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.

The Vancouver Police have released the August 2006 crime statistics by neighbourhood. The graph to the left compares the individual reported burglary statistics for Kerrisdale (the green line), Dunbar/Southlands (the pink line), Shaughnessy (the black line) and West Point Grey (the red line).

As you can see, the sharpest increase was in Kerrisdale where burglaries rose from 10 reported burglaries in July to 29 in August. Over the past year, not including August 2006, the average has been 14.3 reported burglaries each month in Kerrisdale. The reason for the sharp rise in Kerrisdale was due to an anomoly of 17 commerical burglaries that occured during a two-week period. The details on that mini-crime wave are in this post from September 11th.

Other than that, the other neighourhoods were more or less “typical”. Dunbar/Southlands had 11 reported burglaries in August compared to a 12 month average of 15.3, Shaughnessy and West Point Grey both had 13 in August which is just barely above the average for both neighbourhoods of 12.2 each.

Once the city-wide statistics are released, I will update the graph from previous posts that compares the Westside to the rest of the city.

These neighbourhoods have been selected because they are the neighbourhoods where the majority of our clients reside. If you are interested to see how your neighbourhood compares, let me know.

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The VPD just released the May 2006 crime statistics on their
website at www.vpd.ca

The first two graphs (click on any of the images to get a bigger version) are
extensions of the same charts that I have posted before. The first graph compares the
total number of burglaries on the Westside (the yellow line) as well as the
percentage of total city burglaries that this number represents (the blue
bar). As you can see, the total number of burglaries on the Westside stayed steady
at 236 in May, but as a percentage of all city burglaries dropped to 34% in May, down from 37% in April.

As is the case virtually every month, the Westside still led the city in burglaries in May 2006… compared to the 236 on the Westside, the Eastside had 171, the Downtown Core had 136 and the Northeast had 154.

The second chart below compares the total number of
burglaries by neighbourhood. In May, only Dunbar/Southlands saw an increase in
reported burglaries compared to April (15 in April vs. 16 in May), whereas each
of the other neighbourhoods saw a reasonable drop. In the case of Shaughnessy,
May 2006 was the slowest burglary month in more than two years!

I also have compiled a few neighbourhood specific charts to
show how burglaries are trending during the past 12 months compared to the 12
months prior. The first two charts show the Kerrisdale and Dunbar/Southlands
neighbourhoods. In both cases, the number of burglaries has increased in the
past 12 months.

In the case of Kerrisdale, there were 164 burglaries between
June 2005 and May 2006 compared to 157 during the same period the year before.
For Dunbar, there were 195 burglaries between June 2005
and May 2006 compared to 180 during the corresponding months the year prior.

Over the next few days I will post graphs showing how
Shaughnessy, West Point Grey, Kitsilano and other Westside
neighbourhoods have fared.

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The Vancouver Police recently released the city crime statistics for April 2006.

March was an anomaly in that for the first time in a very long time, the Eastside of the city ‘led’ in reported burglaries. April saw a return to the normal distribution of burglaries with Westside residents being the victims of 236 burglaries, compared to the Eastside’s 160, Downtown core’s 103 and the Northeast’s 132. This means that in April, 37% of all burglaries in the city occured on the Westside. Incidentally, 37% is the average monthly percentage of city burglaries that occur on the Westside since January 2002.

The graph below shows both the actual number of burglaries on the Westside (the line graph) as well as the percentage of the city total that those burglaries represent (the bar graph).

In terms of our own clients, we dealt with one residential burglary and one commercial burglary on the Westside (both on the Easter long weekend) as well as one commercial smash & grab in Gastown. By comparison, in the month of May, we only had to deal with one commercial burglary on Alberni Street downtown.

Here is how reported burglaries are trending in the neighbourhoods where most of our residential clients live.

As I have done in the past, I have put together a chart comparing the police statistics for the month of April by crime category. The distribution below is fairly typical with the Westside leading the city in both burglaries as well as mischief (vandalism, grafitti, etc.)

Here is a link to an image of how the Vancouver Police divide the city into four districts.

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The VPD just released the March crime statistics for the city.

In March, District 4 (the Westside) did not have the most burglaries in the city! For the first time in more than two years, District 3 (the Eastside) got the chance to ‘lead’ the city in break-ins with 262 reported burglaries to the Westside’s 231. District 2 (Northeast) had 137 while District 1 (Downtown) had 91. Here is a link to an image of the four districts in Vancouver.

