal architectural forms are brought forth into the world in a form of legal sorcery.

Wright’s sarcastic notion that discussions of burglary risked becoming nothing more than a mathematical exercise came literally true in the November 2012 issue of
Mathematics Teacher
magazine. In a one-page geometry exercise called “The Burglar in the Suitcase,” columnists Kristyn Wilson and Chris Achong relate the tale of a Polish man—the eponymous burglar—who had been sneaking onto buses at the Barcelona airport by hiding inside a standard traveler’s suitcase. Once the bag was locked in the hold of the bus among the other luggage, he would unzip it from within, rifle through everyone else’s goods, and steal whatever seemed of worth. He’d then curl back up inside his suitcase, zip it closed, and wait for an accomplice to pick him up at the next bus stop.

This idiotic plan was interrupted by police, and the man and his accomplice were promptly arrested. Other passengers had apparently noticed a man struggling with his suspiciously heavy suitcase—perhaps even speaking to it—and they called security.

But Wilson and Achong sensed an opportunity here for a creative mathematical exercise and outlined a short geometry tutorial based on the dimensions of the suitcased man. They even provided a line diagram of him, seen in profile, wrapped up inside the case, with measurements down to the tenths of an inch. After you or your students have calculated the internal volume and the available head space of the suitcase, you are then instructed to “research the luggage restrictions for some airlines.” This is presumably to make the lesson more difficult, but it inadvertently also indicates which airlines might be easier to rob due to overgenerous baggage allowances.

“Would the burglar’s suitcase meet the restrictions or be flagged?” they ask. “Justify your answer.”

The Code of the Burglar

Now that the minefield of burglary law has been at least partially explored, and some indication of burglary’s strange spatial power has been revealed, let’s step away from all the abstraction, put our feet back onto solid ground, and look at the actual architecture of burglary: the kinds of buildings most often targeted by burglars and the factors that might make your home more at risk than your neighbor’s.

Despite clear warning signs, why particular buildings are chosen rather than others remains ambiguous and not easily answered. Constantly shifting factors are at play, some of which are rationally premeditated; some burglars, who may not be in the most coherent state of mind, simply make spur-of-the-moment decisions.

Still, if you look closely enough, a few patterns emerge, and a helpful checklist can be developed; this is backed up by research by criminologists such as R. I. Mawby, Paul Cromwell, and James N. Olson, as well as by my interviews with officers from the LAPD and the South Yorkshire Police. The likelihood that your house will be burglarized—and not that of the family across the street—can come down even to the nature of the local streetscape. A complex neighborhood street plan, full of curved roads, dead ends, and culs-de-sac, can deter prospective outsider burglars by reducing their ability to navigate. If the burglars don’t know where they are—if they don’t know how to get away in a hurry without making wrong turns or doubling back upon themselves—then they’re substantially less likely to try to break into a house there.