Keeping Your Home Burglar-Free

Sept. 6 -- After his career as a professional thief led him to an eight-year prison stint, Bob Portenier went straight and now works as a crime prevention consultant. He tells PrimeTime what you can do to make your home a less likely target for a burglar.

Portenier, who says he has a "Ph.D. in crime," has not lost the skills he developed in years of breaking into houses. In a test for PrimeTime, it took him just 7 ½ minutes to bust through the glass window of a concealed basement door, get inside the house, collect guns, jewelry, antique silver, and electronic equipment, and then be on his way.

With more than 8,000 home burglaries every day across the country, and only 15 percent of home burglars ever caught and arrested, it is worth taking precautions to make your home burglar-proof. Following are tips from Portenier and Ed O'Carroll, a crime prevention officer with the Fairfax County Police Department in Virginia.

Protecting Your Home

• Do not walk in on a crime. Never enter your home if you suspect an intruder may be inside. Women in particular, says Portenier, have a tendency to wander around the house when they are suspicious, looking to see if anything has been stolen. "They walk into trouble," he says, when the best thing to do would be to leave and call 911.

• Do not confront an intruder. If you walk in on a crime in progress, leave as quickly as possible and call 911. You never want to have a confrontation with a criminal. "You don't know if this person is on drugs. You don't know if he's psychotic, you don't know if he's an escaped convict," says Portenier. In order to prevent a property crime from escalating into a violent one, "you leave immediately."

• Get an alarm. "To me, the best insurance a homeowner can have is having a security system," says Portenier. But, cautions O'Carroll, who works for the Fairfax County Police Department, an alarm system should not be your only defense against burglary. "Don't have a false sense of security that an alarm system is going to keep the bad guy out. An alarm system doesn't make your doors any tighter, your windows any stronger … an alarm system just lets you know when someone's gotten in."