I’m a single black male (duh) living in a predominately white working-class neighborhood, on the first floor of an apartment that faces a very busy street. I don’t lock up my apartment much while I’m at home. I never have: not in the dorms, not when I lived in the worst neighborhoods in Atlanta.
In the summer, my windows stay open – all day, all night, during thunderstorms, when I’m home and when I’m not – because my place gets hot and I don’t have air conditioning. I have been fussed at my neighbors for doing this but in three years I’ve never had anything taken from inside my apartment (had two bikes stolen off my front porch and backyard, tho).
Frankly, one look at all the books in my apartment is enough to scare away most would-be theives. My place is small, anti-electronic (aside from this computer) and fairly spartan.
Well, thats funny to all of us too, mangeorge. That was then, this is now. Since you are the first person on this thread to bring up race(blaming whites for locking their doors) I strongly urge you to abandon your bigotry.
(a) Yes, because people I know have a tendency to show up unexpected, and there are certain things I don’t want to be, er, disturbed in the middle of.
(b) Stealing my stuff. I don’t think anyone would want to come in just to harm me, but I do have an awful lot of electronics. OTOH, I have insurance, and the only irreplaceable things I own have no cash value, so I’m not too worried about losing my stuff anyway.
Oh, by the way, mangeorge, I merely said that neighborhoods could be diverse or nondiverse. That doesn’t necessarily mean anything about race. After all, it was you who took it that way. Diversity means variety. It could mean diversity of homes, it could mean diversity of streets. It could mean diversity of the different color or style of homes in the neighborhood. It took a prejudiced person like you to pre-judge and think my post was about race.
Growing up, my family locked the doors when we went out and before going to bed, but not when we were at home and awake. When we kids got older the door was often left unlocked even at night or when no one was home, because my younger sisters tended to forget to take their keys with them. I seemed to be the only one in the family who thought this was a bad idea…even though one house we lived in had a front door that tended to blow open if not locked.
In my apartment now I keep the door locked when I go out, and I usually lock it for the night as soon as I come home from work (which is rather late). This being Japan I’m not afraid of anyone bursting in on me with criminal intent. Still, I live in a kind of seedy area with a lot of bars, and there are people coming and going in my apartment building at all hours of the night. Although it has yet to happen, I figure a drunk or confused person might try to open my door by mistake. I’d rather avoid having to deal with a strange non-English speaking person stumbling into my room in the middle of the night.
I feel good if I have to unlock the door to leave in the morning, it means I remebered to lock up before bed. I’m averaging 4 or 5 times a week now! The only sure time I lock the door when we’re home is when I shower, I have this irrational fear of being surprised while naked and sudsy.
I never ever lock my truck, it wigs me out when someone else does and I nearly dislocate my shoulder pulling on a handle that suddenly doesn’t open the door. As much junk as I drive around with, I’m thinking anything stolen would only benefit me really, but alas, thieves apparently have good taste.
I’ve a sister in rural Indiana that has a non-lockable front door, when they bought the old farmhouse no one could locate a key for the old-fashioned skeleton key type lock. The realtor got the cost of replacing it knocked off the price, but they’ve just never fixed it. Kinda handy if I stop in unexpectedly and find no one about, we can just go on in and make ourselves at home while we wait.
Security, of the personal nature. My best anti-theft protection is just not owning much worth stealing, but I would like my child and myself to be safe. Not too safe, really, as most windows are generally unlocked…guess I’ve only got to worry about the slender attackers.
Oh, and I live in a “diverse” neighborhood, less than fifteen minutes from downtown Detroit.
a) Yeah, I always lock the door. But for the most part it’s just habit- there’s not a conscious decision to make sure the door is locked, it’s just something I automatically do.
b) Not particularly worried about someone breaking in. But I feel pretty safe and don’t think about it much.
I live in Denton, Texas- a small(ish) college town near Dallas.
Growing up in New York, apartment door locked all the time. I’m not sure why, because neither I or my family seemed to be scared of any particular thing. Maybe just a case of everybody locking their doors so we did too. About two years ago , I was back in NY visiting friends and family. We had a get together with about 35-40 people and this subject came up. While everybody said they locked their doors all the time the only crime that anyone could come remember happening to them was having an umbrella stolen from them in a restaraunt.
I now live in Fargo, North Dakota. (No, it’s not like the movie and I don’t say “you betcha”) Never lock the doors. As a matter of fact, I don’t have a key to any of the door locks on my house. I believe my wife has a front door key but it’s never been used.
I lock my door if I’m going to bed or I’m out of the house. I always lock my door if Ardred is gone. Sometimes I lock my door if the neighbors are outside (they’ve had a few too many and tried our door once or twice, nothing scary, just an honest mistake).
We’ve got a few interesting characters in my town of about 90,000. One guy finds a door that’s unlocked, comes in, and sleeps either on the couch or in the bed with single females. There’s another guy who tries doors and then masturbates over the beds of sleeping females. That freaks my shit out.
I’m more afraid of personal harm when I’m here, and I’m more afraid of stealing when I’m gone, as we have a lot of small electronics (like gaming systems) that are big targets in a college town.
I usually remember to lock the door when I leave, and occasionally before I go to bed. The front door, that is. The back door is almost always unlocked. I’ve never worried about someone wanting to steal our stuff, because frankly, we really don’t have anything worth stealing. The only things I can think of that might possibly have any resale value whatsoever are theTV and DVD player and his guitars. It would cost us more to replace the doors/windows than most of our stuff.
