Crime

Photo by PoPville flickr user Miki J.

From MPD:

“To help prevent crimes in the community on Halloween night, please ensure that you turn on your porch lights in the front and rear of your home to help illuminate the area at night.

Burglars Love to Break In During Halloween, Here’s How to Keep Them Away

If you saw a hooded man with a spooky mask and giant bag knocking on your neighbor’s door in the middle of the night, you’d be suspicious.

That is, unless it was Halloween.

Halloween gives burglars the perfect cover to inspect houses anonymously without bringing suspicion.

Think about it: If a burglars knocks on a homeowner’s door and the homeowner answers, the burglar just pretends that they were there for the candy all along.

But if no one answers? They’ll assume the homeowner is away for their own Halloween fun, letting the burglar know they they can rob the home without confrontation.

So, if your home will be vacant during Halloween, keep your home safe with these tips.

Keep your home well lit

During Halloween, some homeowners turn off their lights to subtly let trick or treaters know that no one is home or that they’re not participating in giving candy.

Unfortunately, that same subtle cue can tell burglars that your home is ripe for the picking. So whether you’re home or not, keep your home well-lit.

A smarter alternative? Install motion sensor flood lights that turn on automatically when someone approaches your home.

Or you could automate your lights on a random schedule. That way, it’s harder for burglars to tell when someone is home and when they’re not. One way to do this: integrate your lighting into a home automation system.

This allows you to:

• Set lighting schedules

• Control lights remotely using your smartphone or tablet

• Program your lights to automatically turn on and off when someone enters or leaves a room

• Integrate your lights into your security system, allowing lights to turn on when someone breaks in”

“Dear PoPville,

If you want to see why crime is skyrocketing, I strongly encourage you to watch this video. According to a friend, the first three officers who arrived on scene were placed in “non-contact status” as a result of this, which means their guns and badges have been pulled and they’re on desk duty pending an investigation. This is required by policy whenever force is applied. But, that means three more officers off the street, not responding to calls or patrolling.

The problem here, is not that the incident was videotapped. Having it video tapped was a good thing. The problem is that the city will never back up any of our officers and the crowd turned on them for responding to a call and then using force (the call btw, was for a man allegedly on PCP). What type of a message does it send to pull these three off the street for responding to a call and trying to do their jobs with the least amount of force possible? The officer at the end, who threw the knee, was responding to having been bitten! Why would anyone want to do this job? The lesson is that next time, unless someone is actually being harmed, the same officers may choose to play it safe and simply drive by.

I strongly encourage all to call the Mayor’s Office and express support for these officers, given they put themselves in harms way to protect the city. The incident happened on the 5100 block of Cloud Place in Northeast.

Mayor’s Office
1350 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20004
Phone: (202) 727-2643
TTY: 711
Email: [email protected]”