How does a Cat Burglar differ from your everyday regular Burglar? A regular burglar forces entry into your home when no one is home. He or she does not want to be noticed or discovered and will flee immediately upon discovering that someone has arrived home in the middle of a burglary attempt. I have witnessed this time and time again when I get the call to respond to an “Interrupted” Burglary call.
The homeowner arrives home, opens the garage door, sees the door leading into the house propped open and a subject in the doorway with a load of property in their arms. The startled subject runs into the house out of sight, and the startled home owner does the right thing, backs out of the driveway and goes to a neighbors house to call 911. Unseen by the homeowner, the Burglar runs out the rear sliding glass door, hops the fence in the yard, and makes his or her way back to their car.
Officers arrive, check the house to make sure that no one is inside, and find your electronics stacked up by the door ready to go. We find the point of entry where the Suspect kicked in the side garage door to gain entry into the house, and we find the open sliding glass door open, leading to the rear yard where the Suspect made his or her exit. That is how the average Burglar operates.
The Cat Burglar is far from average, and is downright dangerous. The Cat Burglar thrives on entering your home knowing and counting on the fact that you are home. Cat Burglars get off on the challenge of moving around freely in your house while you and your family are sleeping.
The Cat Burglar will stand next to a bed and admire female victims just before going through dresser drawers for jewelry, money, your purse, a wallet, whatever small items they can carry safely on their persons or in their pockets.
How does a Cat Burglar get into your home undetected? The Cat Burglar usually does his or her homework before attempting such a brazen and daring act but keep in mind, that’s what makes it enjoyable. The thrill!
- The Cat Burglar will not spoil the thrill by being discovered making noise getting into your home. The Cat Burglar knows that you don’t have a dog in the back yard or in the house. If you do have a dog, he or she knows that the dog is friendly and will not bark because they’ve conducted their own test during the day when you’re not at home.
- The Cat Burglar knows you don’t have an alarm system or if you do have one, that you never use it. The Cat Burglar knows what time you and your family goes to sleep and what time you wake up. The Cat Burglar knows he or she is in a neighborhood without an alert neighborhood watch group. After all, they’ve spent all this time researching your activity at home and no one has ever reported a suspicious subject to the Police.
- The Cat Burglar is smart, careful, and daring. They are not to be underestimated. They are DANGEROUS! Read the text on Crime Prevention and pay special attention to the Rape I responded to in my quiet little bedroom community. This was the work of a Cat Burglar.
How does a Cat Burglar (hereafter referred to as a CB) gain entry into your home without being detected?
Simple! You let them in.
- Through an open garage door.
- Through an open window.
- Through an open rear sliding glass door. You say the screen door was locked? Gee, golly, gosh. it takes 5 seconds to pop that latch open without making any noise.
- Best attraction yet, the CB knows they will be working in what they love best. Total darkness. No porch or yard lights on. No motion lights.
Picture this. Sleeping in your bed with your spouse. Or worse yet, alone.
Your kids are asleep in their rooms. Or worse yet, you’re alone.
You wake up with the strange feeling that someone is watching you.
You wonder if it’s a dream but as you wipe the sleep from your eyes you see the silhouette of a tall subject, standing at your dresser at the foot of your bed. You sit up startled and either scream, or in some cases ask “Who are you, what are you doing?”
The Suspect calmly looks back at you in the dim light provided by his mini flashlight and answers your question in his own confident voice. “Leaving” he tells you. And he does.
If you’re a female home alone, you’re lucky if that’s all he does is leave. Your Jewelry, purse, cash and credit cards are gone, but hopefully so is the CB. What do you do when you’re in bed asleep. Clothed? Unclothed?
Chances are you weren’t prepared to have a potentially dangerous criminal pop into YOUR house unexpectedly during the middle of the night.
Do you chase him? Do you go for a weapon? Does he have a weapon? What’s his motive? Is he gone?
