It's Friday morning of a long weekend. The car is loaded, someone has already gone back inside twice, and then you pull out and the house sits there for four days doing something it never does the rest of the year: nothing.

Every security company will tell you burglaries spike in the summer. We sell security cameras, and we went and checked. They mostly don't.

Host Mackenzie walks through FBI incident data from 74 American cities across three years, then gets to the part that actually matters — what a house gives away when nobody has walked into it since Friday, and the twenty minutes of work that removes most of it. Most of it is free.

In this episode:

• Why summer burglary runs 5.6% above the rest of the year nationally — and drops on the West Coast
• The cities where the summer pattern is real: Minneapolis is up 47%
• Why the season was never the variable. Four empty days in March is four empty days in July.
• What a two-second glance from the sidewalk actually registers: mail, lights, driveway, bins, the flier nobody took out of the door handle
• The lights mistake people make in both directions
• The vacation photo, the note for the delivery driver, and the out-of-office reply — three things that answer the only question anyone would have
• The full pre-trip list in order of what it does for you, starting with the free items
• The garage remote in a car at long-term parking, sitting next to your registration
• Why a muted camera app is not a security system, and the ten minutes that decides whether you get anything out of the hardware
• Advice from a company that sells cameras: stop watching yours from the beach
• What you actually do if an alert goes off when you're a thousand miles away — the plan is a phone number, not a flight home

And the part almost nobody covers: checking the place you're staying. Since April 2024, Airbnb bans indoor cameras outright — disclosed or not, powered off or not. We cover the two-minute sweep when you walk into a rental, the one indoor device that is permitted and why, and exactly what to do if you find something (starting with: don't touch it).

Home & Safe is from Deluxe CCTV — the practical side of keeping a home, and the people in it, safe. deluxecctv.com

Somebody is standing on a sidewalk on a Tuesday afternoon, looking at two houses. In about forty seconds he'll pick one and walk away from the other. This episode is about what he's actually looking at — not what the security industry thinks he's looking at.

Researchers at UNC Charlotte surveyed 422 incarcerated burglars across North Carolina, Kentucky and Ohio and asked them directly how they chose houses and what made them walk away. Their answers are the most useful thing we've read on this subject, and almost nobody has seen them.

Host Mackenzie walks through what the research says in order of what it costs — which means the first several things are free, and the one we'd rank first we don't sell at all.

In this episode:

• Why burglary in America has fallen by two-thirds since 2005, and why you don't feel like it has
• The number that reframes everything: fewer than one in six property crimes ends in an arrest
• Why the useful question isn't how do I catch someone — it's how do I not get chosen
• The five findings from the burglar survey, including what they actually check before committing
• Lock picking is a movie thing: seven in eight forced a door or walked through an open one
• Deterrence vs. evidence — the same camera bought for two different jobs, and why the beautiful wide shot of your front yard is nearly useless
• The sign without the system: what a bluff buys you
• The 13 percent who said nothing would stop them, and why we're telling you about them
• A free half-hour exercise: stand on your own sidewalk and look at your house the way he would. Then do it again after dark.

Home & Safe is from Deluxe CCTV — the practical side of keeping a home, and the people in it, safe. deluxecctv.com

It's 3:12 on a Tuesday in late August. Your sixth grader is coming up the driveway with her own key, and nobody else is home for another two and a half hours. For 7.7 million American kids, that's just what an afternoon looks like.

In the first episode of Home Safe, host Mackenzie takes the after-school plan most families improvise in four minutes on a Sunday night and rebuilds it on purpose — without the hand-wringing.

Covered in this episode:

• Why there's no legal age that answers "is my kid ready" — and what HHS and Safe Sitter look at instead
• The three readiness buckets: your child, the circumstances, the safety skills
• Five house rules that actually matter, including the phone script and the delivery-driver problem
• The number most parents don't have programmed
• How a smart lock and one entry camera answer the only question you're really asking between 3:00 and 3:20 — and why every setup should be shown to the kids on purpose, out in the open
• A realistic two-week rollout, plus why the readiness answer moves again by October

Sources named throughout: Afterschool Alliance's America After 3 PM, the Child Welfare Information Gateway (U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services), Safe Sitter, and Illinois's parent resource.

Home Safe is from Deluxe CCTV — the practical side of keeping a home and the people in it safe. deluxecctv.com