A Burglar's Guide to the City (13 page)

Quickly, you open the bathroom medicine cabinet, hoping to find some medications—but there’s nothing. Then you go into the kitchen to pop open the cupboards one by one. Almost nothing is in them, which again seems strange, and you’ve also noticed that everything feels vaguely dirty, as if whoever lives here hasn’t cleaned in a while. Anything you’ve touched—a doorknob or cabinet handle—has made your fingers feel oily, your palms a bit slick with something you can’t see. If not for the laptop, which you head toward to grab, this would not have been worth it; now it’s time to go.

Which is exactly when you hear the front door of the apartment burst open, and that word you’ve been hoping to avoid your whole criminal career echoes into the room around you: “Police!” Two officers sweep through the door, and it’s far too late to get back to the open window and escape.

You’re trapped—or
captured
, as the case may be.

“Capture houses” are fake apartments run by the police to attract and, as their name implies, capture burglars. They are furnished to be all but indistinguishable from other apartments, with the important difference that nearly everything inside them has been tagged using a chemical residue only visible under UV light. These chemical sprays and forensic coatings—applied to door handles, window latches, and any portable goods found throughout the properties, including TVs, laptops, and digital cameras—are also known as SmartWater. Tiny Web-connected cameras film each room from various angles. Finally, a small team of officers waits patiently nearby, usually in an apartment next door or across the hall.

The perverse brilliance of a capture house comes from the fact that only the most abjectly paranoid burglars would ever suspect that the home, business, or apartment they’ve broken into is somehow not real, that it is not quite what it appears to be—that they have broken into a decoy, a mirage, or trap. Capture houses can be so carefully designed that a burglar might never experience the slightest sensation that something’s not right or somehow out of place; they might thus never guess that they’re inside a house or apartment secretly run by the police.

It helps that these capture houses are not isolated places, glowing like film sets on the outer edge of town; instead, they are normally flats in busy, multiunit buildings and on otherwise unremarkable streets. If you live in the U.K.—or even if you’ve only traveled there—you may well have seen a capture house yourself, but never suspected anything amiss. Perhaps a police-run apartment is in your very building.

The capture-house program began at the end of 2007 in Leeds, England, under the direction of Chief Constable Sir Norman Bettison of the West Yorkshire Police. Having proved successful in Yorkshire, capture houses are now spreading to nearly every major metropolitan region of the U.K., including such cities as Birmingham, Nottingham, and even London itself.

Just south of Leeds, in the city of Rotherham, Detective Chief Inspector Dave Stopford of the South Yorkshire Police described to me how the program worked, what its strengths and weaknesses have proven to be, and where it might go next. Individual capture houses are most often set up by a technical team of civilians working for the police, he told me. Technicians and local contractors with the necessary expertise install hidden cameras, microphones, fiber-optic or Wi-Fi networks, twenty-four-hour infrared cameras, and even the SmartWater sprays. Each capture house is then fully stocked, complete with electronic equipment, lights on timers, and bare but functional furniture. This makes the apartments something more like an elaborate ploy of interior design and electrical engineering—a wired-up simulation of contemporary British domesticity, all but indistinguishable from the real thing.

Laughing, Stopford explained that his officers once lacked the funds they needed to get the furniture and home goods to stock another new capture house—so one of his officers simply went around the police station, desk to desk, requesting any unused or soon-to-be-discarded personal furniture. Most of the officers contributed at least something—a bedside table, an old couch, a tattered carpet past its prime—thus creating what could be thought of as the ultimate distillation of a police officer’s apartment: a space furnished only with things taken from local cops. If only the burglar later captured there had had an eye for law enforcement taste in interior design, he might never have broken in. It was as police-like an apartment as you could get.

