Home burglaries happen more often than most homeowners and business owners care to admit. It can be a jarring experience to come back to your safe space, and find that it has been broken into. This experience often causes you to question the safety and security of you property. Below, we will look at a basic list of emergency steps you should take after a home burglary. These steps are meant to help you stay safe, and also begin the process of restoring your security. Each of these points will be explained further in the article.
1. Contact the authorities
2. Find a safe place to hide
3. Review security protocols
4. Take stock of what you have
5. Call your insurance agent
6. Clean up around your home
7. Reassess your security measures.
These are the basic emergency steps you should take immediately after a burglary. At a glance, it seems like there are a lot of steps to carry but each of these processes can be started quickly. Here’s are the things you need to do:
1. Immediately Contact The Authorities
Immediately after a home burglary or break-in, the first thing you should do, as an owner, is to contact the authorities and alert them to what has happened. It is imperative that you do this as soon as you realize your home has been broken into.
Ideally, you should try your best not to touch or move anything around until the authorities arrive. I do understand that this is going to be very hard to do, especially when you walk into your home and it dawns on you that something isn’t right.
When the officers arrive, it is important that you relay any pertinent information to them. Make them aware of the security protocols that you have in place. For instance, do you have any surveillance cameras that might be able to provide security footage? If so, handing this information over to the officers will prove to be very useful and aid them in their efforts.
2. Find a Safe Place To Hide
This point specifically applies to homeowners who might be alerted to the presence of a burglar who breaks in while there is still someone at home. Most residential burglaries occur during the daytime when homeowners are not present. Businesses are usually affected after hours and in the evenings. However, this does not mean that night time burglaries don’t happen, they just happen less frequently.
In some cases, homeowners come home after the crime itself has been committed, but in rare cases, you might be home during the break-in, or you might walk into your home and realize that there are still burglars inside.
When this happens, you should immediately call the police as was discussed above, and then you should focus on finding a safe place to hide. It is not advisable for you to engage the burglars, especially if you are unsure as to their number or whether or not they are armed.
3. Review Your Security
After you have turned over any video footage or access control codes, you should have a professional come after to do a survey of your home or business security. At Tru-Max Security we offer this service and can recommend security products that will help secure your property.
Such as increased security of locks and keys to kick and strike plates to better secure the doors and gates of your home. Guard plates to protect any exposed latches at your business.
4. Take Stock Of What You Have
Once the authorities have arrived and made sure that you, and your home, are in the clear. You should start to assess the state of things and take stock of what you have. Not only does this information help homeowners get a sense of why they were targeted, but it also helps law enforcement have a better idea of the items that were stolen in the home burglary.
This step is usually challenging for homeowners to handle because many of them will still be dealing with the shock of finding that their home was just broken into and robbed. Not only were they robbed of some of their personal belongings, but they were also robbed of their peace of mind.
However, it is important for you to carry this task out, sooner rather than later. This is because some of the next few emergency steps are contingent on you being able to properly assess the state of things around you.
5. Call Your Insurance Agent
After you have taken stock of your belongings and determined what is intact, and what is either damaged or missing, you should reach out to your insurance agent or insurance company and notify them of the break-in.
Even if the burglary occurs late at night, you should still make an effort to call your insurer and leave them a message; so that they can get back to you the very next day. You will have to provide your insurer with a detailed and comprehensive list of all the items on your property. In addition to this, you will have to present a second list that details everything that was either stolen or damaged during the home burglary.
The information that you provide your insurance agent will be important when you file a claim after the home burglary. Another benefit of calling the police is that you will be able to take advantage of their comprehensive police report. Not only does this make it easier for your insurer to verify information about the incident, but it makes it easier for you to remember details you may have forgotten in your account.
6. Clean Up Around Your Home
Some homeowners might be quick to dismiss this as an emergency step, but I would like to advise them to keep an open mind and read on to see why this is an important emergency step to take after a home burglary. Home break-ins and burglaries are rarely clean and neat affairs, especially if there are robust security protocols that are guarding your home.
Unfortunately for most homeowners, although the police will come and assess the crime scene, everything else that occurs afterward falls squarely on your shoulders. This means that in the wake of your home being broken into, you will have to take the time to clean up any damage that occurred.
Successfully cleaning up will help you get a clearer sense of how things stand in your home. It should be noted that this can only be done after the crime scene has effectively cleared by the police. This is important because you cannot clean up an active crime scene lest you hamper the investigation.
7. Reassess Your Security Measures
With Tru-Max Security to regain your peace of mind, an increase in the security of your home will help immensely with this.
Final Thoughts:
I deeply sympathize with those of you who have been victims of home break-ins and home burglaries. I also sympathize with those of you who haven’t been through a harrowing experience like this yet, because the truth is it can happen to anyone of us.
However, being armed with the knowledge that it can happen to anyone shouldn’t feel you with dread, instead, it should give you a determination that drives you to keep your home prepared and ready.
Ken Suitor – Feb 2020