League City Public Safety Building grand opening

I was surprised this morning to find no press coverage of yesterday's League City Public Safety Building grand opening.  It was well-publicized in advance.  From the portion that I saw, the event was well-done and well-attended.

I was out and about doing chores yesterday, but I stopped to see the doggies.  

The K-9 demonstrations, in other words.  

Go, doggie, go!!  And I thought MY dog could run fast - this girl had some amazing physical capacity.  I learned a few things about how K-9's are trained and utilized.  Wish I'd brought my better camera.  

Anyway, the dearth of coverage is a bit perplexing to me at a time when all of America has been fixated on the relationship between law enforcement and the public, with the recent internationally-reported incidents in Ferguson Missouri, New York City, and other locations.  Locally, we have also experienced analogous incidents, including the officer-involved shootings in Texas City and Freeport, the latter of which has taken some perplexing turns as the victim is now apparently attempting to recant her initial strong and consistent statements.

So then what happens??  LCPD actually takes the time to do some interesting and positive public outreach, and I don't see a peep about it in the press.  If it doesn't bleed, it doesn't lead?  

Cartoon screengrabbed from this other Blogspot site but presumably copyrighted by the original maker.  My public commentary is non-monetized so I believe this is fair use.  

Section 9 burglaries

Centerpointe Section 9-ers, you may have noticed this message on your USPS clusterbox late yesterday or this morning:

It was distributed by a good Samaritan but it won't remain there for long.  Posting notices on clusterboxes makes USPS absolutely furious (ye shall receive the wrath of Mail Carrier if she catches you doing it).  They won't stand for it, even if it is in the public interest.  

I don't have full details yet, but reportedly, as many as nine (!!) vehicles may have been burgled on the night of September 23.  From what I was told, it seemed to be the usual modis operandi - a person or multiple people looking for items that could be easily grabbed and fenced.  Drug people, I speculate.

Anyway, keep your eyes open.  And for heaven's sake, park as many of your cars in your garages as possible.  A couple of years ago, I published a theory that crime is positively correlated with the number of driveway- and street-parked cars.  It makes perfect sense - if your intention is to break into cars, where are you going to go?  To the areas that have the most cars, duh.  Higher densities of cars provide a two-fold advantage:  greater potential for theft in a smaller area, plus greater opportunity for physical concealment as the cars are being broken into.  The area hit on September 23 does have a lot of outdoor cars, including some that are street-parked.  My cul-de-sac does not seem to have been affected, and it's worth noting that we have no cars whatsoever parked overnight on the street, and most of our residents garage their cars.  Slim pickens, in other words.   

... AND THEY LEAVE THEIR CARS OUTDOORS SO THEIR STUFF IS EASIER TO GET AT.

It looks like yet another meme but it's not.  This doormat is actually for sale. 

A common weak link in home security

It's often the master bath window, or a similarly-configured window in another ground-floor bathroom of a home.

The increasingly-bizarre case of Houstonian Theresa Roemer's burglary illustrates this very well.  According to published reports, approximately $1 million worth of jewelry and consumer goods were stolen via the breakage of a window that, from looking at this photo, I estimate might have been worth about twenty bucks.

Image courtesy of this Houston Chronicle piece.  

Bathroom windows are very often the weakest link in the residential security chain for the following reasons:

1. Most of them are fixed panes of glass and therefore they cannot be outfitted with alarm sensors designed for windows that can be opened.  
2. Most suburban homeowners with standard-configuration lower-end security systems do not have glass break sensors, motion detectors, or security cameras installed in or near their master baths.  Those implements tend to be found in the main areas of the house such as in hallways, near entries, or in great rooms.  
3. Even if there is a glass break sensor nearby, it is possible to penetrate typical bathroom window sheet glass without setting it off.   
4. Most of these windows are single panes of glass and therefore easier to break through discretely than the coated double-paned energy-efficient windows typically found throughout the rest of the house. 
5. As well as being single panes of glass, many tract home master bath windows are inexpensive and thin, making glass removal even more straightforward.
6. Many tract home master bath windows are also large and situated close to the ground, allowing for efficient personnel ingress or egress.
7. Master baths are typically located on the side or rear of the house, so they can be accessed without burglars being seen from the street.  

