The holiday season is approaching, and that means many Juneau residents will be heading out of town to visit family and other loved ones.
We have some quick tips about how not to make your home attractive to opportunist burglars.
Officer Ken Colon of the Juneau Police Department suggests putting together a leave plan.
“If you leave on vacation, like boaters have a float plan, you yourself should a have a plan set in place,” Colon said. “If you have newspaper delivery, stop the delivery. Mail, stop the mail. Reason why is if you don’t, it starts building up.”
Newspapers and mail that pile up are a signal to burglars that someone has not been home for some time.
As an alternative — if you have a good relationship with your neighbors — you can ask them to pick up your newspapers and mail for you.
Leave lights or music on, or put them on a timer.
Better yet, get a college student or someone else to house sit for you while you are away.
And certainly don’t broadcast on social media that you’ll be leaving on that long vacation to Europe or some other dream destination. That’s basically an invitation for burglars to ransack your place.
Rosanne Schmitz of the Flats Families Neighborhood Association said they all keep an eye out for each other.
“We check each other’s houses,” Schmitz said. “Somebody will message us – not put it on Facebook – they’ll message us and they’ll say ‘I’m leaving’ and I go around and I check all of their doors on their house, windows and just make sure everything seems secure. And you just do that once a day and just go around. Then I let them know through a message that everything looked fine.”
“It gives you a peace of mind when you’re away from home,” Schmitz said.
Colon said burglars are opportunists. They’re going to get in as fast as they can, take things that are in plain sight or easy to reach and get out fast. He suggests finding creative ways to stash or hide valuable items that could become a target for a burglar.
Colon said it may take some time, but he recommends taking an inventory of all your valuables, including pictures of the items and any serial numbers.
Store that information in multiple places that would be easy for only you to access, like on a cloud drive and on a thumb drive that’s been hidden somewhere.
Just don’t leave all of that information on a hard drive on your laptop.
“I’m aware of someone, they did that, their laptop was stolen,” Colon said. “Yeah. Now, all of their records are gone. I can tell that I still have records way back when, where it’s in a safe area for me for a very long time.”
Colon is a patrol officer with the Juneau Police Department who spends most of his time in the downtown core, and he specializes in doing security assessments.