This guy struck my town for a period of about 6 weeks. Always on Monday and Thursday nights. A Parolee who didn’t believe in rehabilitation. Always at about 2:00am.
He stood about 6’6”tall, 240lbs of muscle from working out with weights while in prison for the past 3 years. Dressed in dark clothing and a black leather vest. Scary looking guy. 6 weeks in a row of terrorizing residents who were sleeping peacefully in their beds. Thousands of dollars in stolen property had been taken, and he ALWAYS got in through rear UNLOCKED sliding glass doors.
By the time you jumped out of bed and ran to the bedroom window, you maybe caught a glimpse of him walking down the sidewalk to where he had his vehicle parked halfway down your street. One homeowner managed to give a pretty accurate description of this guy. I got mad. No one was going to get away with this in my town!
I looked at where this guy had struck for the past 6 weeks, and made one of those maps with the little “stick pins” marking the houses he had gotten into. I came in on my own time on a Monday morning at about 1:00am, and talked one of my partners into helping me do a little surveillance action in the heart of the area the Suspect had been targeting.
Police work involves a certain amount of luck. I figured we never had a chance of running into this guy but at the least, if he hit this night, we would already be in the area. After sitting for 15 minutes in my personal vehicle I saw through the fog, a vehicle driving slowly through the neighborhood.
Too slowly. It just didn’t look right. Too slowly to have been a newspaper delivery person. Too slowly to be a resident going home. But slowly enough to be cruising a neighborhood for potential victims.
I had my partner do a quick drive by in his unmarked car to get the license plate of the vehicle so that we could radio it in. My partner found the car parked in front of a residence. A residence that was completely dark with no lights on. My partner ran the plate through dispatch as he drove by, and then drove out of the street as to not cause whoever the driver was, to become suspicious.
While waiting for dispatch to advise where this vehicle was registered out of, it drove by me again. But at a normal rate of speed. Maybe faster. This guy was smart. While I was wondering why this guy had driven into a neighborhood and not come out yet, he was wondering why a car had driven past his car and then had left without any apparent reason. I smelled a Burglar. He smelled Cop. So he left. But not without me!
As I followed his car down the street, Dispatch advised that the car came back registered out of the City where my brother works. Remember the high crime rate place? I wanted to know why this guy was in my town at 2:30 in the morning, 30 miles away from his house.
He did something wrong. Weaving, taillight out, I don’t remember but it was enough for me to have a “Marked police unit” effect a car stop. The guy was a professional. Most crooks you stop in the middle of the night are nervous and evasive. This guy was cool, he was calm, and he was defiant.
He had a valid driver’s license. I was surprised. His car was legally registered. I was surprised. He had confidence. I was impressed. But what he didn’t have, was a reason for being in my city at this time of morning. “I couldn’t sleep so I went for a drive” he told me.
I took him off to the side of the roadway and told him straight up that I wasn’t going to insult him by giving him a bunch of BS. I told him that I knew exactly who he was and what he was doing in my town. He looked at me and calmly said “So what, you got nothing on me.”
I’m a smart enough cop to know better than to jeopardize an investigation with improper “questioning” but on the other hand I wanted this guy to know that I knew exactly what was up.
I asked him “off the record”, why a guy that was currently on parole for burglary would take such a brazen chance on getting caught, doing the very same crime that he was on parole for? I never forgot what he told me. He looked at me with defiance and told me the following.
“Nothing I say to you is admissible because this is off the record. I’m not going to say that I know what you’re talking about but I will say this.
You have a job to do, so do I. If I get busted while I’m doing my job, I go back to the pen. (Prison) I’ll get 3 meals a day, medical care, get to work out with weights all day, and be healthier than most cops. I’ll get a job in the kitchen or wherever and get out a whole lot sooner than you think.
Basically you have nothing on me. No prints, no evidence, no nothing. These people are stupid. They leave their doors unlocked at night and almost invite someone in. This is nothing more than a game and it all boils down to who plays the game better, you or me!