Typical greater Houston tract home master bath configuration, screengrabbed from a real estate listing chosen at random.  Behind those 2-inch blinds appears to be a thin sheet of plate glass.  Many homes in our area are constructed similarly.  

So what's the work-around to this potential point of weakness?

One of the easiest improvements is glass block.  While not foolproof, block presents a much more stubborn structural deterrent to would-be burglars.  Image screengrabbed from a real estate listing chosen a little less randomly. 

When I announced to my husband that we would be building our home with glass block in the master bath, he cringed.  "But I hate glass block," he lamented.  "It's so 1970's."  Which of course is true, especially given that our builder offered only one out-dated style of it.

I agree with my husband - it's out-dated.  As far as I'm concerned, the only thing that glass block is good for aesthetically is abstract macro-photography.  This is a photo I took of a blue clapboard home and its sunlit driveway with landscaping vegetation out in front, as seen through an inner-loop friend's glass block wall.  

So I gave my husband a choice.  I said, "Either we go with the builder's glass block option, or we let the builder install the usual flimsy plate glass and then we do our own custom overhaul of the window after we close on the house."  For simplicity, we went with the builder's option.  And of course it's not a foolproof security solution, but we also have brick facing on all sides of our house, so the glass block is set into the frame and the brick rather than into wood alone with a pressed board / Hardi siding surround.  It's possible to penetrate it, but not without a sledgehammer.  And if someone is ever dumb enough to try a sledgehammer, our entire cul-de-sac will become alerted to their activity pretty quickly.

Thus sayeth the previously-burgled blogger who has no desire to go through that kind of recovery process ever again.  Nothing is ever guaranteed, but an ugly window is a small price to pay for a bit of added protection, in my opinion.

Too bad this analysis doesn't break it down by which first-floor window is most often used for entry.

Screengrabbed from this Protect America info site.  No endorsement intended or implied.  

Centerpointe home burglary: Keep eyes open

Online records indicate that a residence in the 700 block of White Oak Pointe was burglarized on Friday June 13.

Screengrabbed from Crime Reports.  Petty crimes such as theft of goods from unlocked cars and open garages do occur routinely here but actual home burglaries have been extremely rare historically.  

The online reports contain little detail, other than the facts that possessions were stolen and the perpetrator(s) were unknown.  There's no indication that they have been apprehended.  The POA reported to me this morning that they currently have no additional information on this event.

If these criminals have been led to believe that Centerpointe represents easy pickins, they might strike here again, and so everyone needs to be vigilant, especially those of us work-at-homes and stay-at-homes who remain in the neighborhood during daylight hours when most adults are at work and children are in school.

Please do us all a favor and email a link to this blog post to your friends and neighbors in Centerpointe.  The neighborhood has an email list (maintained by current-but-not-always POA Board member J.H.), but it is incomplete and tends to be weighted toward people who have lived here longer.  This blog has a Centerpointe readership but that tends to be weighted toward people who have moved here only recently and who may or may not receive J's email blasts.  In other words, because of the way this subdivision evolved, no single entity has optimal or complete coverage for reaching residents quickly when messages like this one need to be spread.  The more people who know about both of those options (email blast list and blog), the better off everyone will be.

Thanks and please report any suspicious activity to the League City Police Department via 911 for emergencies or 281-332-2566.

If you've ever been through it, you know that it's a nightmare.  Even if you are insured, you never recoup the monumental amounts of time and energy that you lose dealing with a burglary, not to mention the sense of violation.  Been there, done that, have no intention of going through it again.  

SHARING: League City PD request for assistance

Please see the following information sources as the League City Police Department works a fatal hit and run accident that occurred this morning.

Link here.

Full URL here:
http://www.leaguecity.com/CivicAlerts.aspx?AID=1325

Direct Youtube link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3d4s-JQSLCQ&feature=youtu.be

I cannot embed the Youtube on this blog post because it's not yet indexed.

Thanks.

