When you find a house you love and go through the process of buying it, the moments are filled with excitement and anticipation. Making a home for yourself and your family not only impacts your current life, but also often lasts for years into the future — sometimes for a lifetime. There’s a lot more that goes into it besides paint color and home decor, too. A house should be a place where you feel happy, comfortable, and most of all, safe, so making sure you also have the means to keep your home and belongings safe is just as important as getting it styled just right. The last thing you want is for a burglary to impact your ability to feel comfortable in the home you’ll be living in for years to come.
A new report on home burglaries sheds light on which areas of the United States are more or less at risk (and therefore which places require residents to bolster their home security measures). As it turns out, the state of Virginia has one of the lowest burglaries in the United States. Per 100,000 people, there were 238 reported incidents of burglary reported in 2017 in Virginia.
The only states with a lower burglary rate than Virginia are New York (201.7 per 100,000 people), New Hampshire (222.0), and Pennsylvania (227.8), which are all in the Northeast. The three states with the highest prevalence of this crime per 100,000 people are New Mexico (830.4), Arkansas (795.5), and Mississippi (781.4). When looking at the nation as a whole, burglaries tend to be most common in the South, where the average rate in the region is 580.9, whereas residents of states in the Northeast tend to experience this crime the least, where the average rate is 276.9. In the West and Midwest, there is more variance across states, but the average rates of the regions land at 525.2 and 415.9, respectively.
Of course, the risk level of each person’s home will vary depending on where within a state they live. Those in urban areas are likely less at risk. And luckily, the study on burglaries found that as a nation, the rate of this reported crime has been decreasing significantly over the past two decades. Still, it can happen to anyone, so the best course of action for everyone is to protect themselves and their belongings as best they can. There are a variety of security systems available to homeowners that can help prevent something like this from happening. Plus, many smart home tools also provide other benefits, such as controlling aspects of the home from afar using a mobile phone app.
Still, there are plenty of reliable measures that aren’t high-tech. Getting study locks on exterior doors and windows is a simple measure to control the safety of a home and avoid an intrusion.
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