Tuesday musings

So, as pretty much every one of my Facebook friends will know, the flat was broken into on Friday night.


Well, 'broken into' is probably a bit of a misnomer. One of the flatmates had left lounge door (which faces the road) unlocked and the thieving little so-and-so's had walked in, taken an XBox, Kinect Sensor, games, and the laptop that I had left on the kitchen table before I went out. 


Understandably, I was upset. First at myself for leaving the laptop out on the kitchen table, and then at the flatmate for leaving the door unlocked, and obviously at the people who stole our stuff. However the fact is that they walked in when people were home and would have been in and out in less than a few minutes. They grabbed the recognisable things (laptop, console, games, etc) and left a router that was sitting in the lounge.


Immediately the flatmates were up in arms - two of them went out and tried to track the perpetrators down, boasting about what they would do if they managed to find them (the punishment would not have fitted the crime, by the way) and they returned an hour later, dejected and empty handed. I must admit I was a bit disappointed.


It made me think a bit more about security. Ideally we would like to be able to keep doors unlocked when we're not at home but depending on where you live this sort of reality is sadly a thing of the past. Even then, when I was living in St Mary's Bay I had a car broken into at night literally metres away from my bedroom window.


So is more security the answer? Does more security make us more secure? One of my flatmates was talking with the Policeman who came to dust for fingerprints and suggested the answer was to make things impossible for thieves.


With all due respect to him, that's the same tactic used by the MPAA and the RIAA to stop pirates, and a fat lot of good that it's done so far. There is an analogy there, and it's where I'm conflicted. My usual response to the corporate heavies is just to accept that piracy happens and just to work around it. Could I say the same thing to my flatmate? How would I feel if someone had said the equivalent of 'shit happens' to me after my laptop was stolen? 


The problem with more security is that it has to go down sometime. Alarms and security systems are normally switched off when people are at home; and talking it over with a friend of mine from South Africa, thieves are upping the ante as well, waiting for people to come home and turn off the security system then using threats of violence to get what they want. It's like the argument against giving the Police bigger guns - the criminals just get even bigger ones.


Personally, I'd rather not live in that kind of environment. I think I'm at peace with the notion of accepting that people will take things regardless of what we do and as long as we do everything we can that should be enough.


Am I the only one who feels like this? Am I being a softie bleeding heart liberal?