Update Friday March 14, 2014:  LCPD posted this on Facebook just before midnight last night:

Be on the watch for spring

We do seem to be having an unusual rash of bad behavior around here - tagging, street, racing, a brazen (and unsuccessful) home burglary in nearby Victory Lakes subdivision on Monday afternoon (bravo to a watchful neighbor who blew the whistle on that attempted residential coup d'etat), and fellow local blogger Island Drumz is reporting that two young women were recently accosted in two separate incidents within the parking lot of the Kemah Walmart on FM 518.

Probably won't be coming to a subdivision near you:  the suspects in the Victory Lakes break-in.  Photo credit not provided by local media reports, but presumably it's LCPD.  

Does all this represent what happens when spring fever gets thwarted by continuing unseasonably cold weather, or is it just one of those statistical small number blips?

We may never know the answer to that, but we'll see what happens when spring finally does arrive.

Yesterday, I almost got fooled into thinking that we were on the cusp of it.  I had to go to Galveston for a work meeting, and the place was wonderful for at least a few hours.  As I write this, another strong cold front is plowing through our area, but here's a taste of what Galveston looked like during yesterday's brief respite.

Despite the fact that the water is currently a remarkably low 52 degrees, the air temperature was approaching 70, with no wind.  These guys were pretty happy about the weather situation.

 

As the pelicans suggested, the atmosphere in Galveston was positively douce - not the English definition, which loses a lot in translation, but the French, which refers to a particular flavor of agreeable softness.  

I celebrated the momentary douceness by trying the poblano asparagus soup at the locally-renowned Mosquito Cafe. It wasn't bad, although I would have made it a bit spicier (but arguably, that would not have been very douce).  Those elongated objects in this photo are not french fries - they are strips of yellow squash.  A dish like this is best eaten by dunking the vegetables into the soup, because the soup is very rich.

Do you notice how the vegetable medley contains chunks of broccoli stems as well as the crowns?  Only real vegetable connoisseurs know to do that - much of our society assumes that the stems are not edible.  They are actually pretty good, although I'm a fan of peeling off the non-douce outer skin before adding them to any dish that I make.   

Be on the watch for street racers, too

Following yesterday's post about the tagger(s), here's yet another in a series of minor events which, in isolation, probably wouldn't signify anything and wouldn't even really be noticeable, but now we're having an accumulation of minor events that might point to the presence of someone in our midst who is in need of a reality check of the lawful kind.  

Someone tore up Centerpointe Drive last night at 10:48 p.m., racing-style at top speed.

When I encouraged folks to first build their home improvement projects out of cardboard, this is not the kind of thing that I was suggesting.

Screengrabbed from this Cheezburger site.  

If last night had been the first recent time that a racing incident had occurred, I wouldn't think twice about it.  But a few days ago, it was even worse.  Someone was methodically careening around the neighborhood in the middle of the night, treating the cul-de-sacs as skill elements in a slalom course.  You might want to make note of this if you're one of the residents who parks his or her car in the street, because these racers treat those parked cars as course obstacles.  Personally I opt for putting mine inside my garage.

This kind of thing does happen from time to time - have you ever come out of your house on a Saturday morning and noticed that every cul-de-sac in your section has a bunch of fresh tire skid marks on it?  I've seen this in Section 9.  The perpetrators often augment their cul-de-sac spins by fish-tailing down the straight sections of the streets just to emphasize the effect of the skids and to complete their "artistic" calling card (GCDN is getting a lot of paywalled flak for describing the Courthouse Annex tagger as a "graffiti artist").

Anyway, once is an accident, twice is a coincidence, and three times would be a pattern.  If any of you hear racing in progress within the subdivision, please report it by calling League City PD at 281-332-2566.  

My husband and I are going to go over our security recordings to see if we managed to capture any footage on that racer from the other night, but that'll take us a bit of time to accomplish.

Be on the watch for taggers

From dog tags to sign tags:  Keep your eyes open for evidence of this kind of activity in and around Centerpointe:

Someone tagged the sign on the piece of property across West Walker from us.  Someone else apparently came along and attempted to paint over it to conceal it.  

