Like some­thing out of an insur­ance com­mer­cial we arrived home after spend­ing eight days loung­ing around the east coast of Aus­tralia to find that some degen­er­ate had bro­ken into our house.

What fol­lowed was 20 hours of steady learn­ing curve, tem­pered only by my inabil­ity to not freak the fuck out dur­ing crises.

I thought I’d write down a few things I’ve learned from this whole expe­ri­ence. Bun­dle it up into a ‘How-To’ Guide for deal­ing with Burglary.

Just one final note: I’ve writ­ten this from the point of view of a guy liv­ing in Mel­bourne, Vic­to­ria. Depend­ing on your loca­tion the phone num­bers and behav­ior and dis­po­si­tion of police and insur­ance com­pa­nies will dif­fer. Obviously.

- Com­ing Home -

Because most crim­i­nals pre­fer not to be seen, you’re not going to realise you’ve been bro­ken into until you’re inside the house. Ange and I didn’t know it had hap­pened until we’d walked through to the very back of the house.

Once you know its hap­pened you’re both going to have an over­whelm­ing urge to panic. Try and del­e­gate all the pan­ick­ing to just one of you. Things will work out bet­ter that way. The calmer you are, the more infor­ma­tion you’ll take in and there’s a lot to take in.

When you’ve dis­cov­ered the entry point — doors for the most part, win­dows are far too noisy to open quickly and effi­ciently — it’s time to get to work. It may be tempt­ing to call friends and fam­ily at this point, but there’s still much to be done. Let them wait.

Do:

• Keep all hands and fin­gers away from the entry point and any other ways into the house.
• Walk around the house and note any­thing that’s been taken.

Odds are you won’t find the perp still pick­ing through your belong­ings. Whether you do or don’t the next step is the same.

Call the police.

- Deal­ing with the Police -

Call Emer­gency Ser­vices on 000 (pro­vided the bas­tards haven’t nicked your phone). The nice lady on the other end of the phone doesn’t need to know the whole story, it’s her job to trans­fer you through to the right area. So just ask for Police. Once you’re through then you can start with the infor­ma­tion dump.

Start by telling them the house has been bro­ken into. They’ll then ask you for clar­i­fi­ca­tion of the crime. You’ll need to know things like:

• What time did you arrive home?
• What time were you last there? (If you’ve been on hol­i­days let them know what time a fam­ily mem­ber or friend was last there)
• How did they the crook get into your house?
• Was any­thing stolen?
• Your address and con­tact details.

Because bur­glary is one of those crimes that doesn’t really rate a police pres­ence these days, don’t be sur­prised if the major­ity of your inter­ac­tions with the police are through the tele­phone. If you haven’t walked in on some­one stuff­ing hand­fuls of your junk into their pock­ets the Police will class it as a ‘cold crime’ and won’t be in too much of a hurry to get to you either.

At some point in the next 24 hours you’ll get visit from the Crime Scene unit. If your Police force is as poorly funded as mine — and you’ve called after 5pm on a week­end — then they won’t arrive until the next busi­ness day. Before they arrive it’s a good idea to take a few pho­tos of the crime scene. Try for close­ups of the entry point and shots of the empty, ran­sacked draw­ers and cup­boards. Feel free to take a few shots of your­self frown­ing and look­ing dis­traught. The Police won’t want them, but it’s nice to have pho­to­graphic records of the emo­tional roller coaster.

Once you’re fin­ished played Jimmy Olsen you should be OK to do a gen­eral clean up of the house. Despite what TV crime shows would have us believe it’s incred­i­bly hard to pull a fin­ger print from a crime scene. The object being dusted have to be very, very shiny and/or nigh imper­me­able to mois­ture. Clothes  are nei­ther very, very shiny. Nor are they nigh imper­me­able to mois­ture.  (unless you wear full-body, trans­par­ent, PVC suits. In which case, best of luck to you.) So you’re fine to start clean­ing those up.

We were lucky we were able to clean up most of the mess. There was just a few things we had to leave alone, namely: where they’d bro­ken in, the Wii, some cof­fee tins, and a tin money box.

When the CS offi­cer arrives walk them through the house, mak­ing sure to point out how the bur­glars got in, what dam­age they did (if any) and restate any items that have been stolen. You really want the Police to have the clear­est pic­ture of whats happened.

They’ll take a few pho­tos of their own. Do resist the urge to pose in front of the lens.

The offi­cer will ask you to write down a list of stolen goods — includ­ing any ser­ial num­bers — and any cash that’s gone miss­ing. Do try to be as truth­ful as possible.

Once that’s done they’ll hand you an ini­tial report, com­plete with a LEDR num­ber. (Impor­tant for later.)
Another, more for­mal ver­sion of the report will arrive in the mail a cou­ple of days later.

After they’ve left you can wipe the “dust” off any­thing the Police have checked for fin­ger­prints. The ‘dust’ itself is a light pow­der made from the same mate­r­ial as grease pen­cils. It  smears like crazy when you start wip­ing it off, but with a warm, damp cloth and a bit of work it’ll even­tu­ally wipe clean.

- Deal­ing with the Insur­ance Company -

You do have house insur­ance right? Right? Even just con­tents insurance?

Give them a call and explain whats hap­pened. They’ll send you out a multi-page Claim Form. If you’ve gone with a pro­gres­sive 21-st cen­tury insurer they should have the option to email it to you.

I won’t bore you too much with the details. Just fill out the form, includ­ing receipts for stolen goods and pric­ing infor­ma­tion for replace­ments. You’ll need the  LEDR num­ber from the police report for this part as well.

Make a copy of every­thing and mail in the orig­i­nal doc­u­ments and copies of your receipts.

There’s going to be a lot of peo­ple tempt­ing you to claim more than you’ve had stolen. We even had some­one send through an SMS that began with “OK, so you had a PSP, a video cam­era…” Cheeky bastards.

I’m not going to lec­ture or pro­vide moral guid­ance on how to han­dle all that. Just keep in mind that the crooks are the ones who broke into your house, not the ones liv­ing their already. From my per­spec­tive there’s no need to prof­i­teer off the experience.

Oh, and don’t expect any response for at least a week.

- Pro­tect­ing Your House and Con­tents for the Future -

There’s always the option of alarms and secu­rity patrols. Or half-starved guard dogs that roam your back­yard. But these things cost a fair bit of money. There’s a few cheap ways to secure your home from future break-ins.

Get house and con­tent insur­ance. If you’re rent­ing you can pick up a plain vanilla con­tents insur­ance pol­icy for around 70c a day. I highly rec­om­mend it.

Slid­ing door pro­tec­tion. The cheap­est way to secure any slid­ing door is to drop a length of wood behind it. it’ll pre­vent the door from open­ing all the way. Just make sure it doesn’t leave a gap any wider than 10 cen­time­ters when the door is opened. If it’s thin enough to fit in the groove then it’ll be a lot harder to acci­den­tally knock out of the way and isn’t imme­di­ately noticeable.

Installing a patio bolt should stop any­one from attempt­ing to lift the door over the wood too.

If you’re going on hol­i­day, the Police offer a ser­vice where they’ll drive past your house every other day to check on it. Con­tact your local sta­tion for more details.

Neigh­bour­hood Watch ser­vices can help you with engrav­ing or mark­ing elec­tri­cal goods.

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