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The effectiveness of burglary security devices

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journal contribution
posted on 2014-10-29, 14:40 authored by Andromachi Tseloni, Rebecca Thompson, Louise Nicholas, Nick Tilley, Graham Farrell
This study measures the effectiveness of anti-burglary security devices, both individually and in combination. Data for 2008–2012 from the Crime Survey of England and Wales are analysed via the Security Impact Assessment Tool to estimate Security Protection Factors (SPFs). SPFs indicate the level of security conferred relative to the absence of security devices. It finds that, for individual devices, external lights and door double locks or deadlocks, are most effective but, counter-intuitively, burglar alarms and dummy alarms confer less protection than no security. Combinations of devices generate positive interaction effects that increase protection more than additively. In particular, combinations with door and window locks plus external lights or security chains confer at least 20 times greater protection against burglary with entry than no security. Although further research is needed, the findings are consistent with improved security playing an important role in long-term declines in burglary rates.

Funding

This work is supported by an Economic and Social Research Council Secondary Data Analysis Initiative Phase 1 grant (project REF: ESRC-SDAI (ES/K003771/1).

History

School

  • Social Sciences

Department

  • Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies

Published in

Security Journal

Volume

in press

Pages

1 - 19

Citation

TSELONI, A. ... et al., 2017. The effectiveness of burglary security devices. Security Journal, 30 (2), pp.646–664

Publisher

Palgrave Macmillan

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Publication date

2017

Notes

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/.

ISSN

0955-1662

eISSN

1743-4645

Language

  • en