It’s Crime Fighting Time…
The Utrecht police are stepping up their fight against crime by using the internet. From Monday information on all break-ins in the city will be published online.
I wonder what this will do… Will it make people more aware of lacking security in their neighbourhoods. Probably. But then the locals chat enough with one another so that grape vine will do its job just fine in “spreading the word”. As far as I know people want to protect their fortress of sollitude, their castle, their home.
Seems to me a smart burglar can take advantage of this site in a few ways. After a burglary people tend to get more security measures. But since the time of burglary is known, you will also have an indication of the minimum age those security measures have. You can scan for probability of weaknesses. Maybe not this year, but in a few years sure. Plan ahead, why not.
But even if that’s a little far fetched, you can get a similar probability from looking around where a fair amount of burglaries has happened and with which method (they add it to the burglary posting!). This seems a likely problem with a lot of houses there. The locks and such will probably stem from the same period on most. The time they were built or last massively fixed up. Again, this seems useful to me if you think like a burglar.
And of course the plain and simple fact of “Oh I don’t need to go there to break in, they’ve already been burgled and are now without much useful things to steal.”
Who knows, maybe it will work. But I think it would work a lot better with a little less information…