Here are the heat maps for Vancouver for the weeks of August 26th through September 1st, and September 2nd through 9th, 2009 that show where reported residential burglaries occurred.

First off is August 26th to September 1st… which had 59 reported residential burglaries:

Next is September 2nd through 9th… where 61 residential burglaries were reported to the VPD…

These numbers average out to about 8.5 residential burglaries per day in the city. That’s been pretty consistent for all of August… about 60 home broken into each week. When you factor in that most burglaries happen between Monday and Friday, between 11am and 4:00pm (rather than evenly spread over a 24 hour period)… the real “average” gets closer to 12 per day.

These maps help show that residential burglary is not concentrated heavily in any one neighbourhood. Crooks pick on homes in every neighbourhood throughout the city. When a spike is seen in any particular neighbourhood, it is typically the work of a single burglar working one place for a few days before moving to another area in the city.

By the end of the year, if you take all of these heat maps from throughout the year and superimpose them on one another, there are not too many ‘burglar free’ spaces. Here’s what 2007 looked like…

So… the bad news is that burglary is (and will continue to be) a major concern in Vancouver. The good news is that it really isn’t that hard to minimize your risk of becoming a victim. It’s not expensive either. In fact, most of the security tactics that have the most impact are either free or at least very cheap.

One of the best ways to learn about how to maximize your home security is to attend one of our ‘Preventing Burglary’ seminars. Our next one is on Tuesday, September 22nd at 6:45pm. Click here to RSVP.

Would you like to get updates about the crime that is happening in your neighbourhood (if you live in Vancouver)?

We send out a newsletter every couple of months that includes burglary statistics that are broken out by neighbourhood, and customized to where you live. If you’d like to subscribe, please visit our website at www.providentsecurity.ca and add your email address in the ‘Subscribe to our Newsletter’ box on the right hand side. (We promise not to send you anything other than the newsletter.)

It’s Kerrisdale Days again….

The Provident slide will be out between 10:00am and 4:30pm tomorrow (Saturday, April 25th 2009) during Kerrisdale Days.

As always, we’ll be on Yew Street between the Royal Bank and TD Canada Trust. We’ve got about two dozen of our team members who will be volunteering to help give out balloons, temporary tattoos and get people on & off of the slide. Of course, if you have any questions about your home security, we’ll have lots of time to talk about that as well.

The day starts off with the Kerrisdale Parade, promptly at 10:00am. The parade is one of the longest standing community parades in the city… more than 1,000 Little Leaguers, pipe bands, antique cars as well as the VPD Mounted Squad (and a few Provident vehicles) will be participating.

It’s a fantastic community event and we’re proud to have been a Kerrisdale Business Association (KBA) member, sponsor and security provider for 13 years now.

Click here to see the schedule of events from the KBA website.

Our next home security seminar will start at 7:00pm this coming Monday, October 27th in our Kerrisdale Showroom.

Similar to last month’s version, both myself and Cst. Ray Gardner will lead a discussion outlining exactly how burglaries occur on the Westside, and most importantly… what you can do about it.

Our last seminar was a great success… so much so that we ended up having an overflow crowd.

As a result, we now know that the maximum number of people that we can comfortably hold in the showroom is 16… so please let us know by sending us an email at seminar@providentsecurity.bc.ca to confirm that you would like to attend.

We will have wine & cheese starting around 6:30pm… so please feel free to come by early. We will be starting the presentation right at 7:00pm and it will be over by 8:45pm.

After the presentation, we will lead a tour through our central monitoring station for those that are interested to see what happens behind the scenes.

What have others said about the information presented at the seminar?

Here is some of the survey feedback we received after the September seminar…

“I particularly liked reiteration of the information about how to delay a burglar for 5 minutes. The tour of the operations facility was very interesting and confidence building”.

“I felt at ease. Information was useful.”

“I found it interesting and informative and I’m sure others would as well …. whether they have a system or not. It helps to stay current with crime trends and security options.”

“with all the home security advertising, I think it can be somewhat confusing for people and your session helped to clear up some issues”

Here are the VPD crime maps for Vancouver during the week of December 12th through 18th, 2007….

The first maps shows all of the reported residential burglaries last week…. like last week, other than South Granville (or Fairview depending on who you talk to) it was reasonably quiet on the Westside.

Next, is the commercial burglaries… more of the same… other than some extra attention in Marpole.

Theft from auto…

and Stolen Auto…

Here are the VPD crime maps for incidents of residential burglary, commercial burglary, theft from auto and theft from auto respectively.

Overall, it was a relatively quiet week on the Westside… some incidents in South Granville, Kitsilano and Point Grey, but pretty quiet in Dunbar and Kerrisdale.

Commercial burglaries on the Westside were heaviest along Granville Street (although no Provident clients got hit… and we monitor more than 80 businesses between 6th and 16th)…

Theft from auto…

Theft of auto…

It has been a while since I’ve posted any of the neighbourhood burglary statistics…. in keeping with tradition, the first graph compares the total number of burglaries on the Westside (the yellow line) against the percentage of burglaries in the whole city that occurred on the Westside (the blue bars).

Click on the any of the images for a larger version…

As you can see, it has been pretty quiet (by comparison) on the Westside for the last few months… which certainly corresponds with our own experience. While we have been kept relatively busy with commercial burglaries, and attempted burglaries, over the past three months… it has been unusually inactive on the residential front.

In fact, April 2007 had the lowest recorded number of burglaries on the Westside (201) since I have been keeping track… which is since January 2002.