When I first saw what happened to that sign a few days ago, I didn't think much of it.  Then there came this morning's story in Galveston County Daily News (paywalled), reporting that someone had also tagged the County Annex on Calder Road!!  OK, that takes a certain amount of undesirable ambition.  Bottom line is that the mischief may be more pervasive than I first thought.  And he, she or they may continue with other local targets.  If you've got security cameras like we do, you might want to check your night footage from time to time to see if there's anything suspicious.

This is what part of the Annex looked like (there was more).  It sure would suck to wake up and find something like this on the side of your house or car, eh?

As the caption indicates, this photo was supplied to GCDN by Judge Mark Henry.  

 

An unreported murder in Clear Lake?

It sucks to live in a newspaper no-man's land.  I've blogged about this before, how our area is caught between Houston and Galveston and therefore, from a news reporting perspective, we tend to get treated like we belong to neither place.

Our center of everything is in the middle of nowhere.  It also doesn't help that Clear Lake straddles a county line.  Historically, newspapers have largely defined themselves by virtue of geographically-named places rather than centers of population.  We are a center of population without a cohesive single identity. 

Sign at FM 518 and the Gulf Freeway. 



I re-launch this lament this morning in response to the routine crime review I just finished.  Periodically, I look at published statistics in order to evaluate what's going on in Centerpointe.  Answer:  Not much.  Happily, it's been Dullsville around here for the past five months.  Almost no criminal activity.  One theft reported from a yard and a few same-address incidents of family violence.  Not even worth showing a screengrab of the reports.

However, in digging through the available material, I did find this:

It kinda sticks out like a sore thumb, doesn't it?? 

This is a screengrab from a Houston Chronicle (paywalled section) article titled "HPD concentrates on hot spots to reduce homicides".  Here is a link to the associated map whence that screengrab came. 

I didn't recall hearing about any recent murders in Clear Lake, certainly not one in the tony Bay Oaks subdivision, and so I started digging to see what was available.

Answer:  Nothing.  There are Houston Police Department internal files that confirm the information presented on the map that Chronicle made, including this downloadable spreadsheet, but I found absolutely no news reporting by any source referencing that address or that street.

Screengrabbed from Google. 

Why??  Why is it that we have to hear every single day about every ridiculous petty skirmish homicide or tragedy that happens in apartment complexes and less prosperous areas of greater Houston, the kind of stories that bear no relevance to our suburban lives.  And yet something reportedly happens in our own community, in a place where it is least expected, and there's not a single peep.  It could be that this was an incident of an isolated nature that also has no relevance to our suburban lives, but the purpose of news reporting is to confirm or deny that kind of conclusion. 

And if the local news media is missing stuff like, well, murders, what else are we not hearing about??

Sigh.

But not necessarily better-informed.

Screengrabbed from Memecenter. 

The Calder crimes, Part 2: Unclear and unfinished

This evening, Houston Chronicle front-paged a prosecution-in-progress that purports to link a specific suspect to the murders that took place in the Calder Road location known as the "Texas Killing Fields" (I initially discussed that subject in an October 2011 blog post). 

Now this comes out??
Screengrabbed from Chron's online front page linking to this article. 

It's difficult to understand the evolution of this story as written, however, and I'm hoping Galveston Daily News steps forward in the next few days to provide us with a more coherent account.

According to sources including KSDK and Houston Press, both of which initially reported on this back in April 2013, Clyde Hedrick of San Leon was charged with murdering a woman named Ellen Rae Beason in an event which apparently was not previously associated with the Calder Road crimes.  Charges were not brought until recently, after the case was reopened 28 years following her death. 

So reportedly, that was what transpired last April.  If I'm understanding the Chron article correctly, in October 2013, some type of legal notice first tentatively connected the crimes.  Maybe. 

April 2013... October 2013... why we're suddenly hearing about this as front page news now, in January 2014, is a complete mystery to me.  We all hope that the Calder crimes, which were among the most heinous ever committed in America, are finally brought to a resolution.  Fingers crossed that more information will be forthcoming. 

Crime February - August 2013

I haven't taken a peek at crime around here since this post of about six months ago, so here are some reported incidents shown as screengrabbed summaries from the CrimeReports website.  As before, I make no warranties as to the accuracy of any of this.

Car burglaries reported for next door neighbors on the same day. 

If you leave your vehicles unlocked and un-garaged in your driveway, your odds of a theft increase.  We've talked about that before.

