A Burglar's Guide to the City (14 page)

An even more astonishing example of social tracking comes from the case of the jewelry-store owner in Kansas City whose shop was robbed of up to $300,000 worth of merchandise. During the ensuing investigation, police found that the owner’s car had been tagged with a GPS device—even her son’s car had a tag—with the implication that their movements had been tracked for days, if not weeks, as the thieves waited for the perfect moment to strike.

It gets weirder. In the summer of 2014, a young man was arrested in Columbia, Tennessee, for having pretended to be a woman on social media. Luring local men into fictional dates, using pseudonyms such as “Young and ready 234” and “Lilwhitegirl1132,” he would send his prospective suitors literally down the garden path, giving them elaborate instructions to find, for example, “the end of Oak Park Drive and meet on a barely noticeable garden path on the dead-end street.” They were then instructed to wait there. Meanwhile, the nineteen-year-old female impersonator was actually back at the target’s house, stealing cash, jewelry, and other valuables. As Columbia Police lieutenant Joey Gideon instructed
The Daily Herald
, “The basic moral there is not to disclose anything online unless you know who that person is.”

This sort of thing needn’t only be online or even digital. In his 2001 study of burglary, criminologist R. I. Mawby learned that one burglar would actually pay other burglars to photocopy vacation rosters when they broke into offices late at night so that he could take note of any upcoming vacations. This can be extended to your own home: a common piece of advice for vacationing homeowners is not to write their exact vacation dates on their home calendar, precisely so that future burglars won’t learn that you’ll be gone for another three days, giving them all the time in the world to rifle through your valuables. Think of the burglar out in Joshua Tree, California, who drank all the beer in the kitchen before taking a nice hot shower, or even the Easton, Pennsylvania, burglar from 2010 who not only drank all the beer in the fridge and took a shower but, awesomely,
gave himself a haircut
. When the homeowner came back, she found him just sitting there, calmly watching TV, freshly shorn. If burglars know how long you’ll be gone, they can basically move in.

Obvious oversharing aside, if your goal is to leave no clues for burglars—to make sure that they can never figure out when you are or are not at home—well, frankly, you just might not be able to do much about it.

In a study of how domestic systems such as home heating can be used by burglars to determine whether you and your family are away on vacation, a team of researchers presenting at a 2012 conference on computer security pointed out that you just can’t hide that you’re not at home. Given the right devices, they explained, “anybody with sufficient technical skills to monitor real-time energy consumption patterns in an entire neighborhood”—and they explain how this is possible—can determine when a particular house sees a precipitous drop in energy use. Either the residents have died or they’re off on vacation somewhere, but either way a huge bull’s-eye has appeared on their house. Automatic meter-reading technologies have very real security implications, the researchers conclude, and even this overlooks the ease with which someone could physically check your electricity meter to see if your monthly use has dropped off.

With this many possible signs to remember to check for, protecting yourself from research-oriented burglars can, to put it mildly, seem a bit overwhelming. Still, you can take some important and basic technological steps. For example, you can use a timer to turn lights on and off in your absence, and you can also buy a device called FakeTV. FakeTV is more or less exactly what it sounds like: a single-purpose lighting appliance that mimics the shifting colors and motion of a regular television set. The result? It looks as if someone is home watching late-night television, with flashes of action and color flickering through the drapery. Set it on a timer, and your house has what sociologists Wright and Decker call “the illusion of occupancy,” even though no one’s home but machines.

Again, though, technical devices such as these risk being as obvious a clue as vacation photos on your Facebook page that you’re not at home. Consider an article from 2013, published in the
Observer
, where we read about wealthy families in the Hamptons of Long Island all looking for a ritzier place to spend their holidays. Apparently so many people now leave the Hamptons for Europe each season that “whole neighborhoods are on timers.” Every night, an otherwise empty neighborhood thus “lights up like the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center.” One exasperated resident points out that the people next door “need to reset their light timer.” Why? “They forgot it’s no longer daylight savings time.” The house anomalously switches on every night a full hour too early, making it even more obvious that, for all the light and electricity, no one’s home.

What burglar could resist the appeal of such a scenario—the ultimate suburban heist, moving from home to home like some new Robin Hood of the Hamptons, timing one’s entry and exit with the automated table lamps of families vacationing far away? You could break into every house in the neighborhood—unless those homeowners could find a way to keep their neighborhood off the map altogether. A different sort of social media use suggests a way that small cities or entire neighborhoods might, in a relatively literal sense, remove themselves from the view of prospective burglars.

A passing remark in Mike Davis’s
City of Quartz
led me to the city of Bradbury, California. This is in itself ironic, as Bradbury—a private, gated suburb north of Los Angeles—has a careful policy of taking itself off the media radar. It does not want to be discussed. As Davis points out in
City of Quartz
, unless you are buying property there, Bradbury would prefer you don’t know it exists.

Reporting on the town back in 1988, the
Los Angeles Times
remarked that, following a handful of crimes in the 1970s and as civic culture in nearby Los Angeles went from bad to worse in the eighties, Bradbury’s “city officials and residents decided to become more closed-mouthed about their community. Each time an article appeared, they said, it drew attention to the city and the number of burglaries increased.” The city managers therefore agreed not to speak to the media, effectively removing their neighborhood from public conversation. Already physically gated to prevent entry by strangers, Bradbury would now be subject to a kind of urban-scale nondisclosure agreement. Out of sight, out of mind—and out of the reach of burglars.

