KD5NRH wrote:Stay alert, even in your own driveway.
+1 An open garage door is a big, wide entry point, and often one that provides areas of complete concealment to either side of the garage itself, from the point-of-view of the homeowner inside or entering the garage. You can find numerous news stories of robberies or home invasions that were obviously planned because the bad guys ambushed the homeowner as he or she left for work in the morning, or put the trash out by the curb early in the morning. I have neighbors who routinely leave their garage doors up while they do yard work, and they may be in their backyards for 30 minutes at a time with the garage open and nice hiding places behind the car.
A different matter, and one that I like even less, is presented by detached garages. Unless there is a secured walkway behind a fence or wall to and from the garage and house, BGs who have scoped out your house and decided to hit it can easily intercept you as you leave the house and walk to the garage to go to work. This precise scenario played out a couple of years ago just about a mile from my house.
The homeowner also owned a small business, had a detached garage, and kept very similar movement patterns every day. Pure speculation on my part, but I'll bet the BGs followed him one day from his business--either knowing or assuming he carried significant amount of cash--and then monitored his house for a morning or two. The man's wife didn't work, and they had a 13- or 14-year-old son who walked himself to the corner to catch the school bus. The man headed for work at about 6:30 every morning, leaving his backdoor and walking to his detached garage.
There were four BGs: the driver stayed with the car and the other three, at least two of whom were armed with handguns, waited beside the house and intercepted the homeowner as he closed the backdoor. The man, woman, and son were tied-up with duct tape, the man pistol-whipped. What the BGs didn't know was that an older daughter was home visiting from college. She hid under a bed, was not discovered, and called 911. Harris County Deputies arrived promptly, and two of the BGs were apprehended. The driver got away, as did one home invader who fled through the backyard and started hopping fences. Out of sheer luck, no one was shot or killed. If the daughter had been discovered or the deputies responded more slowly, who knows what the outcome might have been?
There have been some mixed opinions among home security experts about whether or not to use surveillance cameras at a residence. The basic rejoinder against has run something like this: Don't advertise any security measures that seem inappropriate for your home because the advertisement may tell the BGs that there's something inside worth stealing. In other words, on a 12,000 sq. ft. mini-mansion you'd expect to see security cameras monitoring the place; on a 3,000 sq. ft. suburban tract house, you wouldn't...so it raises a flag to the BGs.
My personal opinion is that may have well been true in 1990, when the average surveillance camera was about the size of a shoebox, clearly visible from the street, and a complement of several cost a couple of grand to install. Today, good CCITT cameras with low-light capability are tiny by comparison, and can be mounted unobtrusively in places that aren't going to be obvious until walk right up on them. And wireless or wired, they're pretty affordable.
A setup like KD5NRH's could allow you to check those otherwise invisible spots before you open the garage door or leave the house for your detached garage. I think the opportunity for awareness overweighs the idea that you may advertise something unusually valuable in the house. And as the price of CCITT surveillance systems comes down, it's far more likely to see them in common use on more modest residences. If the homeowner in my little story had had the habit of checking a video feed of the side of his house before walking to the garage at sunrise, he could have called 911 himself and may have avoided trauma to himself and his family.
Just some random thoughts following KD5NRH's graphic example of the fact that things can be goin' on outside your front door that you may be unaware of.
