Theft *****. I'm still mad about stuff taken decades ago.
I'm not sure most if any alarms are worth a hoot. What I have heard a thief will do is throw a rock through a window, then watch what happens from a safe distance. If the cops don't see any sign of a break in, after a couple more rocks they don't show up.
Or a thief is in and out in less than 3 minutes.
Lights and cameras are what I expect to see more and more of.
Main thing that will happen soon or later, legalize drugs, and remove the root cause of most theft.
Most home alarms are never connected to a window break, FYI.
They use door and motion detectors on homes.
And when the motion detectors go off, the owner gets called every time.
Sometimes it’s a pain as false alarms are much more common than they should be.
Window break alarms are mostly for businesses, where the manager gets a phone call whenever it breaks, before the police are called.
With over a 100 stores in my region we never failed to be informed about an actual break in.
Problem was, my managers got called for false alarms at least once a month on average. Police are not called unless 20 minutes have passed with no response from the store people.
Oddly, while jewelry stores suffer from ‘3 minute’ robberies a lot, most retail outlet robberies take hours, much like home robberies. The guy is usually stoned, usually clumsy, usually going through things looking for cash or easy to pawn stuff.
In close to 40 years of alarm calls, at lots of stores, with lots of guys being arrested, (even quite a few held by the store manager), I seldom ran into a sober criminal, and never into a TV/Movie type ‘professional criminal’.
Lots of guys with long records, looking for money to blow on broads (polite term they seldom used) drugs, stereo systems, booze, etc.
Also never had any wanting to actually USE the tools they were stealing.
These folks were mostly immature lazy types, who didn’t work. Some into their 40’s, who had never held a job, never had a tendency to work.
Most were welfare kids grown up, others were serious drug users, not stealing to ‘buy a fix’ but stealing because they wanted money. DUH. And didn’t want to work for it.
I’ve sat through almost 100 trials. Part of doing business.
Been jury foreman 6 times when it wasn’t one of my stores robbed. (I always get trapped into being the foreman. Better to heard cats).
Never seen the ‘junkie just trying to get a fix’ or seen the ‘drug turf gang war’ criminal in real life.
The ‘drug related crimes’ I see are the loaded guy breaking and entering because his judgment (if he ever had any) was long gone by the time he climbed on the roof to break the skylight (commonest entry point).
The ‘turf war’ crimes I have seen, and Lord, there are a lot of them, are just that, TURF WARS.
These usually because some gang banger was on the wrong street, looked at the wrong woman or ‘disrespected’ a guy at the mall.
Gang violence like this was VERY common in the late 30’s and early 40’s in LA, still the gang capitol of the world.
But in those days people didn’t try to find excuses for them, just blamed the culture that loves and glorifies tribalism.
Now, it excuses tribalism and looks for reasons to justify tribal behavior.
