check to see if there’s a car in the driveway from a second-story window. if not, i grab the handy-dandy home protection shotgun and the phone and mosey downstairs to look through the eyehole. if i don’t know who it is, i start asking questions through the door.
i keep both the storm door and house door locked at all times. under no circumstances would i open either door - unless it’s to someone i know.
if i don’t know them and things seem hinky, hello 911…
I’d assume it was a flatmate who’d lost their key so I probably wouldn’t be freaked out straight away.
Luckily I have a peephole which I always use because the area has a high burglary rate and our neighbours deal cannabis. If I didn’t recognise them, I’d ignore unless it was a police officer.
I’m usually up and would assume it’s a neighbor or friend. So I would open the door.
This thread is sure making me grateful I’m marrying a police officer. I haven’t had a middle-of-the-night knock on the door, but I have woken my fiance before because I thought I heard a strange sound outside (this was in the same week that a neighbor had told us he had seen someone peering through our windows). My fiance got out of bed, grabbed his night vision goggles and a rifle, and scoped out the grounds around our apartment. He came back inside and told me he could guarantee that no human was sneaking around our apartment. (I later realized that what I heard was most likely the neighbor above me opening his sliding door out to the balcony. I do wonder if the neighbor saw my fiance scoping the grounds with his gun, and if so, what he thought of the whole ordeal!)
As a non-American, this thread has been another reminder for me of how armed and dangerous all you Yanks are… which is making me think twice about knocking on some of you guys’s doors. 
I’m a little surprised about the level of paranoia in this thread too. If someone knocks that late I assume it’s a friend, or an emergency like someone bleeding on my lawn, so I just go and answer the door.
This does not seem like a good policy. We have the aforementioned assumption that not answering tells a burglar that no one’s home, meaning they’ll now try to come in, plus the fact that it’s possible someone you don’t know has a legitimate reason for being there, like telling you about someone you do know.
I mean, I do something similar with my phone, but my phone has a messaging service to catch the false positives. And I have a policy of answering the phone if they call back a second time, as chances increase that it’s some sort of emergency.
We have a metal screen door so I would just open our regular door if I hear anything
I’d yell who is it? and look out the window to see who was standing on my porch. I wouldn’t open the door if I didn’t know the person. I might call the cops if I got a weird vibe.
So let me ask this: if you saw in your local paper that a short middle-aged woman living alone was attacked when she opened the door at midnight because she thought it was probably an unexpected friend, you wouldn’t think she was a little foolish?
You make some good points. But what do you do about the following type of thing?
I don’t recall the exact details but I read somewhere that the first murder ever committed in Hollywood of someone connected to the movie business was done by a couple of youngsters who got high one night and decided that it would be a good idea to murder someone who was a famous actor or actress. So they got one of these Hollywood maps to the homes of the stars and found the area with the highest density of homes and decided they would knock on the door (or ring the bell) of some homes along this one street and murder the first person who answered their knock. Then, they did just that. The person who answered their knock was not a famous person but was someone who was loosely related to the movie business - AAMOF, I think it was a couple who answered and if so, they were both murdered.
As you might expect, they were described in the papers and the nicest sweetest and most generous people that anyone in Hollywood knew and … well … the rest of the story speaks for itself.
Even if I have failed to remember the details correctly, you can well imagine a similar kind of story.
Even though this is similar to your hypo where some burglars knock on doors in the hope to find someone who is not at home and in those cases, you should answer the door, in this case, you should not answer the door.
So … what to do?
I suppose if someone knocks and you don’t know them and they are in fact thieves hoping to find no one at home, perhaps in that case, you might want to play a recording for them stating that no one is at home but your security company has been notified and if they attempt to enter your home, they will encounter an “armed response”.
When I was last in Los Angeles, I went to Brentwood (a wealthy community) and almost every home had a sign posted saying, “Warning! Burglars will encounter an armed response”. It was something very similar to that.
So, bottom line, you are correct that it’s probably worth doing something to prevent burglars who are hoping no one is home and who will try to break and enter if they don’t get any kind of a response.
Maybe some kind of alarm system would be a good idea that you could activate when you are at home and if anyone tries to break and enter, it would make a bunch of noise and loudly proclaim the police are on their way.
But I still don’t think that answering the door to a stranger is a good idea.
You are mistaken if you believe that all Americans are armed and dangerous.
Many are armed. That is true. But most people who are not Americans are surprised to find that in general, Americans are kind-hearted and not any more dangerous than any other people.
But, just like people all over the world, if you behave towards someone in a nasty way, you will usually get a nasty response.
The one nasty characteristic many Americans share is that they believe most Brits have terrible teeth and most British males are queer. That belief is generally unfounded and it would be a good idea to work on correcting that.
Bwahahahahahahaha!
This happened one night at our cabin. Not in the absolute middle of nowhere, but pretty rural. Our toddler girls and I were asleep upstairs and my wife was watching TV in the main room. Two girls dressed for a night out knocked on our door. My wife grabbed our big flashlight and answered the door. I woke up and went downstairs. The girls said their car was broken down and they needed to use a phone to call a boyfriend. There’s no cell reception in our hollow. My wife dialed the number to make sure it was legit and passed the phone out the door to them. When they were done we had a little chat and they walked back down to their car. They said they chose our house (out of the 2 or 3 they walked past to get there) because of the toys on the porch. And I assume they could make out that someone had the TV on and was up.
Now when the Jehovah’s witnesses come in the middle of the day, that’s when we don’t answer the door :D.
Not afraid of taking a bullet to the eye?
Why would anyone think that someone who was attacked in their own home was foolish? That’s no different than saying that the woman who was raped was foolish for walking home alone.
