A Burglar's Guide to the City

by Geoff Manaugh

More’s Utopia shows that police visions of the metropolis are integral to the Western literary tradition. Indeed, the possibility that a twenty-first-century Utopia might yet be written by a retired police helicopter pilot or by an FBI bank-crime investigator is oddly compelling, even if, as with More’s own classic text, it is unlikely that every aspect of their ideal city would appeal to everyone’s taste.

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.

He would steal only one thing at a time, which helped make it all but impossible to tell if something had been stolen or simply misplaced, if your kids had innocently moved it or if your spouse had put it away somewhere without telling you. You might think it’s memory loss or early-onset senility; it’s actually a patient burglar robbing you and your family in slow motion.

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.

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,

Her mother, she said, used to duct-tape her and her siblings together into a large knot, then leave them like that for an hour or more at a time. Had the woman known back then how easy it was to escape from duct tape, she said, perhaps she would not have spent so many hours duct-taped to her siblings. Unsure of how to reply, I laughed—then saw the expression on her face and immediately regretted it.