I almost never worry about anyone trying to hurt me, either. When I lived alone in an isolated apartment in a rough part of town and heard drunk-sounding men down in the parking lot, I made sure the doors were locked and kept an eye on them. When I was reading a bunch of those Patricia Cornwell books about women being slaughtered in their sleep while Dr.J was on overnight call, I got up three or four times a night to make sure everything was locked up. (I quit reading the damned things because they were making me paranoid.) That’s it, really.
The one thing I do do, though, is make sure the dogs aren’t outside unsupervised for long periods of time when I’m home alone at night. I mean, if you were going to break into a house where a woman is alone with two biggish dogs, the smart thing to do would be to get the dogs out of the way, right? I could deal with somebody coming into my home and hurting me, but I couldn’t deal with somebody hurting them to get to me.
a) Originally from Moscow, now in LA. I always lock the apartment door.
b) Both in Russia, pretty much just personal harm here.
Locking a door takes a few seconds of effort and has no real downside. There are gangs and drug dealers (generally not of the benign pothead sort) a few hundred meters away every night. It just doesn’t make sense to leave the front door and balcony unlocked here.
a) We generally lock the doors even when there are people in the house. Our house is situated so that both the front and the back doors are easily accessible via the street, and our family only uses the back door, so the front door is always locked. We don’t think twice about leaving the door unlocked when we’re expecting people, and we mainly lock it out of habit.
b) Theft, I guess. Neither theft nor bodily harm are things we really worry about though.
c) I’m from suburban Melbourne, Australia.
Incidentally, a friend of mine’s family - who live in a nice $1M neighborhood - don’t ever lock their back door. Not when there are people inside, not when the house is empty, and not when they go on holiday. It’s a bit too trusting for my liking, but I don’t think they’ve ever had cause to regret it.
We used to never lock our doors. Regardless of whether we where home or not.
Now I do lock when we leave, and try to remember to when we go to bed. Never bother locking when we are home just hanging out.
Don’t know why we changed really. We live in a very remote area and it would be VERY easy to break a window or force a door and help yourself. Know one would know. I guess it keep curious kids from poking around.
As far as locking at night, that’s so that I will here if someone is breaking in. Our new dog is not much of a barker.
I’m not two worried about someone deliberately trying to hurt me. But it’s easy to tell when we are home. A burglar would have to be real stupid to break in when someone is home, it’s pretty common knowledge that most of the people around here are armed.
I grew up in a small town (population about 8,000) in middle Tennessee and I remember leaving the doors unlocked when we were home during the day, but always locking them when we left or when we went to sleep. This was so ingrained in me that when I was about 6 or so and spending the night with relatives in Mississippi, I was totally freaked out when I woke up to pee and saw the front door standing wide open to catch a breeze. I couldn’t go back to sleep ater that.
After I left home, I was living alone in various spots, some urban, some more rural, but I always locked my door, whether I was home or not. It just seemed safer to me. Now that RickQ and I are married, we still lock the doors all the time. It would seem weird to me not to do so. I worry about the kinds of things other people have mentioned, such as surprising someone during a robbery, or someone trying to hurt me, although I know the odds are against it. As others have mentioned, it is an easy thing to do, so why not do it, even if it may never be needed?
Interestingly enough, the person in this thread (Daizy) who agreed with the “locked in” feeling I had heard about from a colleague at work is from the same place: Edmonton, Alberta. Must be something about those wide open spaces.
Brynda !
You have a colleague from Edmonton? Is his name Joe? Why didn’t he come visit? My door’s open!
To be fair, I don’t actually live in Edmonton. I live just outside of it. About 10 minutes away. The last thing we need is for people to think that Edmonton has a population of only 13,000. Edmonton’s population is around 900,000 to a million I believe. (Please don’t make me look it up.)
I generally have my door locked, but it’s mostly so people don’t just walk into my apt, since it’d be real easy to get in through the windows if one had nefarious intentions. Out on the farm, the doors are never locked irrespective of whether anyone’s home or not. The keys are left in the ignitions of any parked vehicles, too.
Our door is always locked, whether we are home or not home. It has never occurred to me not to lock the door. There have been a few times when I came in from grocery shopping, for example, with lots of bags and didn’t have a free hand to lock the door, and forgot to go back to lock it later. When Mr. Del came home and found the door closed but unlocked, A HUGE PANIC ENSUED. I think this is part of the New York City mentality. We might leave the door unlocked if we go down to the lobby for our mail, but not if we are running around the corner to pick up milk.
On the other hand, we also have a house in Western NY, in a small town on Lake Erie. Up there, we almost always leave the door unlocked, if we are in the house or if we are somewhat close to the house – at the neighbor’s down the street, or at the beach, or running up to the store for a carton of milk. We do lock the house when we go to sleep at night, or if we are going out for the entire day. Obviously (I think), we lock up the Western NY house while we are in Brooklyn.
One difference is that in Western New York, we like to have the door open for fresh air, because we are in and out of the yard all day, and because neighbors and family and friends drop by. In New York City, opening the door to our apartment hallway isn’t really doing anything in terms of fresh air, we don’t have a yard, and anyone who drops by would need to ring at the building door first, which is always locked and visitors need to ring to be buzzed in.
Well, Moonlight Drive, I guess you didn’t read Moonlight Drive’s post (#24) that I referenced in my reply.
From dictionary.com;
Yes, the bolding is mine.
Bigotry, huh? I don’t remember the OP asking out racial makeup (diversity).
Please read my first, and on topic, reply.
Let’s both quit playing games, ok? I will.
Edmonton’s population is around 900,000 to a million I believe. (Please don’t make me look it up.)