“Give him the password?” That was not the correct answer.
Instead, I was to give him a fake password to alert the company to a hostage situation. “The kids need to know that they can never play around with this,” he warned.
My children, wide-eyed and dumbstruck at the thought of Mommy with a gun to her head, nodded earnestly. No one would touch anything. Ever.
What kind of hellscape did this man think I was living in? I glanced out the window at my quiet, tree-lined street. A groundhog bobbed across the lawn, momentarily distracting the children. I live on the edge of a relatively safe town that borders an even safer one. I’ve never been robbed, even when I lived on not-so-quiet streets in not-so-safe neighborhoods. Do I really need all this stuff?
The National Council for Home Safety and Security says that homes without alarms are three times as likely to get burglarized — that sounds like pretty bad odds.
But Don Chon, an associate professor of justice and public safety at Auburn University at Montgomery in Alabama, told me that he has not found any evidence in his research that security measures like alarms, special locks, high fences or watch dogs reduce the burglary risk. He has also found that while people in wealthier neighborhoods are more likely to worry about getting burglarized, people living in poorer neighborhoods are more likely to be the victims of such crimes.
Jay Darfler, a senior vice president of emerging markets at ADT, said, “Crime overall is headed in the right direction,” referring to the drop in the burglary rate. So why spend all this money? “You cannot overvalue the sense that comes with peace of mind,” he said.
But do I really feel calmer? Or do I now just have another reason to stare at my iPhone in a state of perpetual panic? “It’s bad enough that we get scary news on our phones all the time, to add this makes it much more personal and direct,” Mr. Glassner said. If something terrible really were to happen, “What can you really do? Get home fast enough to interrupt it?”
I don’t know if I’m safer now that I have that telltale yard sign in my flower bed. I do know that when my neighbor went to my house to feed the fish when we were out of town for Thanksgiving, the alarm went off. And when the monitoring service dutifully called seconds later, I couldn’t remember my password.
