Home & Safe

Deluxe CCTV

Everyone deserves to feel safe where they live.   Home & Safe is a show about how you actually get there. If you own a house, rent an apartment, run a shop, or are just tired of wondering whether that package will still be on the porch when you get home, this is for you.   One clear question per episode, answered in plain language. Because feeling safe at home isn't a luxury, and it shouldn't take an expert to arrange it.  Brought to you by Deluxe CCTV. 

Episodes

  1. 2d ago

    Alarms, Cameras, And What Gets Police To Your Door

    In a growing number of American cities, a home alarm going off is not, on its own, enough to send the police. Somebody has to confirm there is a real emergency first. The siren still sounds, and the alarm company still calls, but the last step, the one most people assumed was guaranteed, has changed. Most people paying for an alarm have no idea whether that is how it works where they live. This episode is about why cities made the change, what it means for how you set up your home, and why the camera you may already own could be the thing that decides whether anybody comes. Host Mackenzie works through the policy, the numbers behind it, what police count as confirmation, and what to do, and not do, when your own alarm goes off. None of it requires buying anything. In this episode: Verified response, the policy Salt Lake City adopted in 2000, and the other cities that have followed itWhat actually happens between your sensor tripping and a dispatcher’s screen, and where an unverified alarm lands in the queueHow to find out what your own city does, and why you want to know before the day you need itWhat the Department of Justice’s own guide for police says about how many alarm calls turn out to be falseThe three causes of false alarms, and the one that accounts for most of them by a wide marginThe counterintuitive result from Salt Lake City, and why we are careful about what it does and does not proveThe cost to your street that almost nobody mentionsThe three ways an alarm can be confirmed, and what a dispatcher does and does not countThe exception that matters most: if you are home and calling for help, none of this applies to youThe police advice repeated more than any other on this subject, and why people keep ignoring itLook first, call second, and what to tell a dispatcher that is worth more than any amount of alarm historyThe common false-alarm fixes that cost little or nothingWhy your camera becomes the second signal, and the three things from earlier episodes that suddenly carry real weightThe test to arrange with your alarm company, and the number it gives youMany of our cameras can be viewed on your phone with no subscription, which is exactly what this episode is about. What we do not sell is the service that does the looking for you. That is a monitored alarm; it is a monthly fee, and plenty of people reasonably prefer it. A camera lets you confirm. It does not make it certain that you will, because you may be in a meeting, driving, or asleep in another time zone. If the moment that matters is likely to be one where you cannot look, paying somebody else to is not a failure of self-reliance. It is matching the setup to how you actually live. The one thing we would push back on is paying for that service and assuming it means police will come. It means somebody will check. Sources named in this episode: the Department of Justice’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, police departments in Salt Lake City, Milwaukee, Seattle, Los Angeles, and Dallas, York Regional Police, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Home & Safe is from Deluxe CCTV — the practical side of keeping a home, and the people in it, safe. deluxecctv.com

  2. Oct 30

    How Outdoor Lighting Affects Your Home Security

    You hear something outside at night and go to the window. You can barely see anything, and not because it is dark out there. Your porch light is on, and that is the problem. Your eyes have adjusted to the bright patch by the door, the glass is throwing your own lit room back at you, and you are standing next to a working light seeing less than you would with no light at all. This is one of the few episodes where our commercial interest is weak, because we do not sell lighting. It is also a subject where the research is stronger than most of what gets recommended for home security, and stranger than the usual explanation suggests. We sell cameras, we do not sell lights, and by the end of this episode we are telling you to fix the light first. Host Mackenzie works through what the studies found, the point where they stop applying to a single house, and the cheap change that can often do more for a camera owner than a better camera. In this episode: What a systematic review of street lighting studies spanning about four decades found, and why the method matters as much as the figureThe randomized trial in New York City public housing, and why random assignment is so rare in this fieldWhy the effect showed up more strongly for property crime than for violent crimeWhy the British and American studies came out so far apart, and how the estimate changed when the review was updatedThe limit that matters most to you: all of this research is about street lighting, and none of it measured one brighter fixture over one front doorWhat light at your own house does reliably get you, starting with seeing who is at the door before you open itWhy being able to assess your yard from a window removes one of the few genuinely risky things an ordinary household doesDisability glare, and why past a certain point more light helps you see lessWhy professional lighting guidance favors even light over bright light, and what that means for a single floodlight over the doorThe two-minute test after dark: stand where a stranger would approach from, and look back at your own houseHow a bright patch next to a dark path forces your camera to choose, and why a light behind someone gives you an outlineWhat infrared quietly takes away, and why the color of a jacket is often the most useful part of a descriptionThe number on a camera spec sheet that almost nobody looks atWhy a motion light is good at getting your attention and awkward for a cameraThen the part that does not add up. When the review pooled those studies, crime fell during the day about as much as it fell at night. If lighting worked only by making people visible after dark, that should not happen, because a street lamp does nothing for a Tuesday afternoon. The researchers’ own reading is that better lighting may work on the place rather than the person, signaling that a street is cared for, drawing more people onto it, and strengthening the attention residents already pay. That is an inference rather than a measured mechanism, and we say so. It also changes how you might think about what your own property signals. Sources named in this episode: Brandon Welsh and David Farrington’s systematic review for the Campbell Collaboration (2008) and its 2022 update with Stephen Douglas, the randomized lighting trial in New York City public housing led by Aaron Chalfin (2021), the Illuminating Engineering Society, and the Federal Highway Administration. Home & Safe is from Deluxe CCTV — the practical side of keeping a home, and the people in it, safe. deluxecctv.com