As in the past, I have extended the same two graphs (double click on either of them to see a bigger version) to include the March 2006 numbers. The first compares the Westside vs. all of Vancouver. The second graph (the line graph) compares four neighbourhoods: Kerrisdale, Shaughnessy, Dunbar/Southlands and West Point Grey since December 2005. For the most part, there was little change for each neighbourhood between February and March. The biggest change was in Dunbar where 4 fewer burglaries were reported to the Police in March than in February…

In terms of some of the other categories of crime incidents, here is how the Westside compared to the other areas of the city in March.

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The Vancouver Police just released their February crime statistics for the city.

During the month of February there were almost 100 fewer burglaries reported in the city compared to January. The Westside saw a decrease of about 75 burglaries in the same period.

I created a couple graphs (double click on each to make them bigger) to show how February compared. The first is an extension of the same graph I posted a few weeks ago which shows the total number of reported burglaries on the Westside as well as the percentage of burglaries throughout the city that occur on the Westside. The second graph (the line graph) compares four neighbourhoods: Kerrisdale, Shaughnessy, Dunbar/Southlands and West Point Grey since December 2005. As you can see, with the exception of Dunbar, the other three neighbourhoods had fewer burglaries than in January. Kerrisdale had the most marked difference going from twenty-eight (28) reported burglaries in January to thirteen (13) in February, which is the lowest total since November.

I found it interesting that January was the only month in the past year that saw all four of these neighbourhoods experience an increase in reported burglaries. In every other month, an increase in one neighbourhood coincided with a decrease in one or more of the others.

Here is the breakdown by neighbourhood for December 2005 through February 2006:

Often times, we are asked by clients how the crime is in their particular neighbourhood. As these statistics illustrate, there really isn’t a true pattern in terms of being able to accurately predict what is going to happen based on past statistics. Certainly, the style of burglaries change depending on the season (for example, there tends to be more burglaries through windows in the summer, due to the fact that many are left open), but the actual amount of activity throughout the entire Westside stays fairly constant (an average of 290 per month). In my own unscientific experience, I have found that crooks tend to work an area for a while, resulting in a spike of activity, before either getting caught or moving on to another neighbourhood.

I recall an incident in our own parking garage where I had a run-in (literally) with a car thief who, once caught a couple weeks later, the Police figured was responsible for a significant number of recent Dunbar burglaries. In the words of one of the Constables who was involved with the incident, the car thief was a “walking crime wave”. Once arrested, the impact on Dunbar burglaries was quite dramatic… for a while. Eventually someone else moved in and took over.

The fact that the majority of crime is committed by a small minority of people helps explain why so many burglaries happen in such a similar fashion. It also helps improve your odds at being able to prevent a burglary by being able to correctly anticipate how a burglary could happen at your home or business.

As always, if you have any questions or comments, please use the comments icon below or send me an email (a link is on the profile page).

The Vancouver Police divide the city into four districts. As you can see from the map below, the Westside is District 4.

The Westside has consistently been the busiest area in Vancouver for burglaries… in most months registering almost three times as many burglaries as the next closest district.

January 2006 was a very busy month for burglaries on the Westside. During the month, there were a total of 772 reported burglaries in Vancouver, 322 or 42% of them on the Westside (double click on the graph below for a larger version). Over the past two years, the Westside typically represents 39% of total burglaries in the city during any given month. Since then, May 2004 was the lowest month at 33% and May 2005 was the highest at 46%.

In terms of real numbers, the Westside has averaged 293 burglaries per month since January 2004, 174, or 59.5% of which are residential and the balance commercial. That works out to an average of 5.9 residential burglaries per day and 1.4 commercial. However, these averages are based on a seven day week and most residential burglaries occur between Monday and Friday from 11:00am and 4:00pm (when crooks expect that homes will be empty) Commercial burglaries occur seven days a week, typically between 1:00am and 6:00am (when crooks expect businesses to be empty).

The list below shows the total number of reported burglaries during the month of January 2006 broken down by neighbourhood (sorry about the formatting):

West Point Grey 14
Kitsilano 48
Fairview 53
South Cambie 11
Shaughnessy 18
Arbutus Ridge 7
Dunbar/Southlands 9
Kerrisdale 18
Oakridge 16
Riley Park 36
Marpole 24
Mount Pleasant (partial) 5

All of the above statistics are from the Vancouver Police Department.