334: Home Security (They Wheeled My Safe Out the Front Door)

Mind4Survival Podcast: Survival, Prepping, Preparedness for Preppers

Host Brian Duff shares personal anecdotes regarding home robberies in Baghdad and Los Angeles to illustrate the necessity of layered securit

Key takeaways

• Theft in Baghdad succeeded because the intruder bypassed strong locks by cutting through a thin decorative wood panel on the door.
• CPTED (Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design) suggests trimming shrubs and tree limbs to maintain clear sight lines and remove hiding spots.

Main topics

• Layered Home Security
• CPTED (Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design)

Notable quotes

Detection time plus delay time must exceed response time.

Conclusion

Effective home security is not just about having good hardware, but ab

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Hey everyone, Brian Duff here and welcome to another episode of Mindful Survival. In today's episode, we are getting into home security and what that looks like for you. Some things to think about, some ideas to kick around and looking at it from the perspective of the bad guy who might try to break into your home at some time. That's what they do for a profession. Now, I know a thing or two about people breaking into your home, right? In 2010, I was sitting on the outskirts of Baghdad reading an email from my roommate back home in the States. I was working as a tactical commander on a Department of State high threat security detail, escorting State Department officials throughout Baghdad and around the region. And I'm sitting there doing that for a living, doing security for a living. And the email tells me that our house had been robbed while he was out of town for Memorial Day weekend. The man who did it, the crackhead who did it, ended up turning out later. I found out this later. was skinny enough to break out just the little vertical pane on a French window between the rest of the panes there and knock out a couple panes of glass and was able to slide in through those two panes of glass. And because of what went down, what was stolen and all that, I suspect it was he went and opened the door for a crew of thieves. Now, he or they went through the house. And as they're going through the house looking for stuff to steal, they came to a closet door with a deadbolt lock on it. A deadbolt lock on an interior door, a closet door, to me, is a neon sign for bad guys saying, hey, something worth protecting is on the other side. It shows somebody exactly where to look. And that wouldn't be the most terrible thing if you had a door. Speaker 1 (1:53) The access to get into the thing that you're protecting is really squared away and it's really durable and tough. Unfortunately for me, that wasn't the case because my lapse in thought, I actually had thought about it. I said, I need to go change this door out at some time. I just didn't have enough time. I didn't make the time. But the door that I had the deadbolt lock in. Had a decorative center panel in it. It was an older door, probably a hundred year old door. And that center decorative panel was probably about a 16th inch thick of wood. If that 16th inch made a little bit more really thin. So what did the bad guy do? Bad guys do. They didn't worry about the lock or the reinforced hinges that I had. All set up to go. No, they didn't worry about any of that. They used a claw hammer and they chopped through the center of the door where that decorative panel was. Went right through it. Used the back end of a hammer. Went right through there. Left my deadbolt, the three-inch screws, all that stuff that's sitting in the frame. Then on the other side, the gun safe I had just purchased with the lag bolts that I was going to install, but time. Speaker 1 (3:16) and not making enough time to do it, they sat right, those lag bolts sat right on top of the safe. I'd get to it later. Well, that gun safe went out the front door. And I had, at the time, I had a security management degree. I guess I still do, but like, that's what I was doing. I had a security management degree. And I could opine for days about fixed site security. I spent my days working the layers between a threat and the people in my vehicles that I was protecting. I lived and breathed security. There was a 15-person security detail plus the protectees whom I had to keep safe through my route planning, my mission planning, and the calls I made in the middle of all guidance around Baghdad and outside on the outskirts there. I did a great job and I love the intensity of being forced to successfully operate at a high level of consequence back then. Minus the people trying to kill you part. That part was a little bit of a drag. But it's one of the best jobs I ever had. I really enjoyed that job. Speaker 1 (4:17) Later, I was considered such a security guy that I was hired as the government equivalent of a lieutenant colonel overseeing the contracted guard force at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. Early on, when I first took that over, the program had over a thousand guards protecting multiple sites across Baghdad. I spent my life immersed in security. Despite all that experience and knowing exactly what to do, I never applied one minute of follow-through. to securing my own house the way it should be. I could cite you chapter and verse on operating entry control points while under an active terrorist threat. and I knew that closet door was flimsy. I should have upgraded it. At home, on my rare breaks from the embassy, I didn't want to think about security. I didn't want to think it would happen to me, so I only played at security. Sat around one morning, put a deadbolt lock. You know, it only takes a little bit to change out the hinges and all that stuff. Got all that done and called it good. I didn't want to think it would happen to me, so I only played at security. What was that? What would you call that? I'd say I had some pretty raging case of normalcy bias going on. Now, years before that, thieves cased my dad's house in L.A., waited until he left one evening. came through a basement vent, cut the bolts. He had his safe bolted down, chained down, cut that from underneath the house, and they wheeled that one out the front door. Two unrelated break-ins, same family, the same lesson twice. Even during relatively good times, there are people who are willing to break into yours to take what you have and make it their own. And that's during... Good times, the best of times, people do that. So it only stands to reason that as we move forward farther into problems with diesel