It is particularly unwise to leave fire arms in an unlocked vehicle in Section 9 where there are so many free-ranging young children at play.  Be very glad that a thief got hold of your gun instead of a mischievous kid.  This incident was dated April 24, 2013.



Aaand another theft from an unlocked vehicle.  These are so common that you have to wonder how many of them go un-reported.  Lock your danged cars, people!  Better still, put them in your garages where they belong!

And after you put your car into your garage, close the door behind you. 




Nor is it particularly wise to leave children unattended if their judgment hasn't sufficiently matured to the point where they can keep themselves from getting into trouble for really stupid reasons. 

Bad behavior of the type that normally doesn't impact the rest of us.  This was dated April 5, 2013.

Anyway, nothing particularly remarkable in that stack.  Life goes on with its usual minor annoyances. 

Walnut woes and identity thefts

OK, this is getting downright surreal. 

Gonzalez had a short piece (paywalled) today describing a 2011-ish study done by this organization, in which League City was ranked as the "68th safest" city among 430 cities of population exceeding 75,000 that were assessed. 

That may not sound very impressive, but it puts us in approximately the top 16% of American cities in the size range assessed.  I'll take it. 

It looks like a lot of crime, but it's not when compared to the rest of our society.

RecordsPedia indicated that they'd prefer this content to be embedded as a frame, but I can't seem to adjust their HTML sequence to display properly in Blogger's layout, so here is a low-res screengrab. 

And in fact, very little crime tends to occur here in Centerpointe.  I've noted this previously when I've done routine crime summaries. 

But here's the thing: Of the crime that does occur in Centerpointe, a disproportionate share of it seems to occur on just one street:  Walnut Pointe.

This phenomenon has fascinated the hell out of me on more than one previous occasion.

Screengrab from this November 29, 2012 post which, in turn, referenced this June 19, 2012 post.  All of this related back to my original March 30, 2011 post on broken windows theory and the fact that parking cars on sidewalks is illegal, not to mention ignorant, inconsiderate, and un-neighborly. 

According to broken windows theory, one illegal activity sets the stage for additional illegal activities to follow.  Consistency does not equal proof, and there's a bit of chicken-and-egg effect tied up in all of this, but I find it to be a worthy theory - one that has some compelling real-world evidence of its efficacy. 

I usually retrieve most of our reported crime statistics from a website called Crime Reports.  They've changed their format recently such that only 30 days of data can be displayed at one time, rather than a full six months, which was a very efficient way of displaying data.  But going back to late August 2012, which is apparently when I did my last look-see, here's what got reported to that source:

Something heretofore unreported in the mix:  Identity theft, with these three reported incidents on Walnut Pointe.
Screengrab courtesy of Crime Reports.  See next image for corresponding details. 

I distilled those three incidents down to this list.  Two of the addresses are the same, but the thefts took place on different days, so there may have been more than one perpetrator. 

Assault on Walnut Pointe.
Screengrab courtesy of Crime Reports. 

A theft on Walnut Pointe.
Screengrab courtesy of Crime Reports. 

During approximately this same five-month timeframe, what else reportedly happened in Centerpointe?


Someone reportedly busted into a car on Almond Pointe.
Screengrab courtesy of Crime Reports.

Someone reportedly snatched from an unlocked vehicle on Willow Pointe.
Screengrab courtesy of Crime Reports.

And someone reportedly lifted an identity on Harvard Pointe, which is one of the only crimes reported here in Section 9 during our three-year existence.
Screengrab courtesy of Crime Reports.

So in this approximately five-month period of time, Centerpointe had one criminal incident reported on Harvard Pointe, one on Willow Pointe, one on Almond Pointe... and five on Walnut Pointe. 

But here is where I will veer away from a Walnut Pointe focus because these identity theft reports are very concerning. 

I don't yet have any details as to how they might have happened, but here's what concerns me: 

Back in late November and again in December, I talked about serious problems my family was having with the League City Post Office.  Our mail went missing and then mysteriously re-appeared from within the Post Office itself only after we filed a formal theft report with USPS. 

