Chennai: While burglaries in residential colonies were a regular occurrence in the city a few years ago, the trend has changed now with the thieves targeting only locked houses, ATMs and banks as they feel they would be ‘safe’.
The police say that the burglars find stealing from locked houses more attractive and simpler, and that when it comes to attempting to breaking into ATMs, they think of ‘assured returns’ a senior police official said.
“There are incidents of burglars doing recee in cars or bikes to identify their possible target before striking. In the night, they come by car, steal valuables from the locked houses that they had identified earlier, stuff the loot in the dickey of the vehicle before escaping,” noted a police source, giving the example of the case which happened in Tambaram.
The thieves, too, do their preparations before deciding to strike. A good number of them prefer not to enter the house where the inmates are sleeping. “It will be a ‘high-risk operation’ for them if they intrude into a house with inmates. The possibility of being identified and also getting caught is very high.
So, they prefer locked houses. They even keep the neighbours’ houses locked before they break into a locked house, to make sure that the next door inmates do not ‘disturb’ them,” another official said.
Though many burglars ‘dream’ of robbing a bank and ‘settle down’ once and for all, their dreams hardly come true. “What they failed to understand is that they just can’t break into the safety chest of a bank and also take away cash stuffed in the cash chest of ATM machines. Most of the banks use technology supported locks in their banks as well as in the ATMs,” said the police.
Of course, chain-snatchers may have the highest success rate in the city because they can finish their ‘job’ on a bike in less than a minute and flee. Available statistics shows that there was a reduction of 15 per cent in property offences in the city in 2013, compared to 2012.