  3. Oct 23

    Halloween Safety and Home Security

    For a few hours on one evening a year, households do the opposite of everything this show usually recommends. You want strangers walking up and down your street. You put something on the front steps to attract attention. Then you open the front door to people you have never met, over and over, in the dark. That is not a security failure. It is the holiday, and we are not going to tell you to stop. What changes for those few hours is that the ordinary signals your household runs on stop working, because everything that would normally look unusual is exactly what everyone is doing. Host Mackenzie covers the people coming to your door, the house you leave behind when you go out with your own kids, and the statistics the security industry publishes every October, most of which do not hold up. In this episode: What the National Fire Protection Association actually records about decoration fires, and the two numbers in it that tell you nearly everything about avoiding oneWhy an open flame on a front step next to dried cornstalks would look obviously wrong on any other night of the year, and why nobody flags it on this oneThe indoor version at a party, where crepe paper and a long costume meet a hot bulb in a room with more people in it than usualWhy exits are not a place for decorations, indoors or out, which is the same argument we made in episode seven about bars and key-both-sides deadboltsThe walk down your own path before dark, looking for the cord, the step you stopped noticing, and what a fog machine does to visibility for someone who cannot see over itThe genuinely odd combination at the center of the night: you dress the front of your house to say come up here, and then you leaveWhy locking up matters most on the night it feels least necessary, when you have been in and out of that door forty timesDressing the inside as well as the outside, and why a lamp in a room people actually sit in does more than the porch lightThe bowl you should be willing to lose, and the most likely property loss of the eveningWhy every behavior that normally earns a second glance is what the whole street is doing, and why the people who would do the noticing are occupiedWhy asking somebody what they are doing never crosses your mind on this one night, and what that does to the threshold for anyone reporting anythingThe point where we are reasoning rather than citing, and why we are telling you which is whichThe other way to read all of it: more potential witnesses on the street than on any night of the yearMotion alerts, the mute that goes on at 6 on the 31st, and the number of people who never turn it back onWhy your footage will be poor that night, and the free camera test you get on November 1 that you cannot buy any other wayWe also went looking for the crime evidence, and we cannot give it to you. The figures you will find on nearly every security company’s website in October trace back to a handful of insurance press releases from around 2016 to 2018. The same insurer has been quoted at three different numbers in three different years. A 60% burglary spike sits next to a 24% overall spike in the same article. And insurance claims are not crime statistics anyway, since they measure what people choose to claim above a deductible that removes most of what actually happens on Halloween. We are not saying those figures are wrong. We are saying we could not verify them, and a number we cannot verify is not one we are going to read to you as though it were settled. There is one Halloween figure that is properly measured, and it has nothing to do with crime. It is about children walking in the road between 5 and 8 in the evening, and it is the most useful safety thing in this episode. Sources named in this episode: the National Fire Protection Association, and a 2019 analysis of federal crash data published in JAMA Pediatrics. Home & Safe is from Deluxe CCTV — the practical side of keeping a home, and the people in it, safe. deluxecctv.com