At the time, I speculated that we might have gotten caught up in the perfect identity theft set-up.  I had no proof that any actual wrongdoing was intended or had taken place, but I noted the air-tight possibilities for someone to exploit such a situation for those purposes.

And now today I see four reported incidents of identity theft in Centerpointe within the past few months, overlapping with our own mail troubles. 

Is all this a coincidence, or does the plot thicken?  As time allows, I will endeavor to find out. 

Drive-by damage

I like to pride myself on my ability to spot subtle changes in my surroundings, but my eagle-eyed husband beat me to this one:

Someone shot up the VL Park and Ride sign. 
Looks like 45 calibre, or perhaps 9 mm.

Judging from the tightness of that cluster, my guess is that they either shot from a ground position, or the car in which the shooter was riding was brought to a halt before they fired.  They'd have to be pretty good to achieve that kind of consistency from a car moving 40 mph, and people of that level of skill typically don't go around shooting up road signs. 

In and of itself it's a minor crime, but this kind of thing is concerning because of the potential for collateral damage.  If you ever want the fear of God put into you, take a concealed handgun class and listen to the instructors tell you about the potential for the down-range effects of any gun that you fire.  You can never limit your thinking to your intended target - you have to mentally assess your impacts on everything else that's also in line with your target, and bullets travel surprisingly far - half a mile is not uncommon.  That kind of perspective is the principal means that the instructors use to instill in their students a sense of conservative knee-shaking responsibility regarding the firing of any weapon. 

This must have happened fairly recently, because the Park and Ride has only been open for a few months.  I don't yet know if it's an isolated incident, or if someone is going around our area shooting the place up.  I'll be keeping my eyes open for additional evidence. 

This is a crummy picture because I took it from a moving car in the northbound lanes.  I haven't yet determined if the shooter was northbound or southbound when the weapon was fired. 

Post office postscript

In this post of a few days ago, I briefly described an incident in which some of our mail went missing within the League City Post Office.  I'm going to expound on that here, because this incident concerns me greatly. 

First of all, let me clarify our situation by noting that we do not have one of these old-style individual mailboxes such as this one depicted in the cartoon above.  Every other section of Centerpointe has individual home delivery to their own mailboxes, but because of <insert long story that was not our developer's fault here>, Section 9 is the one portion of the entire subdivision that was forced to accept four of these things instead - two at each end of our section:

They are called "clusterboxes" (but sometimes you will hear them not-so-affectionately referred to as "clusterf*cks", a mis-use of an old military term, but an amusing one).

They are referred to somewhat disparagingly that way because many people do not like them - they want the white-picket-fence-style matching mailbox out in front of their home as was traditionally always done, and they often feel short-changed by having to go to a clusterbox instead.

Me, I love the clustery things because they provide a secure, locked, high-quality mail box that I did not have to install or pay for myself.  In this, the age of rampant identity theft, there is no way I would allow my mail to sit outside in a conventional unlocked box.  I'd have to install a locked box or get a PMB instead. 

Clusterbox image above screengrabbed from the Approved Cluster Mailboxes sales site.   

So, because I get clusterbox delivery, I automatically know for a fact that any mail delivery failures are the fault of the Post Office rather than originating via random third-party theft from an unguarded front-yard mailbox. 

As I explained on November 29, our situation boiled down to this: 

We received a peach slip from the League City USPS, informing us of the need to pick up our mail, which had exceeded the clusterbox volume.  In this other recent post, I talked about junk mail coming (quoth) "in successive vomitous waves" at this holiday time of year.  We were taken off guard by just how much junk mail has avalanched upon us within the past couple of weeks.  See, this is only our second holiday season at this address.  We started out here with a virgin address associated with a brand new house, and it took the address-sellers and the mass mailers some time to catch up with us.  We never faced anywhere near this magnitude of junk onslaught last year, so we didn't foresee it this year.  And the main drawback of clusterboxes is this:  They are tiny.  They don't hold nearly as much mail as a conventional standalone mailbox. 

Anyway, our box filled up unexpectedly and, lesson thusly learned, we went to the Post Office with peach slip in hand, only to be told that there was no mail there for us.   The only explanation they could offer my husband was that maybe our mail was accidentally returned-to-sender "early" - meaning, before the ten-day window on the peach slip was up.

