Another example where the content doesn't support the headline. Nearly all of the decline to current levels had already occurred before 2020 for other reasons outlined in the article.
Now attention is shifting to another burglar-thwarting development: Working from home. Burglars try to avoid dwellings with people in them, and at-home workers also provide residential neighborhoods with what urbanist Jane Jacobs famously dubbed “eyes on the street,” an informal system of surveillance that makes it harder for miscreants to get away with stuff.
A more sophisticated analysis released as a (not yet peer-reviewed) working paper earlier this year by Jesse Matheson, Brendon McConnell, James Rockey and Argyris Sakalis, all economists at British universities, found that that in England and Wales (which experienced a pandemic drop in burglaries similar to that in the US) neighborhoods with residents more likely to work from home experienced steeper burglary declines. To be precise, a 9.5 percentage point (one standard deviation) increase in WFH share “leads to a persistent 4% drop in burglaries.”
Cameras are not nearly as helpful as most civilians seem to believe. Even if you give the cops a video of the burglar, they still have to catch him. Most police forces are overworked with more serious crimes than burglary and they don't have facial recognition software, so catching the guy is not going to be a priority for them unless someone gets hurt or there's a huge wave of burglaries in the same area. All burglars know this, so they're not hugely dissuaded by cameras.
What about getting the license plate of the car the burglar drove? Usually those plates are stolen.
Cameras are not useless, but they are not the magic burglary prevention talismans the public seems to think they are.
I think that's a great point I haven't thought of much before. Goods have gotten way cheaper relative to the cost of services, and especially second hand goods are almost unsellable in some cases - my guess is "porch pirate" thefts are more common now than home robberies.
If you couple all the following:
1. Most goods in a home have little resale value.
2. Tons of homes, even in modest or poor areas, have security cameras.
3. At least where I live, many homeowners have guns.
4. As the article points out, with so many people now staying at home or having flexible schedules, it's a lot harder to determine when a house would be empty.
Overall the risk/reward tradeoff just got much, much worse for home burglaries.
There's still expensive jewelry I suppose--though possibly less of that. But, as you say, electronics is generally of relatively lower value than it used to be and at least some of it can be remotely disabled/tracked. A lot of people don't even have a stereo system or DSLR camera setup.
I'm happy enough having a stereo as a casual consumer today (with speakers in multiple rooms). But I doubt I'd assemble one if I were starting from scratch.
With the shift from CD to streaming I'd strongly suspect most people just use a smart speaker setup.
I fall into that category too with Sonos. The speakers were relatively expensive but now they're not the latest model I bet they wouldn't be worth much second hand.
This doesn’t answer your question, but is related: At least in West Coast cities, I am skeptical about the data. A lot of people have stopped reporting burglaries because nothing is done about them. If you don’t need a police report - like if your loss isn’t worth the insurance deductible and increased future premiums - there isn’t a point to reporting. Police are often understaffed or have been instructed to deprioritize investigating these crimes. And even when a suspect is apprehended, city prosecutors focused on “restorative justice” often prefer to release them. Jaded victims have grown tired of reporting property crimes with no consequences. This is changing now perhaps, with an increasing focus on public safety, but it’s hard for me and many I know to trust the crime data from the last 10 years.
There’s also different trends for different areas or types of crime. For example there’s a trend of “burglary tourists” - illegal immigrants or legal visa holding tourists that often target certain groups like South Asians, perceiving them to be an easy and wealthy target. I suspect there are such groups for whom even the data would show sharp increases. Example article:
https://www.nbcboston.com/news/local/security-measures-urged...
The article is login-gated for me, but I wonder if it includes “Porch Piracy”, which -seems- to be on the rise, but I’m not sure if data supports even that. Maybe it’s just B&E is down because it’s easier to casually grab deliveries and run.
