6 Stops in a 15-Minute Evening Check That Close the Doors Burglars Actually Use

0:00 No-Force Burglary Statistic 1:36 Checking the Garage Door 2:14 Locking the Interior Garage Door 2:33 Car Remote Garage Risk 2:46 Emergency Release Cord Vulnerability 3:31 What Your Front Glass Shows 4:43 Exterior Lighting as Deterrent 6:08 Touching Every Ground-Floor Door 6:42 The Unlocked Door Statistic 8:06 Burglars Entering From the Rear 9:05 Who Still Holds a Key 9:52 Hidden Spare Key Risk 10:19 Keeping Your Phone in Reach 10:44 When Someone Is Home 11:12 If You Hear Something at Night 11:56 Running the Full Six-Step Round The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics averaged household burglary accounts from 2003 to 2007, and nearly two in three completed burglaries involved no force at all, no broken glass, no kicked door, just an unlocked or open door or window. This video walks through six checkpoints built from that data and from Home Office interviews with convicted burglars, starting with the garage, where an open door or a forgotten remote on a car visor hands over everything behind it in one move. From there it moves to the front step, where whatever sits visible through the glass, a laptop, a bag, a set of keys, tells a stranger whether the house is worth the risk before they ever touch the door. It covers exterior lighting as a cue for occupancy, then the station the numbers point to directly: every ground-floor door and window touched by hand, because closed is not the same condition as locked, and that single gap accounts for more than half of the empty-house entries counted in the national survey. It also covers who still holds a working key, an old tenant, a contractor, a friend who never gave one back, and closes with the one thing that matters if every lock held and someone still got in anyway: a phone within reach, a light you can turn on without standing up, and the rule of staying behind a closed door and calling emergency services instead of going to check the sound. None of the six stations costs more than a few dollars, and the round only works as a whole, finished only when every one of the six questions gets a yes.