But that was just speculation.  Nobody at the League City Post Office could find any record of what actually happened. 

I began contacting potential senders to confirm or deny that possibility, but there was no evidence that any mail had been returned to anyone.  So it allegedly wasn't at the Post Office, and it apparently was not returned either.  So where was it, and why?

Going this way?  Going that way?

My husband handled the filing of the formal complaint.  He went to the League City Post Office in person two times, with no results.  He then started with the USPS Houston area customer service channels, but didn't get anywhere with that either.  From overhearing his phone conversations, mostly what he seemed to receive was scolding for not having managed our junk mail avalanche in the way that the Post Office would prefer to see (i.e., this was an attempted deflection from what the Post Office might have done wrong, which was to violate its own peach slip procedure and/or lose our mail).  "What assurances can you give us that our mail was not stolen by someone inside the Post Office?" he asked the USPS service reps.  No comment seemed to be forthcoming on that one. 

As he seemed to be getting nowhere with customer service, he then filed a formal theft complaint.  And about two days after that, he got a communication informing him that our mail had re-appeared at the League City Post Office. 

I have no evidence of any intentional wrongdoing here - it may have simply been a case of the Post Office violating its own policies, and/or general disorganization and ineptitude, or some other situational failure. 

But here's what concerns me:  These circumstances would also constitute a very nice functional framework for identity theft.  Some mail goes missing, customer launches investigation, mail reappears, oopsie, no harm done.  But what if a customer could not address this kind of thing in a timely manner because of some overriding crisis in their lives (serious illness, death in the family, etc)?  Some mail goes missing, customer is distracted, customer doesn't notice until some time in the future when collection agencies come calling because a thief had extracted personal information from the missing mail and used it to forge new credit accounts. 

Think about it.  Someone could snatch a bit of mail and (patience being a virtue) first hold onto it for a while to confirm or deny if there's any fall-out stemming from this action.  The resulting decision tree could be made to work very much in the snatcher's favor: 

• If the snatch does get noticed, produce the mail and claim an "oopsie", thus protecting the snatcher. 
• If the snatch does not get noticed, sell the mail to a third-party identity thief for a tidy sum of money.  The resulting chain of culpability would be extremely difficult to trace, thus protecting the snatcher. 

Again, I have no evidence of any intentional wrongdoing by anyone in the Post Office with our situation here.  But a person has to be sensitive to the potential for this kind of thing, because identity theft has become like fire ants: increasingly difficult to out-wit.  We lived in Centerpointe only about 18 months before someone co-opted our mailing address for the purpose of writing hot checks - despite us having a virgin address!  The sophistication of the methods used to achieve identity theft continues to grow.  I myself have had three unrelated fraudulent uses of my identity thus far in my life.  A person has to take this kind of possibility seriously - for crying out loud, we live in a time when even District Attorneys occasionally get their identities stolen!

Anyway, watch your back where mail is concerned, or that "cluster" terminology might one day acquire deeper personal meaning for you.  And I'll have more to say about junk mail in a future post. 

A more secure front door

Almost two years ago, I published an account of a burglary that my family experienced while living in Pearland.  Since that time, I've also talked about new technologies such as security cameras, but there are a few basic physical loose ends that I never got around to covering. 

And now is a good time to do it, given that we're in the holiday season when there's typically an escalation in bizarre burglaries.  This is the time of year when a certain segment of our population realizes that they've over-spent on crank to the point where they have no money for holiday gifts, and so they better go steal something to cover the gap.  It was just over one year ago that the lady on Walnut Pointe emerged from her shower to find that men had broken into her house. 

As always, this is not legal or professional advice I'm supplying here, and I'm not a home security expert.  These are just some personal observations as to what I've chosen to do, and why.

My Pearland burglars gained initial access to the house by using a battering ram to break the frame of our front door.  The door itself was a heavy solid mahogany number and would not yield, but the frame was simply builder-grade pine plus common hardware and it splintered accordingly.

This was the same approach used back in August of 2012 by the individual(s) who apparently attempted to break into that home on Cypress Pointe.