Now, either arrest me, or you’ll be in violation of an unlawful detention.”
And he was right. We had nothing physical as evidence. He was allowed to drive away. But what we did have was a subject prowling an area that had been plagued by residential burglaries for the past 6 weeks. A subject that was in an area late at night, where he had no legitimate reason for being there.
A subject who was on Parole, for burglary and other related crimes.
But there’s a neat little agreement under the terms of probation and parole. It’s called a search clause. We don’t abuse the privilege but that clause gives us the right to search the person, vehicle, or home, of anyone on probation or parole. Especially when we have probable cause to believe that the person on parole may not be giving “rehabilitation” a total chance.
To make a long story short, I told the investigators about the stop of this subject the previous night, the investigators called the subjects parole officer, and we were granted permission to do a parole search of the subject’s apartment. Guess what we found.
Do I really need to tell you that we found most all the jewelry and watches that had been taken from all of our residential burglaries. Of course we did. This guy got his parole violated, plus got additional time for the new cases.
Remember what this guy told me that night. He didn’t care about getting busted. It was all a game to him. But remember as well that all this guy was after was property. Think about kidnapping. Think about sexual predators. Think about having your life turned inside out by being raped. And think about our property burglar’s motive.
Opportunity.
- Dark houses in an affluent neighborhood.
- No porch lights on in front or rear.
- No motion lights for security.
- No dogs to warn of intruders.
- No observant neighbors that check on a strange car parking on the street at 2am.
- Unlocked rear doors, sliding doors, and garage doors.
- No alarm systems being used.
Remember what we always say. Every action has a reaction. Take away the opportunity and you’ll take away the crime. Please, for the sake of the safety of your family, those you care about, and for yourself, always remember that YOU hold the cards in determining whether or not, you wake up to a strange man by your bed at night. A person on parole who has the motive to….well, we don’t know what that motive is now, do we?
Tips:
- You can’t do anything about living on a dark street with no street lamps. Some people prefer that in comparison to bright glaring streetlights. Just be aware that Burglars and Prowlers also like those dark streets. Keep front and rear porch lights on during hours of darkness.
- They make porch lights on sensors, just like the motion lights mounted at the corners of homes. When it’s dark out and the porch light is turned off, it will come on automatically when something crosses it’s beam. You’re going to get sick of us telling you this, but Burglars HATE Light!
- Motion Lights. GET THEM! They are cheap, and invaluable!
- Don’t want a dog? That’s cool. Many people don’t. But you can use the neighbor’s dog as a warning signal. Especially the dog that doesn’t normally bark a lot. Being K9 Officers, Mark and I can both tell you that you when we are searching yards for a suspect, dog’s all over the neighborhood start barking. Pay attention to that valuable tool. Especially late at night or in the early morning hours.
- Get in touch with your neighbors. If you all get along, then great. If not (and many don’t) and least get together for a common goal to protect each other’s homes. Start a neighborhood watch group. Call your local Police Department for information on how to get started.
- Lock your sliding glass doors, garage doors, and windows at night! They have spacers allowing the windows and sliders to be kept partially open for ventilation. Get them! PLEASE keep your family safe, and intruders OUT! Lock up!
- Last but not least, if you have a few bucks to throw out for peace of mind, INVEST in an ALARM SYSTEM! Any one of these things could have kept our Cat Burglar from being successful. Any one of these things could have kept the woman from being raped, as was described under Crime Prevention.
- Every action has a reaction. What action are you going to take?
Remember what happened in the story listed under Crime Prevention? A brutal Rape in an upscale quiet little community. An unlit house, an open bathroom window, and no prevention measures taken can provoke a tragedy in your life that can be avoided. There are variations to this, to where the outcome can be death to the victim.
Please be safe,
Listen to what we say,
And DON’T let the bad guy win!
JL
