As you know I am an owl – I go to bed late
and often get involved online so end up going to bed really late…..!!!
Well last night at 3.30 the house alarm
went off over the road. As my computer
room is upstairs at the front of the house, I looked out straight away to see
if I could see a van or anything suspicious.
OK I didn’t have my distance glasses on as
I was on the computer but I could see the house and the road pretty clearly
even though it was dark although the bushes in the garden next door slightly
hampered my vision at ground level.
There was no movement, no van parked
outside or even in the part of the driveway that I could see, although I couldn’t
see all their front garden because of bushes and I couldn’t see the driveway up
the other side of the house. But no
figures hurrying away either.
I kept watching presuming that something
had triggered the alarm inside and the owners would turn it off in a minute but
no, ten minutes later it was still going.
By now I thought I really should do
something about it and as it wasn’t an emergency I rang 101. The lady on the other end took my details
(which seemed more important than what was going on over the road for some
reason!) and I told her what I knew.
While I was speaking to her the alarm stopped,
although that was probably because it was set to stop after 15 minutes.
Anyway, she told me that the police don’t
investigate when house alarms go off - even though it was 3.30 a.m. and it seemed
that the owners couldn’t be there or they would have turned it off.
She just told me that if I saw anyone
running away or a vehicle drive off to ring “the 9’s”.
Well unless I had night vision binoculars
to hand and could tell them the make and registration of the vehicle, then I
rather think that would be a waste of time too as by the time they got here the
burglars would be well away.
I kept an eye on the house and about 5
minutes after the alarm had stopped, a light came on in a downstairs room which
was on for a good five minutes or so and by the time I went to bed ten minutes
or so later the light had gone out but the security light round the side was
on. But still no fleeing burglars to be
seen, so I can only presume the owners had finally been woken by their alarm.
So…… what I have learned from last night’s
episode is that burglar alarms are a complete waste of time and if you are a
burglar and you set an alarm off, then just sit tight and carry on with
ransacking the house, as the police wont bother you. Then, by the time you leave, the alarm will
have stopped and even on the off-chance that it had woken a neighbour, they
will be tucked up back in their beds and be well asleep again by the time you
leave. No worries about turning lights
on in the house either to make your job easier, as it is even more likely to
make neighbours think that the alarm had woken the owners.
I decided a well-lit outside of the house,
possibly nice crunchy gravel, and of course dogs, are much more of a deterrent
than a burglar alarm.