fuel and different things that might be impacting the economy, that we all might experience, or some of us might experience, a hike in property crime in your area. So knowing the doctrine about home security and applying it to your own address, Those are two separate skills and many people fail at the second. It's what I failed at actually applying and I knew it. I didn't apply it. Didn't lean into it when I had the time and I paid the price for it. So what does that mean? It means lean into it. Now let's go over this and let's talk about what home security actually is and protective security, protecting your home, protecting your family, all of that. The way we look at it is the first layer of that starts by deterring people. Right. You want them to say, hey, I don't want to mess with this. I'm going somewhere else. Or, hey, you know what? This is such a secure place that I'm going to give up my life of crime over it. Now, for those who aren't deterred by the steps or maybe the lack of steps someone takes, security is designed to make their actions against you. and your home harder and more complex. So you didn't deter them, but guess what? You're making it a lot more difficult to get to the end result or for them to get to the end result that they desire, the end, the desire to stay on their end. Walls, gates, lights, random actions at random times, cameras, locks, they all make your house a obvious Speaker 1 (7:59) Poor choice to target. Why? Because you look prepared and ready. Not someone the typical bad guy will choose to mess with. I'm going to talk about that. Who they pick on. The discipline of home security in the absence of deterrence reduces down to one fundamental relationship. Detection time plus delay time must exceed response time. Speaker 1 (8:30) Detection time plus delay time must exceed response time because detection time is how long it takes for someone, you, a neighbor, one of your electronic sensors, a dog, whatever, to know something is happening and alert people who can mitigate the problem. Maybe you get alerted when you see it happening and you're the problem mitigator. Now, delay time is how long physical barriers and security strategies prevent someone from gaining access to your home. The doors, the locks, the prickly bushes, all that stuff that you have going on. That's all part of that. Now, response time, right? Because detection time plus delay time must exceed response time. Response time is how long it takes someone. to do something about the person, the problem that is causing you the issue that you have detected. Ultimately, because you're the only person you can control. That ends up being you. When it comes to your home security, the somebody that needs to manage it is you. Now, does that mean you're going to go out there and engage and interact directly with the robbers? No, it doesn't mean that. But it means you're the one taking charge and finding a way to get to a solution. Speaker 1 (10:01) Some people build their primary plan around a police response, which is great, right? Most departments are excellent staff by dedicated professionals who will do their best to help you. And if we're thinking of disaster preparedness in, hey, what is, you know, what's my final fallback here? What is, where, where do I have, where does a rubber meet the road? We know in the Supreme Court case of Town of Castle Rock versus Gonzalez in 2005, the Supreme Court held that a person, in this case a woman with a restraining order, had no constitutional right to police protection. It wasn't a right that had to be enforced. So she had no right to that protection. Therefore, what is the protection? Ultimately, it falls back. to you because you don't control those external assets. So plan on what you can control you and your home. That gives you a way to judge every security upgrade that you're thinking about that you could possibly do. Every security upgrade that I'm talking about here in this podcast. Does it deter in your case? Does it stop? Does it delay? Does it make your adversaries work more complicated? Does it buy you the appearance and time to overcome the bad guy's intent? And this works because once you think in terms of effect in time, you can focus more on what works. A camera somebody sees from the sidewalk, does its deterrence work before that person coming down the sidewalk commits to coming on your problem? They see the camera like, hey, I might do something else here, which is the only point, right? Here's the thing with deterrence. The only point that you can deter is before they actually take action. That same camera that you have out there so people can see it and they say, hey, this person has some sort of security system. That same candera stuffed up under an eave somewhere aimed at the back door that nobody can see. What does it do? It records what already happened. It's your. evidence after the fact it's your hey post game analysis of what happened what i can do like you get that off of it but it's not doing anything necessarily for you in the moment right a six dollar box of three inch screws a strike plate that strengthens your your door Speaker 1 (12:39) That is a security feature that happens whether anyone is watching or not. So looking at what they do, what bang for your buck you get and all of that. Now, number two, what are you going to do? Number two, you're going to walk your property like you're someone that's casing your property, like you're going to rob your property. I've mentioned this before. One of the things in several diplomatic or high threat diplomatic security courses that I went through training and vetting courses. One of the first things you do is you plan an attack on a high-threat motorcade. So you can see, hey, what are they looking for? Typically, you're looking for choke points and different things when you're attacking a motorcade because you don't know which direction you're going to go. That was my job as a tactical commander, try to keep them off kilter about where we're driving, what roads we're taking, when we're going, and all that stuff. No matter what, at some point, we had to go through certain intersections, a certain place, because we have to go back to a base or we're going to a certain place. So you look for those choke points and all that. So what does that mean for you? Well, when you have your house, if you live in your house, your apartment, wherever you live, go take a look at it. Look at your own house the way an adversary would. If you're getting ready to buy a new place, do this. Look at it like an Speaker 2 (13:54) adversary Speaker 1 (13:54) would. The way someone trying to get in