Funny thing that a home security topic should come up today. Yesterday my husband and I woke up to the very disturbing sight of many of the vehicles, garage doors, license plates, and block walls in our immediate neighborhood having been spray painted, along with two of our own vehicles.
We think it was some local idiot teens (two different handwriting styles), but the LAPD are on it as a hate crime because in addition to the ever-witty "F*** You" that our RV and most everything else was tagged with, our truck and one other person's vehicle were tagged with "No N...." (N-word).
Friends of all shades and nationalities visit us often, which may have made us a target for this hateful epithet. The other vehicle tagged with the N-word was parked outside the home of an elderly African American woman. Like I said, LAPD is on it because it escalated from criminal mischief to hate crime realm. Police were canvassing the neighborhood yesterday, taking reports, shooting pictures, offering sympathy, giving helpful graffiti removal pointers, etc.
According to my security cameras, our truck was tagged at 5:47 AM, but it's impossible to identify the perpetrator from the shadowy image of a guy (or very flat-chested female) in a hoody. To my knowledge, no other Ring or security cameras picked up anything helpful. Our dog slept through it - I'm sure the guys were very quiet as they wreaked their havoc.
As for general security: We have a 12 foot high, double key dead bolt, heavy wrought iron gate that spans the area before our front steps, heavy dead bolt security screen doors plus dead bolt wooden doors on all exterior doors, a monitored burglar alarm system, two Arlo cameras facing outside and three facing the interior of our home.
At any time, including when we're traveling, I can open an app on my phone and see exactly what's going on in and around my house. I'm sent alerts for any activity - including when someone walks up to our front gate and can review the footage for 7 days.
When on vacation we leave a couple of radios and lights on with intermittent timers, some other lights (where the interior cameras are placed) burning 24/7, and ask a couple trusted neighbors to keep an eye on our home and clear the circulars and other drop-off junk when they're walking their dogs.
Mail delivery continues because we have a mail slot that shoots the mail right into a large tub in our garage. The way the slot is constructed it's difficult if not impossible to see whether any mail has piled up. Not to mention that I'd see the person checking it out via a security camera. We back our vehicles in the driveway all the way up to the garage door and bring our car keys with us or lock them up in a safe while we're out of town.
We never post our travels or plans to leave town on social media until we have returned home.
Ours is a nice (but hardly Beverly Hills) Los Angeles suburban neighborhood. As with most of Los Angeles, we are within a mile of a freeway off ramp. Burglars and other criminals travel. We aim to prevent our home from appearing to be the low-hanging fruit that an opportunist believes will be ripe for the picking.
It may sound like our home has the appearance of a fortress, but that's far from the truth. No bars on the window or anything like that. Passers-by wouldn't take a second look for any reason - good or bad. We blend into the neighborhood and are less showy than many.
Our hope is that our security level is noticeable to someone looking for an easy break-in target. However, we know that nothing is foolproof. If someone is hell-bent on getting in, he/she will.
