This week’s edition (7/11/19) of our local newspaper, the West Springfield Record, includes a front-page headline that reads “Town Besieged by Rash of Car Break-Ins.” The article explains this is happening in multiple communities in our area.
WWLP reported about this trend as well.
We’d like to take a moment to point out ways your home’s security system, installed by Northeast Security Solutions, can help in preventing car break-ins.
Most of these car break-ins are happening in the middle of the night. The cars tend to be unlocked or in garages where the doors were accidentally left open. Most of us try to be good at remembering to lock the car doors and keep the garage door closed. However, doing so can be easy to forget. Here are some ways your home security system can help you in preventing car break-ins.
Garage Door Left Open Reminders
Our security systems that have the Alarm.com Interactive Services enabled can remind you if you’ve left any door open, including a garage door. You can even customize this alert to control how long the door should be left open before it notifies you. If an alert does come in, you can go close the garage door. You can even close it right from your Alarm.com app on your mobile device or computer if you have a Z-Wave or Wi-Fi enabled garage door opener.
Automatic Garage Door Closing
Alerts created by doors left open are great, but maybe you don’t want any human intervention. There is an add-on feature available for Alarm.com that enables your system to automatically arm itself at night. An additional automation rule that will close any open garage doors when your system is armed finishes the job. You’ll never leave your door open at night again with both of these rules enabled!
Using Video Analytics to Scare Away the Thieves and Wake You Up
There are a lot of surveillance cameras on the market. What makes Alarm.com cameras stand out from the competition is the video analytics option. You can program your cameras to recognize people or cars at night and trigger Z-wave enabled devices upon detecting a person or car’s movement.
For example, you can program your security system to turn on your outside lights when a person or car is detected in your driveway. You can also limit it to nighttime and ignore motion caused by any animals. This will hopefully scare away any would-be thief.
You might be asking, “Can’t any motion-activated light do that?” Well, that is an option as well, but standard motion lights typically don’t distinguish time of day or have the ability to ignore animals, so you may be wasting electricity. In addition, standard motion lights can’t alert you to the fact that they’ve been activated, and can’t trigger other lights. However, Alarm.com-enabled security cameras controlling your outside lights can perform these other tasks.
With an Alarm.com-enabled security camera, you can also program your system to turn on your bedroom lights when the outside cameras detect a person or a vehicle in your driveway. This will hopefully wake you up. You can then call the police to arrest the thief while they are in the act.
Why Do I Care About Preventing Car Break-Ins?
Perhaps you are one of those people who doesn’t keep anything valuable in your car except some spare change for parking meters. If you don’t mind losing that and can deal with the psychological trauma of being a burglary victim, perhaps preventing car break-ins isn’t a concern for you.
However, many of these crime victims are reporting purses, expensive electronics, and other items that do have value going missing. These folks who had their purses taken likely had their home keys in their purses. Now the burglar has a way to get into their homes if they don’t rekey all of their locks. Stopping these crimes from happening in the first place is in your best interest.
How Can We Help?
Many of these crimes could have been prevented if the cars had been locked or the garages had been closed. However, there have also been reports of thieves using tools to open locked cars. Therefore, locking your doors and cars does not create a sure-fire solution. If any of these additional security measures are of interest to you, we are happy to offer a free security consultation and give you a no obligation, complimentary estimate to implement them. Call us at 413-SECURITY (732-8748) or visit our website at www.NortheastSecuritySolutions.com for more information.
Featured image photo credit: (U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Wesley Farnsworth/Released)