A BURGLAR'S GUIDE TO THE CITY by Geoff Manaugh

• Burglars use cities better.
• How Architecture Works: A Humanist’s Toolkit
• Nevertheless, to commit burglary you must cross some imaginary border, or invisible plane, and enter another clearly defined architectural space—a volume of air, an enclosure—with the intention of committing a crime there.
• To put this another way, burglary requires architecture. Not infrequently, only because of some aspect
• The physical design of a metropolis—its public transit and its street grid, its climate and its topography—can inadvertently result in weak spots that only become clear when criminals take advantage of them, whether that’s to commit bank heists, burglaries, drive-by shootings, or murders. This means that, to a surprising extent, the way a city was built can catalyze or help inspire certain criminal acts.
• If there is a general law of urban criminality here, it’s that cities get the types of crime their design calls for.
• Anyone’s geographic understanding of a city can be profoundly improved when given access to an aerial view—when the city is laid out below you like a diagram—and this is all the more true when your job requires you to survey the city from above, imagining getaway routes and potential hideaways, possible next turns and preemptive roadblocks.
• As a cop trying to anticipate how burglars might use the city, you have to think three-dimensionally. Volumetrically.
• Windows aren’t used nearly as frequently as you would think. Doors aren’t used nearly as frequently as you would think. There are a lot of tunnel jobs. There are a lot of roof jobs. There are a lot of very creative ways of gaining access to restaurants or residences—including driving a car through the wall.”
• A pallet is a ladder to a burglar. They’ll just set it vertically and then stack another one on top of it, and then they’re off and running—off and climbing.
• Cops don’t (yet) have X-ray vision, but something approximating that technology is on its way.
• This suggests that every city blooms with the kinds of crime most appropriate to its form.
• As long as there is money, there will be bandits—and there will be people like Bill Rehder on their tail. All that changes is the form the crime takes, molded by the need to overcome the legal and spatial constraints of a particular time and place.
• The city gives off signals, provided you know how to read them: something as innocuous as an early-morning fog bank might actually be a clue, revealing sewer tunnels or lost creeks in the neighborhood around you.
• The burglar is a three-dimensional actor amid the two-dimensional surfaces and objects of the city. This means operating with a fundamentally different spatial sense of how architecture should work, and how one room could be connected to another.
• Breaking the close means crossing the outer limits of a space, whether it be the private interior of a home or the inside of a parked car.
• houses on corners are more likely to be broken into, as they offer multiple escape routes and clear lines of sight in all directions, allowing burglars to look out for returning residents or a patrolling cop car.
• “To deter crime,” Cisneros explains, “spaces should convey to would-be intruders a strong sense that if they enter they are very likely to be observed, to be identified as intruders, and to have difficulty escaping.”
• When seen through the eyes of a burglar, many architectural features take on an unexpected dual role. Such things as back doors and side windows often double as potential getaway routes, for example, and experienced burglars will often only target houses with at least two points of exit.
• Even the type of glass in your windows can matter.
• BEWARE OF DOG signs are, in fact, effective deterrents.
• If anything, alarms signal to burglars that you own something worth protecting and that your house is thus a good target.
• Incredibly, as many as 70 percent of residential burglaries are estimated to be committed by drug addicts.
• “Capture houses” are fake apartments run by the police to attract and, as their name implies, capture burglars.
• What remains so interesting about the idea of a capture house is this larger, abstract notion that the houses, apartments, bars, shops, and businesses standing all around us might be fake, that they exist as a police-monitored surrogate of the everyday world, a labyrinth of law-enforcement stage sets both deceptive and alluring.
• There simply is no cut-and-dried rule for when, where, and under what circumstances you can expect a burglary to take place.
• Burglary tools are effectively everywhere, hidden in plain sight.
• the room next to the actual target is just as important, for security, as the room you are trying to protect.
• Whole classes of attack can be ruled out by architectural design alone.
• A burning bar is basically a long bundle of steel rods encased inside a larger steel tube through which oxygen is then blown at high pressure; the steel at one end of the tube is ignited using an oxyacetylene torch, causing the internal rods to begin to melt.
• Booby traps are illegal—you can wire up as many burglar alarms as you like, but you can’t wire up a shotgun to fire if someone kicks open your front door.
• Subtly guiding people onto an escalator almost immediately upon entering a casino might seem to be an example of bad architectural design, but it works as an ingenious security protocol.
• A thorny plant called trifoliate orange—nicknamed the Rambo bush—is sold as a low-cost living barrier. It is marketed under the name Living Fence. Trifoliate orange is so dense and fast-growing that it can stop speeding vehicles; it is used by the U.S. military to help secure the perimeters of missile silos and armories; and its razor-sharp thorns make it a great fit for domestic security needs.
• People seem to think they should lock-pick or kick their way through solid doors rather than just take a ten-dollar drywall knife and carve whole new hallways into the world. Those people are mere slaves to architecture, spatial captives in a world someone else has designed for them.
• Because doors are often the sturdiest and most fortified parts of the wall in front of you, they are a distraction and a trap. By comparison, the wall itself is often more like tissue paper, just drywall and some two-by-fours, without a lock or a chain in sight.
• the most successful getaways of tomorrow will be achieved by hacking the city.
• No sooner does one side develop a new technology or technique, however, than the other side ups its game, in an endless arms race over who controls the built environment.
• The first rule of a successful getaway is not to look as if you’re trying to get away.
• Every new technology comes with an accompanying threat—or perhaps promise—of new crimes.