The Work-from-Home Era Is Bad for Burglars

The article notes that there was an increase in non-residential burglaries during the same timeframe.

From the article:

Now attention is shifting to another burglar-thwarting development: Working from home. Burglars try to avoid dwellings with people in them, and at-home workers also provide residential neighborhoods with what urbanist Jane Jacobs famously dubbed “eyes on the street,” an informal system of surveillance that makes it harder for miscreants to get away with stuff.

A more sophisticated analysis released as a (not yet peer-reviewed) working paper earlier this year by Jesse Matheson, Brendon McConnell, James Rockey and Argyris Sakalis, all economists at British universities, found that that in England and Wales (which experienced a pandemic drop in burglaries similar to that in the US) neighborhoods with residents more likely to work from home experienced steeper burglary declines. To be precise, a 9.5 percentage point (one standard deviation) increase in WFH share “leads to a persistent 4% drop in burglaries.”

Cameras are not nearly as helpful as most civilians seem to believe. Even if you give the cops a video of the burglar, they still have to catch him. Most police forces are overworked with more serious crimes than burglary and they don't have facial recognition software, so catching the guy is not going to be a priority for them unless someone gets hurt or there's a huge wave of burglaries in the same area. All burglars know this, so they're not hugely dissuaded by cameras.

What about getting the license plate of the car the burglar drove? Usually those plates are stolen.

Cameras are not useless, but they are not the magic burglary prevention talismans the public seems to think they are.

I just don't have very much that's worth stealing now compared to the 80s/90s.

Back then (in the UK) TVs, stereos, computers and VCRs were all expensive and in demand. You'd hear about burglars targeting them.

Now those things (or their modern equivalents) are cheap, often trackable.

Anecdotally, the thing I've heard is the main target of burglaries now is car keys because everyone's driving a BMW/Mercedes/Audi on finance.

How would this be a “secular trend”? What does secular even mean in this context?

What do you think "secular" means?

This doesn’t answer your question, but is related: At least in West Coast cities, I am skeptical about the data. A lot of people have stopped reporting burglaries because nothing is done about them. If you don’t need a police report - like if your loss isn’t worth the insurance deductible and increased future premiums - there isn’t a point to reporting. Police are often understaffed or have been instructed to deprioritize investigating these crimes. And even when a suspect is apprehended, city prosecutors focused on “restorative justice” often prefer to release them. Jaded victims have grown tired of reporting property crimes with no consequences. This is changing now perhaps, with an increasing focus on public safety, but it’s hard for me and many I know to trust the crime data from the last 10 years.

There’s also different trends for different areas or types of crime. For example there’s a trend of “burglary tourists” - illegal immigrants or legal visa holding tourists that often target certain groups like South Asians, perceiving them to be an easy and wealthy target. I suspect there are such groups for whom even the data would show sharp increases. Example article: https://www.nbcboston.com/news/local/security-measures-urged...