Except in that case, they targeted the BACK door rather than the front.  That attempt was not successful, but the door and frame were reportedly damaged beyond repair (according to the account published in the neighborhood newsletter).
Screengrabbed from www.crimereports.com
And by the way, it's been delightfully quiet around here lately, crime-wise.  This grab shows reported incidents from August 1, 2012 through November 27, 2012.

Why do burglars insist on breaking down heavy doors when every house has about fifteen fragile ground-floor windows they could choose instead?  I don't know - perhaps it's just a failure of imagination - but they do this fairly predictably, so here is a photo sequence showing how we reinforced our front door several months back.

Well, a partial photo sequence at least, because my husband had already commenced this particular honey-do before I had the camera ready.

Basically our front door has this very common configuration: door knob below, and deadbolt above.  As delivered by the builder, each of these components had its own separate small strike plate held in place by two screws (you can see the original holes here). 

My husband went to the hardware store and bought a single larger, thicker strike plate which fit this standard spacing (I believe it cost about ten bucks).  However, given that the frame had been fitted with the original separate plates, he had to trace the outline of the new one and then use a chisel to chip out the extra wood, so that the new larger plate would sit flush with the frame.  This job is a pain in the lower anatomy requiring patience, but it doesn't require a lot of skill or special tools.  What you see here is the finished chisel-out. 

Here's the new single-piece strike plate dry-fitted in place.  Notice how it has nine screw holes instead of the original four that the two smaller plates had. 

But THIS is the picture that really tells the thousand words.  That screw on the right is one of the original screws installed by the builder.  The one on the left came with the new strike plate.  Which do you think offers more protection: four of the right screw or nine of the left? 

The reason why doors break down so easily is that the frames are pretty flimsy.  These longer screws were designed to anchor way back into the stud wall and provide substantially more strength. 

I can't imagine what it would take to break down this door with this new hardware installed.  I think the door itself would have to be reduced to splinters (and it's mahogany, so it's stronger than it looks).  The frame is a lot less likely to let go now. 

Of course, all this effort would be for naught if it were not coupled with the use of double-sided deadbolts:

It took us a while to get to this frame-reinforcement honey-do, but I had a locksmith installing these deadbolts within 48 hours of us closing the contract on this house.  The original house came with one-sided deadbolts, meaning, there was a knob you turn on the inside to open it. 

With this configuration...
You need a key to get into the house.
You also need a key to get out of the house.
This idea freaks some people out, but let me explain.

If you don't use double-sided deadbolts, you can have the strongest door and door frame in the world and it wouldn't amount to a hill of beans because the burglars can simply pop a small hole in that door glass, reach in, turn the latch, and walk through your now-unlocked door. 

I can't remember who put me onto the idea of double-sided deadbolts.  It may have been the Pearland police officers who investigated our burglary, because I've used double-siders on every house I've owned since that time. 

This idea scares some people because they think, "OMG, what if there's a fire and I can't find my keys?!  I'll be trapped!!" 

Well, first of all, exercise a bit of self-discipline and keep a spare key near every double-deadbolted door, but keep them:

1. Beyond the reach of anyone who puts an arm through the door glass, and
2. Near the door but hidden.

We do this in my family and it's not a burdensome procedure - we're accustomed to it.  And woe to anyone who screws up and moves a key from its assigned location. 

Secondly, remember that you still have your fifteen-odd ground-floor windows to choose from if you need to get out in an emergency.  Overcome psychological inertia and see the senselessness of requiring a door as an egress point in an emergency. 

Double-sided deadbolts also offer the following additional advantage:  They impair a burglar's ability to get back out of your house if they do get in, say, through a window.  Even if they come in by the riskier means of a window (visible window transits clearly signal something wrong at the house - door transits may be ambiguous and less noticeable to neighbors and passers-by), they're most likely going to want to exit through a door because they'll be carrying your goodies and it's inconvenient to try to muscle flat-screen TVs and other items out of windows that were never designed for such activities.  Faced with these kinds of efficiency barriers, they may just conclude, "Oh, to hell with this!" and go find an easier target. 

Our back door is a different configuration and I'll try to deal with that in a separate post.  In the meantime, may your holiday weeks be burglar-free.