The Connection

The Alexandria Citizens’ Police Academy is a 10-week course hosted by the Alexandria Police Department (APD) to offer citizens a better understanding of how the department works. Throughout the course, participants sit in on emergency calls and ride along with police officers on patrol. In the 10th and final week of the course, citizens met the with budget and communications specialists in the department and received a special lesson on how Alexandrians should secure their homes.

The man arrives at the door. One second passes. He tests the lock as he looks up and down the street to make sure no one is watching. Another second passes, then a third as he kicks at just the right spot on the door and it swings open. Three seconds. That’s how long it can take for someone to break into a house.

In the final Police Academy class, Charles Lloyd, the Police Department’s crime prevention specialist, helped citizens learn how to secure themselves and their homes. In the event of an emergency, anyone in distress should immediately contact the police.

For home security, Lloyd only half-jokingly noted that his objective is to make citizens a little more paranoid, or at least more aware. Lloyd referenced a triangle that determines the likelihood of criminal activity. The three elements that must be present are the desire to commit a crime, the ability to carry it out, and the opportunity.

“You can’t take away desire or ability,” said Lloyd, “but you can reduce opportunity. Criminals look for the softest target … so you want to present an unattractive target.”

Lloyd displayed a series of homes, some with dense bushes and shrubbery clustered around the house, others with minimal exterior lighting leaving most of the house in complete darkness. A moment later, he showed the same houses, but with the bushes trimmed and the exterior lights activated. These cosmetic changes, Lloyd said, also had an improvement to home security.

“You want to keep bushes trimmed below three feet and trees limbed up over six feet, it leaves less hiding space,” said Lloyd, though he recognized that many people enjoy the dense foliage for the protection offered from street view. “With privacy, you give up some security.”

Lighting is also one of the cheapest and most efficient sources of home protection. Lloyd’s recommends dawn-to-dusk lighting rather than motion sensor activated, which can be tested to see if the home owners are actually present or paying attention.

Closer to the house, Lloyd advised using gravel mixed into the planter beds.

“Mulch is quiet, but walking on gravel stands out,” said Lloyd, saying someone inside might be likely to hear, or even wake up, to the sound of crunching gravel outside.

Lloyd ran through a few tricks that can help homeowners keep entrances secure. At the doors, in addition to obviously keeping them locked, Lloyd recommended using three inch screws rather than the standard half-inch screws to secure the door frame. Lloyd also recommended installing a strike plate, which is easily available at any home-goods retailer. In total, Lloyd described it as a $11 project that could potentially, with a little skill, be done by the homeowner.

“It won’t stop a kick,” Lloyd noted, “but it will make it more difficult. None of this will make the house burglar-proof, but it makes it more resistant. It gives you time to get to a safe place and call the police. You can do things relatively cheaply to fortify your home.”

Another option is a door barricade, an unintrusive block that slides into place against the bottom of the door. Deadbolts are also an important locking mechanism, but they are also structurally the weakest part of the door. A door cage helps reinforce the deadbolt area of the door and make it less prone to kicking-in.

At the windows, Lloyd said there are a number of options, from adding bars to a protective film that keeps the glass from shattering. The glass will break eventually, but it will make a lot of noise and alert the homeowners. Adding a Charlie bar, a stick of some kind that blocks the window from opening, can prevent intruders from sneaking in that way. Many entrances through sliding glass doors, however, aren’t done by breaking the glass. The criminal applies pressure and pulls up, removing the screw from the track at the bottom. The only way to prevent this, Lloyd said, is to check the doors to make sure the screw doesn't easily come out of the track.

The last entrance many residents don’t think about is the garage door.

“The garage needs to be treated as an exterior,” Lloyd warned, and added that people should never leave their garage door openers in their cars. Once, as a patrol officer, Lloyd said he found a suspicious man going down the streets with a bag full of garage door openers. As it turned out, he was breaking into cars and replacing the garage door openers with identical ones in his bag, then using the real one to break in later.

But not all garage entrances have to be so sophisticated. Lloyd demonstrated how a long coat hanger can be slipped in through a gap and tug on the emergency release. To counter this, Lloyd recommended putting a binder clip over the emergency release, which leaves it still accessible from the inside but immune to external attacks.

On alarm systems, Lloyd ran through a variety of options, from sophisticated alarm systems that call the police in the event of an intrusion to the cheap, simple option of a magnetic alarm. Set on either side of a door, a magnetic alarm will trigger and ring once the door opens and the magnets are separated. It won’t contact the police, but it may wake the homeowners and startle the intruder.

If someone decides to get a gun for home defense, Lloyd said there were a number of precautions they need to take. Mainly, it all goes back to not trying to be a hero.

“If someone breaks into your house and you grab your firearm, if you’re incapacitated, you just armed someone who may not have been originally armed,” said Lloyd. “If you hear glass break, grab the family and go to a safe place. Don’t seek out trouble or the people breaking in, call the police. Tell the intruders you’re upstairs and that you’re armed. Think twice. Look out for your family before you go Clint Eastwood, because nine out of 10 times that won’t work.”

For any self-defense, Lloyd says it’s vital that the person carrying the weapon understand the law. That’s not just on guns either. Lloyd showed a popular keychain item that looks like a cat’s head and functions like brass knuckles. They are legal to carry, but illegal to conceal. Meaning anyone carrying them on keys but keeping them in their pockets, purse, or even under a coat could be carrying a concealed weapon without a permit.

Lloyd’s most recommended personal safety item is pepper spray. He says it’s easy to use and is highly effective.

At the end of the class, Lloyd gave out various personal safety gifts to those in the citizen’s police academy, including a book safe and magnet alarms.

Next week is the last meeting for Spring 2016 Citizen’s Police Academy, with a review of the classes and a look at the academy itself.