Once apprehended, many of the criminals are shown DVDs of their breakin. This is not only—or even primarily—to embarrass them, but also to show off a bit, to demonstrate the ever-watchful, all-powerful eyes of the British police with their clever lenses hidden inside lampshades and ferns. The surreal, Warholian effect is to make it seem as if the burglars have inadvertently broken into a private film studio meant just for them, their fifteen minutes of fame captured on miniature cameras that only the most paranoid among them would even look for or see.

Chief Inspector Stopford explained that in many cases, a capture house will be set up to catch one specific person. The police will have studied the modus operandi of a burglar—someone who only breaks into first-floor flats, for example, where a window has been left slightly ajar—and they then design an apartment to attract that person. The effort is apparently worth it. A single burglar can raise the crime rate of an entire neighborhood; taking that one person off the streets pays huge dividends in reducing the overall local crime statistics. But it’s not always a guaranteed success. Some of the fake apartments Stopford’s officers have operated have been open for as little as one day before being hit by a burglar, while others have gone nearly a full calendar year without being broken into even once.

All this means that if you are the burglar in question, the local police have designed and furnished an apartment with you in mind. When you are next out and about, casing homes for a possible burglary, and you feel attracted to a certain property, you have to step back and consider the almost science-fiction-like possibility that it was put there specifically to attract you.

The notion of the capture house is easy to adapt elsewhere, even at different scales. Bait cars are basically the same idea: they are “capture cars,” left on the street with their windows down or even with their keys still in the ignition to attract passing car thieves. But if you give in to your baser impulses and try to boost the car, you’ll find the doors immediately lock, trapping you inside, while an internal camera has already sent high-resolution images of your face to a nearby police crew. The car is GPS-tagged in case you try to get away.

Back in Los Angeles, Detective Chris Casey explained to me that entire fake storefront businesses have been set up around the city by the LAPD to trap would-be thieves, fences, and smugglers. He described how police officers would pose as pawnshop owners or even as black-market metal buyers to deceive burglars and thieves. The program is elaborate and expensive—but it works. Think of it as an architectural version of going undercover: not just officers wearing civilian clothes and using fake names, but an entire building or strip mall disguised and camouflaged as something else altogether.

What remains so interesting about the idea of a capture house is this larger, abstract notion that the houses, apartments, bars, shops, and businesses standing all around us might be
fake
, that they exist as a police-monitored surrogate of the everyday world, a labyrinth of law-enforcement stage sets both deceptive and alluring. Indeed, beyond just trapping local burglars, the capture-house program’s overriding and perhaps most successful effect lies in inspiring a distinct and quite peculiar form of interpretive unease among local criminals: the uncanny feeling that the very place you are now standing in is somehow not real but a kind of well-furnished simulation, a deliberate mirage or architectural replica run by the local police, overseen by invisible cameras recording your every move. As Chief Inspector Stopford somewhat overconfidently explained to me, even if you’re looking for signs that a given home or apartment is a capture house, you won’t find them. You won’t know you’ve actually broken into a simulation until the police themselves come crashing in, looking for you.

*

The fundamental premise of the capture-house program is that police can successfully predict what sorts of buildings and internal spaces will attract not just any criminal but a specific burglar, the unique individual each particular capture house was built to target. This is because burglars unwittingly betray personal, as well as shared, patterns in their crimes; they often hit the same sorts of apartments and businesses over and over. But the urge to mathematize this, and to devise complex statistical models for when and where a burglar will strike next, can lead to all sorts of analytical absurdities.

A great example of this comes from an article published in the criminology journal
Crime, Law and Social Change
back in 2011. Researchers from the Physics Engineering Department at Tsinghua University reported some eyebrow-raisingly specific data about the meteorological circumstances during which burglaries were most likely to occur in urban China.

They found, for example, that burglars tended to strike when the temperature was “in the range of −7ºC to 27ºC,” or approximately 19º–81º Fahrenheit. This is not entirely surprising, given that this corresponds quite well to the expected thermal window for most of the country. In a sense, it would be unusual to do
anything
outside of these temperatures. Undaunted by the inherent absurdity, the authors also found that instances of burglary could be correlated to a set of average wind speeds (for example, burglars seem to hit on days when the wind is blowing less than four meters per second in China, or roughly nine miles per hour) and even relative humidity (burglary, we read, is most likely to occur when the humidity is between 15 and 85 percent, another meaninglessly all-encompassing range).

