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I’m an architect, you know—I’d love to see the blueprints for your new bank downtown. I’m working on one myself and I’m having trouble with the vault.
In short, he robbed the banks of nineteenth-century America by making copies of them, declaring replicant architectural warfare on the moneyed classes of the East Coast.
before his gang robbed the Manhattan Savings Institution in October 1878, Leslie had already broken into the bank twice, stealing nothing, simply checking out the building for himself and verifying that he had the correct combination for the vault door.
Burglary is the original sin of the metropolis. Indeed, you cannot tell the story of buildings without telling the story of the people who want to break into them: burglars are a necessary part of the tale, a deviant counternarrative as old as the built environment itself.
As any FBI agent can tell you, Los Angeles became the bank robbery capital of the world in large part because of its freeways.
he describes how LAPD pilots navigate the city: “To facilitate ground-air synchronization, thousands of residential rooftops have been painted with identifying street numbers, transforming the aerial view of the city into a huge police grid.” With this incredible image, Davis implies that the police have stealthily redesigned urban space to suit their own needs, even painting our addresses onto the roofs of our buildings without us noticing, all so that we can be more easily corralled. To Mike Davis, we are not civilians; we are sheep.
It’s hard to know which is more dystopian: the idea that your every move is being studied by occasionally malign figures of anonymous government authority, or that everything you’ve done in the public sphere has for years now been secretly recorded for no particular reason, by people who would rather be doing almost anything else, in an apotheosis of archival bureaucracy that you yourself pay for through tax.
An Orlando, Florida, company called L-3 CyTerra has developed a “stepped frequency continuous wave” handheld radar system called the RANGE-R. This device, about the size of a walkie-talkie, allows users to see through walls—or ceilings.
Before new buildings begin construction, Dakswin pointed out, they have to be approved by the city. So building designs are filed at city hall or even in the municipal water department. Then it’s just a question of social engineering, of convincing someone else that you need those plans. Dakswin described how essential this has been for him in the past: he actually registered a fake company—he wouldn’t say where, but I had to assume it was in Toronto—with the generic name of a legal services firm. He then contacted a local construction company saying that he needed to obtain a set of
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houses on corners are more likely to be broken into, as they offer multiple escape routes and clear lines of sight in all directions, allowing burglars to look out for returning residents or a patrolling cop car.
Is your house set back farther from the street than the other houses around it—perhaps even within a ring of large bushes or luxuriant trees? If so, you’re more likely to be a target:
some burglars will carry a roll of tape, throwing up a quick X across the window glass—as if anticipating a hurricane—before shattering it. That way, broken pieces of glass will just hang there, stuck in a web of tape, far less likely to fall and noisily shatter.
If your house is architecturally unique, or in any way confusing, it can be a less tempting target.
a savvy burglar often needs to do these days is look at the website of your home builder or the property agency in charge of your apartment building to pull up a floor plan; these innocuous online tools ostensibly made for real estate bargain hunters are also amazingly helpful burglars’ guides.
Scott Decker in their book Burglars on the Job admitted that he used to work as the family gardener at a particular house; he had a duplicate key cut for access to the house, but he had since used the key over and over to reenter the house and steal things.
Do you own a dog? BEWARE OF DOG signs are, in fact, effective deterrents. Is anyone currently home? If not, are your neighbors around and likely to see something? Do you have a burglar alarm? One burglar explained to Wright and Decker how he would react to burglar alarms—and it certainly wasn’t with the desired level of fear. If anything, alarms signal to burglars that you own something worth protecting and that your house is thus a good target.
as many as 70 percent of residential burglaries are estimated to be committed by drug addicts.
“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.
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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.
He described how police officers would pose as pawnshop owners or even as black-market metal buyers to deceive burglars and thieves.
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
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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.
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.
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.
A broomstick, a brick of polystyrene, some black electrical tape, a can of hair spray: these were enough to subvert and neutralize more than a million dollars’ worth of high-tech security sensors, as if a rewards shopper at Home Depot had somehow managed to rob Fort Knox.
the classic French heist film Rififi—in which burglars use fireproof insulating foam to silence the alarm of the store they’ve carefully broken into
A set of master keys to the infrastructure of New York City popped up on eBay back in September 2012, leaving media commentators and city officials alike concerned for the safety of the metropolis. These keys promised universal access to urban infrastructure, from subways to skyscrapers—true “keys to the city” that should never be let out into the wild.
A bump key is basically a regular, blank door key that you insert into a lock, then, as you turn it slightly with one hand, you give it a solid bump with a hammer or even with the heel of a shoe; if done correctly, this bounces all the pins up out of the cylinder, and the lock will open.
Working as a police officer had taught him firsthand that locks don’t work. They slow criminals down, sure—but they don’t really stop anyone. Maybe your lock means that a burglar will need a few more minutes to get inside—but they’ll still get inside. If you really want to keep people out of a space altogether—if you want to end the humiliation of burglary—then you need something far stronger than a dead bolt. You need an absolute physical barrier.
A thorny plant called trifoliate orange—nicknamed the Rambo bush—is sold as a low-cost living barrier. It is marketed under the name Living Fence. Trifoliate orange is so dense and fast-growing that it can stop speeding vehicles; it is used by the U.S. military to help secure the perimeters of missile silos and armories; and its razor-sharp thorns make it a great fit for domestic security needs.
the army has even developed detailed 3-D models of Gaza and the West Bank, down to the locations of internal doors and windows. Each structure has also been given an identifying number so that the otherwise impossibly complex task of signaling one’s location to other troops can be resolved simply by relaying a coded number, a kind of military lat/long for the ocean of architecture into which the soldiers have dived.
Streetlights were one of many new patrol tools implemented by Louis XIV’s lieutenant general of police, Gabriel Nicolas de la Reynie. De la Reynie’s plan ordered that lanterns be hung over the streets every sixty feet—with the unintended side effect that Paris soon gained its popular moniker, the City of Light. The world’s most romantic city takes its nickname from a police operation.
