You are On Your Own With Your Security of Your Home and Valuables

As long-time readers of the Park Rag may remember, our home was broken into in November. The outcome was that thousands of dollars worth of items were stolen. We actually found a clipboard that the thieves left at our house and provided that to the Sherrif’s office. We even went to the extreme step (we’d call it dumb now) of tracking down our items on KSL Classifieds. We believe we found our laptop and met with the likely thief. Upon recognizing us, the thief quickly left the store where we arranged to meet. The store did get the person on camera.

All said, we had a number of things working for us including fingerprints and a picture of the likely thief. Yet, over two months later there have been no results. The sheriffs department has been diligent in calling every few weeks letting us know where they are and that they keep searching a pawn store database. We appreciate that. We also appreciate the sheriff’s deputy that came the night of the break-in. He did a wonderful job of calming us down.

Yet, it took them almost a month to send the found clipboard to Salt Lake to get any fingerprints off the clipboard. While we wished this would have been faster, we know that only 10% of property crimes are solved and they probably have more important things to do. This isn’t CSI.

The end result is that we never expect to see any of our valuables again. We also never expect the thieves to be caught. We can only imagine at this point a suspect being asked, “where were you on afternoon of November 15th?”

The point of this article isn’t to disparage law enforcement or ask why anything more couldn’t be done. We get it. Yet, we hope others can learn from our mistakes and can also learn from what we have learned. The key take away is that you are on your own. Our county is big enough that it will probably take at least 10 minutes for the sheriff to reach you in the case of an issue (depending on where a deputy currently is). Thieves on average spend less than 8 minutes at a home. Likewise, if you come home later to realize you have been robbed, our experience says you will be lucky to recover anything. Finally, many people we have talked to have commented, “that’s why you have insurance.” We suppose that’s true but didn’t realize that insurance (in at least our case) has a deductible of 0.5% of your insured home’s value. So, if you lose everything, filing an insurance claim is a no brainer. If you only lose a few thousand dollars, you’ll have to decide whether the difference between your loss (valued by the insurance company) and the deductible makes sense to file based on the likelihood your rates will rise.

With that in mind, we heard that 8 cars were broken into in Jeremy Ranch on Monday night. We also have heard that a few homes have been broken into in Jeremy Ranch since our was. Keep in mind that Jeremy Ranch even has a private security vehicle that is supposed to drive around.

That evidently didn’t make a difference. We hope these people’s experience ends up differently from ours, but we don’t hold out great hope. Perhaps our community has always been a target and we just didn’t know it. Or perhaps something has changed. We’re not sure. What we are sure of is that our perspective has changed. We never leave a door unlocked. We don’t leave cars out. We have put various systems in place to make our home harder to rob; however, we know that nothing will prevent the determined thief.

We’ve left the naivety behind that someone else, be it the sheriff, private security, or the insurance company will make it all better. We’ve also left behind the notion that “it won’t happen here” because that’s obviously not true. While it makes us more vigilant it also makes us a little sad. Our little community doesn’t have quite the same feel to us that it did a few months ago.