Come on, if someone can’t steal a car without the keys, they suck at it.
Sorry to call back to this, but these reasons don’t ring true to me and I can’t imagine how this could be anyone’s justification for leaving such an expensive possession ripe for the taking.
Let’s go through this list:
Reason 1: OK, so while rural car thefts are less likely, they still happen. I wouldn’t stake the entirety of my security on the fact that I am statistically less vulnerable.
Reason 2: You do realize that there are other means to keep track of keys, yes? Keep them on your person when you’re about and put them on the key holder/counter receptacle/designated place when you’re home. To basically offer up your vehicle on a silver platter to avoid the inconvenience of misplaced keys seems shortsighted and foolhardy.
Reason 3: This is fallacious reasoning. Car thefts are relatively rare, BUT, they do happen and have a huge impact on your life. Just because you haven’t had any issues yet doesn’t mean you WON’T in the future. In fact, if you had encountered problems in the past, I’m sure you wouldn’t even try to defend this behavior at all.
Reason 4: This is perhaps the worst reason of them all. What sort of security is this supposed to offer? Do you think thieves respect property rights? Your personal outlook means nothing to the thief making away with your car.
Now, this is probably going to come across like I’m picking on you, vetbridge, but I truly mean no disrespect here. I’ve lurked these boards for years and enjoyed your detailed responses to animal care questions, etc. however this is a moment where you just seem to not make much sense.
My wife and I were once locked out of our house, she was horrified at the speed with which I forced entry back into our house, with no damage, using only a tire iron (since it was in the unlocked car).
“But dear, any firefighter would know how to do this” was not the appropriate reply, although it was the one I gave. Silly husband.
“Uhm, it was solely the specific knowledge I had of the door and latch design that allowed me to force my way in. No one else in the world could have done it” was apparently what I should have said. She’s been skittish of being home alone ever since. And that was four or five years ago.
I don’t know if this would be any different, but I have worked along side a state fire investigator, when it comes to house fires, his favorite saying was, “Insurance pays off on stupid.” His meaning was when your house burns down because you were cooking on the stove, and left the house, forgot it, etc…there was no reason to point fingers and swear you weren’t cooking or did a dumb thing. You pay your insurance premiums…if your house burns, they will pay, unless they think you set the fire on purpose.
After saying that, I would think that if you didn’t lock your doors, whether its because you are in denial that bad things will happen to you, or because you were in a hurry and forgot, your insurance will pay, unless again, they think you did it on purpose.
One more side note, I used to own a soft top Jeep too, while I did take the keys with me, I never locked it. If someone wanted something from the inside, I hoped they would just open the door rather than slice open my top and make me drive home in the rain with a sliced top.
This just isn’t true. Very few robbers are going to go through a wall. While there may not be anything you can do to make your home absolutely impossible to break into, everything you do will decrease the chances. Thieves want an easy opportunity, not a challenge. I’ve been told the alarm on my bike is pointless because they can take it anyway. Well if they can take it from my house after the alarm wakes me up and I start firing 9 mm rounds at them, I guess they deserve it.
That was exactly my reasoning when I put a small padlock on the upright freezer on my back porch after somebody stole a case of my vegetarian roommate’s veggie burgers out of it (we were joking afterward that the thief must have been really disappointed when he got home and discovered what he had). The lock is small and I did a poor job of installing the latch, and it would be a fairly simple matter for somebody with a screwdriver (or a hammer) to get around the lock. It’s mainly there to discourage the opportunistic passerby who spots the freezer and wants to take a look inside.
My husband drives a soft-top convertible and does not lock it, for the same reason. He’s had his radio stolen from it. The funny thing (to me it’s funny) is, it happened after we left the crappy neighbourhood for the good one. I guess opportunists hang out in the good neighbourhoods.
IME, leaving the car keys in the ignition is a cultural thing. It’s what you do in the country, where country is defined as “my driveway is over a 100 yards long and I have at least 5 acres”. It’s a little celebration of the fact that you don’t have to worry about that sort of thing. Sure, there’s a chance your car could still get stolen, but it’s a tiny one, especially if you have dogs. If you have outside dogs in the country (and most people do), you have 5 minutes warning at least whenever someone approaches the house, and it’s an odd enough thing that you typically drop whatever you are doing and wander over to see what’s what. So you’d see anyone approaching your car long before they got there.
You’re not the first to think this. And not just the nice parts of town, but the rural areas where people generally feel safer.
