Prevention campaign: reducing evening burglaries

We move back to winter time soon, marking shorter days that bring a higher risk of burglaries as night falls. A number of safety measures can help discourage thieves. The Police Cantonal and communal police departments in canton Vaud are launching a prevention campaign in November.

Every year in autumn we see a rise in the number of break-ins as night falls. Dark arrives quickly and burglars take advantage of dusk to check out empty houses and enter them, under cover of the fading light. The season for evening home break-ins has this way in recent years. Police recorded some 70 such burglaries during September, with houses and apartments equally affected. Up to now, more than 100 burglaries have been recorded during October 2013. Those during the first week of October were mainly apartments in the city of Lausanne, but the following week more houses than apartments were broken into. The highest number of burglaries during the previous two years were in December 2011 with 350 and in November 2012 with 300. A rise in the number of break-ins during coming months is therefore expected.

You can avoid being an unhappy victim of these crimes by taking a few precautions. Make your presence known by turning on different lights using timers that are set to come on as evening falls, until your return. Use energy-saving lamps that don’t heat up and consume little energy – LED lights, for example. Another strategy is to install low-consumption lights that come on when
movement is detected outside your home.

Police from the communes and Vaud’s gendarmes are waging a joint campaign to make the population more aware of the problem and to introduce people to preventive measures they can take against evening burglaries. The campaign kicks off 26 October through the press and social media. Flyers will be handed out to the population and posters put up in residential areas.

Given the large number of English speakers in Vaud and in the greater region of French-speaking
Switzerland, Vaud Police are working with the English-language web site GenevaLunch.com to
offer the campaign in English.

• To download the poster:
  http://www.vd.ch/fileadmin/user_upload/themes/securite/prevention/fichiers_pdf/com-validsera_anglais.pdf