The aptly named Hidden Hills—another secluded semi-city in the economic orbit of Greater Los Angeles—has found a different way to remove itself from public scrutiny. Like Bradbury, the town does not appear on Google Street View. The invasive cameras of the search-engine giant are not welcome on the private streets of either neighborhood, something not uncommon in the wealthier, private subdivisions and celebrity-dense developments north of L.A. The equestrian-oriented Bell Canyon, for example, also wealthy, private, and keen to stay off the maps of ambitious burglars, has joined them, opting out of representation on Google Street View. This secrecy only adds to their property values (presumably attracting the unwanted interest of future burglary crews).

Despite all the publicly available data, the disappointing truth is that burglaries more often than not are impulsive and unplanned, based on spur-of-the-moment decisions made in response to some immediately noticed detail: the window of that house was left open, that man clearly just left for work, likely leaving an empty house, or that the street is totally deserted and you have a pressing need for cash. The vast majority of burglaries are not particularly exciting (this book exists to shed light on the exceptions, not the rule). Statistically, burglary is far more likely to be committed by an opportunist drug addict smashing a pane of glass to steal a pair of diamond stud earrings and a DVD player than it is to be an organized gang of topology-obsessed underground-mining aficionados burrowing into a building from the structure next door.

There simply is no cut-and-dried rule for when, where, and under what circumstances you can expect a burglary to take place. Even the most general parameters are only moderately useful for predicting when and where a burglar might strike next. Worse, trying to protect yourself against these outliers—against the special cases, the unpredictable breakins, the addicts, and the impulse burglars—means that you run the risk of fortifying yourself against only the most outlandish scenarios.

Burglars of the Ancient World

The question of how to protect and even fortify your home against a burglar’s intrusion is a question as old as the home itself. Jerry Toner, a classicist at Cambridge University, teaches what he calls “history from below”: looking at the popular entertainments, bodily sensations, and even the disaster-response plans of ancient Rome. One particularly memorable course focused on the lost smells of early Christianity. I learned that Toner was writing a new book about crime in imperial Rome, from vandalism and riots to murder and burglary, and thus thought it obvious that I should talk to him about breaking and entering in the ancient world. After all, no less a figure than famed Roman orator Marcus Tullius Cicero once asked, “What is more sacred, what is more inviolable, than the house of every citizen?” The injunction against breaking and entering is encoded in the very foundations of civic discourse.

Toner began by reminding me of a book I’d last read in my high school Latin class:
The Golden Ass
by Apuleius. A major secondary story line of that book is the tale of three thieves who steal the titular donkey—they technically steal a homeowner who has accidentally turned himself into a donkey during a conjuring trick gone awry. As Apuleius describes it, this proto–burglary crew would use axes not only to cleave open locked trunks, but to knock down or undermine the walls of private residences. The origin of the word
undermine
is straightforward and quite literal here, as it means digging a tunnel or mine under the walls of a building or city, causing those walls to collapse. They wouldn’t bother with merely breaking the close, to return to the language of legal argumentation; they would obliterate the close altogether in a cloud of wood splinters and dust.

While peering out at a neighbor’s house, our narrator sees “three great thieves attempting to
break down his walls and gates, and to open the
locks to enter in, by tearing away all the doors from
the posts and by dragging out the bolts, which were
most firmly fixed.” They were dismantling the building, taking architecture apart in a literal act of breaking and entering. This would seem to make
The Golden Ass
a candidate for one of literature’s earliest tunnel jobs, a second-century heist aligned with present-day police definitions of breaking through walls.

This example was just a prelude to a lengthy discussion by Toner of the criminal environment of Rome, a discussion that he prefaced by pointing out some key limitations to our knowledge of exactly what kinds of burglaries would have occurred there. First of all, Latin had no word for
burglar
; there were only variations on
thief
, implying a lack of attention to the spatial circumstances of a given crime. This is not to say that there weren’t home invasions or that private residences were somehow considered impregnable. On the contrary, even the presence of window shutters—useful for more than just offering privacy—was evidence that some degree of home fortification was considered advisable against potential breakins.

Roman popular culture provided would-be burglars with plenty of ideal opportunities to strike, Toner explained. Consider the astonishing popularity of Rome’s chariot races: it is estimated that nearly 75 percent of the city’s residents would attend the stadium on race days, leaving an all-but-deserted metropolis behind them, its homes unwatched, its private goods there for the taking. An urban standing army of what we’d now call police was thus called up to fan out into the streets of Rome, moving against the swarming tide of humanity who pushed and shoved their way toward the Circus Maximus. Again, I was struck by a more recent echo: An excited burglar pointed out to criminologists Cromwell and Olson in their 2004 study, “Man! Wait until football season. I clean up then. When they are at the game, I’m at their house.” Two thousand years later burglars are still using the same modus operandi.

After Toner described the chariot races, I mentioned Stanley Kubrick’s early film
The Killing
, from 1956, in which a heist at the local horse race sets up a disastrous sequence of events for the perpetrators. Surely, I said, such a plot could be altered and rewritten for the ancient world, where villa after villa and mansion after mansion are systematically and expertly looted, emptied of their every valuable. It would be the largest heist in history—a veritable sacking of Rome. If only Kubrick were still around to direct it.

Toner was only half-convinced by the scenario, this
Ocean’s Eleven
of the ancient world. The first problem, he began, and there were many, was with what the burglars of the time could actually steal—what luxury goods would have existed at the time, not to mention which were valuable enough to target—and how the criminals could carry it all through the city without being spotted. This would, in turn, have had an effect on which buildings they chose to rob, and even which streets or neighborhoods—such as those closest to the Tiber River, so that they could plot an aquatic getaway and just float to distant safety. Burglars even back then would have made decisions based not only on a building’s perceived vulnerabilities or how easy it might have been to scale the outside walls (or to knock them down), but also based on what those thieves thought they might realistically find inside worth stealing. I was reminded again of Bill Mason and the various details he would look for before choosing to hit a certain high-rise, struck by the continuity of ideas that seem to have underlain burglary for millennia.