Their conclusion is impressively vague. They write that burglary is “more inclined to occur in a comfortable circumstance,” although quite a few burglaries also occurred during “extreme weather.” Sadly, although the authors mention barometric pressure as a further influence on burglary statistics, they don’t delve into any hard numbers.

But perhaps we shouldn’t be so cynical. It’s all too easy to mock these attempts at statistical measurement. It might sound ridiculous, for example, to learn that burglary can be correlated to the phases of the moon—as if crime has its own lunar tides—but this, in fact, is borne out quite regularly. The reason is simple: a new moon equals less light to be seen by, and thus an easier time sneaking around someone’s property or through an empty part of town.

No less a figure than legendary magician and escape artist Harry Houdini confirms this in his 1906 book,
The Right Way to Do Wrong
. Houdini describes the burglar as a kind of occult psychogeographer, someone uniquely attuned not only to the rhythms of the streets but to the phases of the moon above. Houdini writes that an accomplished burglar would have “consulted the almanac” before heading out for plunder, using astronomical timetables to help coordinate his heist with the orbit of the moon around the earth. Every bit of darkness helps. Then, when the almanac is right and the shadows are deepest, this astrologist-burglar with one eye on the stars and planets would make his fateful move.

Yet even a new moon works both ways. Burglars are humans, after all, and they are not immune to fear when wandering into a house in utter darkness. A great deal of the sociological literature indicates that too little light is as unnerving to a burglar as it would be for a homeowner to hear someone rummaging around in the dark. Think of the hapless burglar—one of my favorite examples yet—who called the police himself when he became convinced that someone else was in the house with him. He thought another burglar was somewhere out there in the darkness, tiptoeing through the unlit rooms, perhaps heading straight for him.

Lunar phase aside, the question of when to strike a particular building is at least as important for burglars as where that building is located or how it is designed. If you don’t want to read every issue of
Architectural Digest
looking for hints about which houses to strike, then you might want to look elsewhere for clues about who, what, where, and when to burglarize—such as reading people’s Twitter feeds or Facebook updates.

In 2010, as social location services such as Foursquare achieved mainstream appeal, a semiautomated Twitter account called PleaseRobMe popped up. It began retweeting people’s social status updates, but only those that seemed to indicate when that person was no longer at home. “Showing you a list of all those empty homes out there” was PleaseRobMe’s tagline. Its point was not criminal, PleaseRobMe hastened to add, but sociological, showing how “oversharing,” as it’s termed, can have real-world security consequences, not the least of which is letting anyone in the world know when you’ve stepped out to a bar, a museum, a friend’s restaurant, or a nightclub—or all of the above, in a multihour bender—and thus are no longer inside your apartment. All a burglar would have to do is check their target’s Foursquare account (or Instagram or Twitter or Facebook feeds) to see how much more time they’ve got to get in and out undisturbed.

Consider burglar Tricia Schneider. According to the sheriff’s office of Posey County, Indiana, Schneider “admitted using Facebook posts to pick her targets” in numerous counties throughout southwest Indiana. Sheriff Greg Oeth explained to local media outlet WECT that online oversharing entails risks: “It’s posting, ‘Look how much fun we’re having on the beach today. Here’s photos of us at a very unique restaurant.’ Those sorts of things [are an] indication that you’re away from home and that your property is unprotected.”

Or think about the New Jersey man who was also busted for using social media to choose his targets. Known by Hunterdon County police as the “Facebook burglar,” Steven Pieczynski would wait until his own Facebook friends had posted holiday plans before raiding their empty houses. Note that these weren’t, technically, strangers; they were people who had accepted Pieczynski’s friend requests.