However, regardless of what The Great Detective thought, rural areas do generally have lower crime rates. It’s still kind of interesting that Conon Doyle had the same kind of thoughts a hundred years ago.
I recently had to check up on this: I’m considering taking in a lodger. If I were to take in a lodger, my insurance would only pay out if there were a forcible entry.
I don’t know about houses but my insurance company just paid off on my stolen GPS out of my car. I left it unlocked (accidentally) in my own driveway and someone grabbed it overnight. The insurance company just requires that I file a police report.
While you may be correct about robbers looking for something easy, it’s certainly not always correct. The guys that did this first moved a compacted cardboard bail across the parking lot so they could stand on it to try and pry some bars off a back window (it’s to high to reach from the ground. Even if they got the window open they probably wouldn’t have been able to get in it given how high it was. Then when they gave up on that, they smashed in the back steel entry door (they actually breeched the jamb portion of it, but ruined everything). Then, nothing, they left. The only thing we can figure is that they were maybe trying to figure out the response time from the police since they never entered the building.
Oh, and the whole front is all glass windows, if they had simply broken one of those when no one was looking they could have just hopped in that way and had the run of the place for a few minutes.
I don’t do this myself, but some of my neighbours do. However, I do know several people that have had their cars stolen. In each case the thieves did it without keys.
My thoughts too.
Yeah - but the police around here warn about keeping your keys on the keyholder by the door. Apparently thieves will look there before looking in your ignition.
Habits are habits. Being able to come from the barn and jump into the truck to go get a load of wood/hay/etc. is also very convenient. For the same reason I don’t know of anyone that takes the key out of their farm machinery (ever).
Agreed - but I think the point is that it is theft whether or not the keys were there or not.
Jim
I live in a tenement flat in the UK (a building with a main door and 3 apartments on each floor).
Shopping around for insurance, some (most, actually, iirc) companies specified that the stair was to be ‘secure’ - i.e. the main door was to be kept locked except for specific reasons like maintainance, deliveries, etc. If the door was regularly left hooked open or even just unlocked, they said that might well affect any burglary claims if the individual flats were broken into…
Reported.
One tip I’ve encountered regarding driving in Latin America where there is a lot of petty theft offenses is to leave your car doors unlocked or leave a window down, since otherwise there must be something valuable inside and it’s worth smashing a window to check.
I used to leave my IH Scout unlocked, and had a key stashed in teh crap in the glove box. At the time it was worth about $500, and the ignition was so worn that most of the time you could hand turn it without a key [the key was stashed in the glove box for the few times it wouldn’t hand turn] and in the summer we generally left the hard top off and if it looked like rain threw a tarp over it to keep the seats dry.
We had an old secondhand upright freezer that had a manufacturer installed lock in the door though since it sat inside the house we never locked it.
Poor burgler, most people keep meat in the freezer 
It’s strange. IMHO the general perception in the UK is that Americans are more concerned than us (paranoid even?) about security. I suppose it must be the films and TV series where the apartment door has three bolts, spy hole, and a steel frame.
My home insurance specifies that all windows must have locks and a minimum five lever lock on the doors. If I am burgled, they may well want to see the police report showing forced entry. If I pop down to the shop, leave the front door on the latch, and an opportunistic thief makes off with my computer, I have zero chance of making a successful claim.
Similarly, if I leave the keys in my car, or even leave it unlocked, I will have problems making a claim. I know personally of a case where someone left the keys in the ignition at a petrol station while they went to pay. Some crook was hanging around, waiting his chance, and made off with his Mercedes. The insurance refused to pay out on the grounds that he had failed to take reasonable care.
The most common way to steal expensive cars these days, is to burgle the house and find the keys.
Burglars may be able to defeat locked doors, but zombies aren’t. Lock your doors, stay safe from zombies.
thats impressive!
I have always wondered why people are so concerned about locking doors. I have never heard anyone in a position to know say that it helps. Police always say lock your doors, but never that it helps. Perhaps not locking doors implies one is so clueless that they won’t miss the property? Anyway, your story is an impressive example of why locking doors will not deter a determined thief.
My story is much more mundane. A friend lives in a busy subdivision. She has a pool in her back yard. They have a privacy fence around the back yard. No one saw anyone enter the yard and once in the yard of course they had complete privacy to break in.
A neighbor did notice someone open the garage door and a pickup drive in to the garage and the door close. It surprised the neighbor since the owners both work during the day, but she didn’t think anything was wrong. The police estimate that the thieves took a couple of hours to go through the house and remove everything of value. They even closed the garage door behind them when they left.