Every 12 months, nearly a million U.S. households fall victim to burglary, in line with the FBI, leaving homeowners feeling violated and traumatized.
What if the home itself was the primary line of defense?
Crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED) uses landscaping to discourage thieves before they even consider targeting your private home. It’s a practical, if underutilized, solution to dissuading unwanted visitors, and a straightforward option to amp up your private home security.
Here’s the way to do it.
Increase visibility around your property
Most criminals look for straightforward targets with loads of hiding spots to duck into once they approach your own home. Making a well-lit, open environment is step one to keeping people out.
You don’t need to turn your private home into an impenetrable fortress. Easy things that increase the perception of easily being caught could be enough to forestall theft. You possibly can clear debris and unnecessary structures like broken down sheds around your own home and add a motion-activated flood light. And when you’re putting in trees or shrubs, select species that also provide you with a transparent line of sight after they’ve matured — thick, dense bushes near your private home can provide cover for somebody attempting a break-in.
Create barriers which might be difficult to breach
Walk around the surface of your private home and pretend to be a burglar. Are there any side windows or scarcely-used back doors that provide access to the within? Could landscaping make them harder to breach?
If your private home is product of brick or has a stone veneer, rose bushes and other thorny, flowering hedges like Bougainvillea, Hawthorn and Firethorn can provide line of defense under windows. Just make sure you ask an area landscaper which species grow best in your area before you begin planting. (If your private home is product of wood, seek the advice of a contractor, too — moisture from plants can sometimes result in wood rot.)
If you happen to’ve got the funds, it could be value fortifying the actual boundaries of your property.
A tall, wrought iron fence is difficult to scale and straightforward to see through, providing visibility from contained in the home. A low fence combined with a thorny hedge can even work as a deterrent against unwanted visitors. Large rocky borders — favored by many householders within the southwest — are one other great option.
Install an alarm system
Not all lighting and alarm systems have equal impact on criminals.
When shopping around, search for a security system that may quickly notify emergency services within the event of a break-in. The best security systems even have motion sensors and intermittent alarms that produce a “startle” effect on trespassers. When these go off, criminals typically resolve that breaking into the house they’re attached to is more trouble than it’s value, says Dak Kopec, an architectural psychologist and professor on the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Alarms that trigger too easily (or lights which might be almost all the time on) are inclined to turn into an everyday a part of a household’s environment, and other people — members of the family or otherwise — don’t pay as much attention to them.
“[Criminals] want to see how easy it’s going to be to do whatever mayhem they wish to do,” Kopec says. Don’t give them the chance.