Keeping Your Home and Neighborhood Safer

We just attended a meeting with our Sanchez, Pond and Prosper neighbors in the San Francisco Eureka Valley area, coordinated with the SF Mission District police and Supervisor Mandelman. They had some great advice for helping us make our blocks safer. 

It was good to hear that we were already following many of their suggestions, but there were some great new ideas that we hadn’t considered.

The tips below are critical, especially if your property is vacant while you’re selling it. Criminals see and know what’s going on in their area.

9 Great Tips

1. Recruit everyone on your block - even if you make your home safe and others don’t follow suit, criminals will come. So, they suggested getting everyone on your block onboard, before you take next steps. Assign a team captain to go door-to-door and ask neighbors to sign up, get their email addresses and set up a group email for ongoing communications. Your district police department, along with your district supervisors, also have active programs to help you work with your neighbors and public buildings. Be sure to contact them.
2. Keep lights on at night inside your home, garage and at your porch/doors. Sounds logical, but many of our neighbors hadn’t been turning on their lights, even though they had them installed. Others had lights on their porch, but not in front of their garages.
3. Use timers and motion detectors to turn on lights - this will help you make sure that the lights go on, and also give the appearance that someone is home to turn the lights on and off.​
4. Don’t cover all your windows - it may seem logical to make sure people can’t see inside, but for upper floors and units, you actually want them to see your lights and hear activity. Criminals shy away from active areas.
5. Install video cameras - even if they are fake ones. Criminals know to look for them, and avoid homes that have them. Costco and Amazon have a number of great security cameras, like Ring, Avertx, Blink, or Arlo, and there are several lower cost ones. Here's one example of a fake camera from Amazon. 
   
   These are some specifications to look for when purchasing a camera:
   1. ​Quality - today, this means a 4K resolution camera with advanced night, low light capability, so that you get quality and color at night.
   2. Local Network Video Recorder (NVR) - allows you to connect cameras and store video with an option to store some data in the cloud. This means that the cameras are hardwired with Ethernet so that your cameras can run 24x7 and it gives you a buffer to go back a week in time.
   3. Playback needs to be simple and convenient so that you can review footage frequently and easily. IN order to save time, you'll want something that can show you when motion happened. Advanced systems can show you when there was a vehicle or person. 
   4. Exporting needs to be simple and in a friendly format. If you want to share with someone, it needs to be easy to pick a timeframe, but it also needs to be in a format that it can play in a browser or easily on a PC/Mac. Some friendly formats include MP4, MOV and QT.
   5. Live video sharing - Many of us neighbors share live views of our cameras. You'll want something that allows you to have extra accounts that can just view live video or see it via link.
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6. Keep the front of your home tidy - trim your trees and shrubs, etc. Criminals are looking for areas that seem unattended and in disarray. They just feel more comfortable there.
7. If your home is vacant during a sale, be sure to visit it or have your agent do so at least 1-2x per week. Criminals keep close tabs on their area, and definitely know when your property is vacant. So, keep them on their toes.
8. Remove graffiti immediately - the police explained that graffiti is one way that criminals mark their territory. If you leave it, they’ll definitely come back. Don’t give them the opportunity to claim your property.