However, burglaries have been a little down across the city… the total number of reported burglaries in the entire city in April 2007 was 611, which was the lowest since February 2006. As a percentage of total burglaries in the city though, the Westside has remained fairly consistent with about a third of all burglaries in the city happening here. (I wonder who was in jail over the past couple months to account for the change).

Below I have attached some neighbourhood specific graphs showing total number of burglaries per month…

Kerrisdale Burglaries November 2004 – April 2007 (Click the image for a bigger version)

Shaughnessy Burglaries November 2004 – April 2007 (Click the image for a bigger version)

Dunbar/Southlands Burglaries November 2004 – April 2007 (Click the image for a bigger version)

West Point Grey Burglaries November 2004 – April 2007 (Click the image for a bigger version)

As always, these statistics are all courtesy of the Vancouver Police Department. The map below shows how the city divides each neighbourhood… anytime that I have referenced neighbourhood specific burglary stats on this blog, it corresponds to the following….

Here are images of the Vancouver Police residential burglary crime maps for the week of January 17th through 23rd, as well as for the week of the 24th through to the 30th.

The red areas show the geographical ‘hot’ spots where residential burglaries are concentrated for that week.

Comparing the two weeks side by side offers an interesting view of how the ‘hot spots’ in the city move around. When these hot spot maps are combined for a longer period of time, the distribution ends up looking quite even across the city. While the Westside is the property crime ‘leader’ in Vancouver, residential burglaries are a problem in literally every single neighbourhood in the city.

These maps illustrate that most crooks will tend to work an area for a few days, and then move on to another neighbourhood… rather than just hitting the same places over and over again. The worst handful of offenders are responsible for the vast majority of property crime… and are literally walking crime waves who are largely responsible for shaping the moving ‘hot spots’ in the city.

Here are the crime maps from the Vancouver Police for the week of October 18th through October 24th…

Residential Burglaries

Commercial Burglaries

Theft from Auto

Stolen Auto

The Vancouver Police make weekly crime maps available to the public through their website at www.vpd.ca

The following images are all for the week of October 4th through October 10th, 2006 and give you an idea where most criminal incidents have been located. The dark red centres are where the majority of each type of crime has occured during the week.

Residential Burglaries (click on the image for a bigger version)

Commercial Burglaries (click on the image for a bigger version)

Theft from Auto (click on the image for a bigger version)

Stolen Vehicles (click on the image for a bigger version)

The image above summarizes, for me, everything that is wrong with the security industry (click on the image for a bigger version). The installation is absolutely criminal and how any company could charge a dime for monitoring a system like this is beyond my comprehension. In the race to offer the cheapest possible alarm in order to generate a monthly monitoring fee, far too many systems have been installed like this offering a false sense of security to literally millions of Canadians, Americans and other unsuspecting victims.

There are so many things wrong here that it is hard to know where to start. Here is a short list of the 3 most important issues:

1. The keypad is actually the control panel. This particular model is called a Lynx and is manufactured by Honeywell. However, most of the major manufacturers have their own version of an “all-in-one” control panel, siren & keypad (Here is a link to GE’s version). These all-in-one models were designed to simplify installation and are typically part of “free” or low-cost alarm systems. They are all equally useless.

The most important problem with systems like this is the fact that you need to have a delay time in order to open your door and get to the keypad each time you enter your home. So, when a crook breaks in, they also have the same amount of time. If the crook follows the sound of the beeping keypad they will be standing in front of not only the keypad, but the brains of the alarm system. So, rather than punching in a valid code, the crook could simply rip the entire unit off of the wall.

Provided that they rip the panel off of the wall before the alarm sends its first signal, it will never be able to send a signal.

2. If point #1 wasn’t bad enough (or maybe because the installer who put the ‘system’ in realized how useless it was going to be) the power supply for the system is located right beside the keypad/control panel. Unplug the transformer (which is just barely able to stay plugged in as it is) and the alarm loses power. This provides a really convenient way for someone to either accidentally or intentionally unplug the system and wait for the back-up battery to die.

3. Even worse, the phone jack has also been located beside the power supply. The phone jack is the alarm systems only connection to the outside world. If it gets unplugged, the system cannot communicate and a crook would not have to go through the hassle of ripping the panel off of the wall.

In this particular install, a crook need not even reach all of the way in after breaking the window to unplug the alarm system because the phone line is less than six inches from the window.

Even if there was a glassbreak sensor installed, the fact that the phone line is so easily accessible would render it useless because it could easily be unplugged before the alarm tripped.

Unfortunately, a system like this one offers absolutely zero security value. It’s only purpose is to allow an alarm company to collect a monthly monitoring fee and hope the client does not figure out how misplaced their trust in the company was.

Hundreds of thousands of systems (actually, probably a lot more) like this have been installed all over North America as part of “free” or low cost alarm systems. Rather than an alarm company having to spend several hours installing seperate keypads, siren and control panel, this set-up allows a company to send out ‘installers’ who literally require no experience whatsoever to simply mount these types of systems. Nice, quick and easy install : no security value.

Lessons?

1. Your control panel needs to be as far away from your keypads as possible. At a minimum, it should take longer to find your control panel than your entry delay time. If possible, the control panel should be hidden.

2. The siren needs to be located away from your control panel so that crooks cannot simply follow the noise of your siren to locate your control panel location.

3. The alarm phone jack, transformer and control panel should not be visible from the outside of your home.

4. If you are willing to spend a monthly monitoring fee, you might as well be willing to spend a little extra up front to ensure that your alarm is actually capable of justifying any monthly expense. Otherwise, forget paying for monitoring and spend that money on better locks, stronger glass and other physical security measures.

The good news?

This particular system is being pulled off the wall and replaced with a proper system by Provident on Monday.