  4. Oct 16

    Security Cameras: Getting the Most From Your Footage

    Somebody has broken into your property. You call the police, and fairly early in that conversation they ask whether you have cameras. If you can say yes, it feels like the good part of a bad morning. Then the follow-up questions start. Was a camera pointed at that part of the property? Was there enough light at that hour to see a face? Was the person close enough to the lens? How long does your system hold footage? Most people find out they don’t know the answers all at once, on a terrible morning, after years of believing this was handled. Owning a camera and owning usable footage are two different things, and the gap between them is where this episode lives. Host Mackenzie goes through what the research says a camera is worth after a crime, the failures that turn a recording into nothing, and an afternoon of fixes that require no new equipment. We sell security cameras, so you can expect us to argue that one is worth having. We think the evidence supports that. We also think almost everything that would improve yours costs nothing. In this episode: The one study that measured this properly, covering 251,195 crimes on the British railway network, where footage existed in 45% of cases and was judged useful in 29%What happened where useful footage existed, and why the picture for theft without it is as bleak as it isWhy we are not handing you a figure from a British railway network and letting you assume it describes your driveway, including what the author himself says about private homesDeterrence and evidence are two different jobs, and a camera positioned well for one is usually positioned badly for the otherThe benefits that never appear in any crime statistic and are the ones households actually use, including the disputed insurance claim and the noise at 2 a.m.Why a camera is quite often a device for finding out that nothing happened, and why that is worth saying out loudThe five failures that separate footage that exists from footage that works: direction, distance combined with width, light in both directions, an uncertain time window, and retentionWhy the instinct to fit as much of your property into the shot as possible is the instinct that ruins the recording, and why small is the one problem that cannot be fixed afterwardThe failure that did not come from the study but shows up constantly in home systems, where motion-triggered recording starts a second or two into the eventThe retention arithmetic nobody does before a holiday, when a system holds seven days, and you were gone for 10Why most camera owners have never watched their own footage under the conditions that actually matter, and the free test that takes about 15 minutes tonightThe walk test, and the gap between whether you can see somebody and whether an officer can describe what they were wearingThe clock on your recorder, the detection zone that ignores the pavement and therefore ignores the person walking up it, and the export function nobody finds until somebody asks for a fileWhy roof-level mounting gives you the tops of heads, and the height that gives you facesWhat to do the same day something happens, before the week between reporting it and anybody asking to see itThen the part camera marketing works hardest to obscure. There are three different things a camera can do, and they are not the same job. Seeing that somebody is there works at almost any distance, and almost any camera can manage it. Recognizing, where you can tell an adult from a child or make out a light jacket, needs closer. Identifying, meaning a face somebody could match or a plate somebody could read, needs dramatically closer than most people expect. The measurement underneath all three is not megapixels. It is how many pixels fall on the subject, which depends on resolution, the width of the scene the camera covers, and how far away the person is. Which is why the number on the box tells you almost nothing by itself. A high-resolution camera aimed wide at a distance can put fewer pixels on a face than a modest camera watching a doorway. There is an international standard that defines these categories and the pixel density each one requires, and professional installers design to it. None of it is proprietary. It is just not in the advertising, because the advertising would rather say 4K. Some homes have four cameras all doing the first job and nothing doing the third, and that is the configuration everybody describes afterward as useless. Source named in this episode: Matthew Ashby, “The Value of CCTV Surveillance Cameras as an Investigative Tool,” European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research, 2017. Home & Safe is from Deluxe CCTV — the practical side of keeping a home, and the people in it, safe. deluxecctv.com

  5. Oct 9

    Power Outages and Home Security

    When the power goes out, the first thing you notice is usually the sound. The refrigerator stops. Whatever was humming in the next room stops. The house gets quieter than you knew it could be. Then the mental inventory starts: flashlight, phone, batteries, how long the food will keep. Your security system is somewhere on that list, and most people have no idea where. We sell equipment that runs on electricity, so this episode is about what happens when there’s none. We also went and checked whether crime actually rises during an outage, which is the premise behind most of what our industry publishes during storm season. It mostly doesn’t. Host Mackenzie goes device by device through what stops and what keeps going, then through what the research says, then through a list of fixes that are almost entirely free. In this episode: Why a wired camera system stops the instant the power does, cameras, recorder, and switch alike, which is our own equipment and our own thing to say out loudWhy battery cameras feel reassuring until you remember what they talk to, since the router and the modem have no battery and nothing reaches your phoneThe backup battery in your alarm panel, why it is measured in hours rather than days, and why the one installed six years ago no longer holds what it did when it was newThe brief flicker that is arguably worse for your equipment than a two-day outage, and what happens to a drive when a recorder loses power mid-writeThe manual release on your garage door and your gate, why you find it in daylight, and what a released garage door can do from the outsideThe free inventory that takes about 10 minutes, and why flipping your own breaker on a Saturday afternoon tells you something no manual willWhat researchers found in the Texas rolling blackouts of February 2021, where the outages raised neither overall crime nor any single category measuredWhy disaster researchers have called widespread looting a disaster myth for decades, the difference between a disaster and a civil disturbance, and why New York in 1977 went one way while the same city in 1968 and 2003 went anotherWhere that research is genuinely contested, including the field survey after Hurricane Hugo that found stores stripped down to the fixtures and the carpetsThe two narrow risks a 2023 systematic review did identify, which turn out to describe the same house on the street, plus the Texas finding about what dropped even though crime didn’tThe week not to post on social media that your street has been dark for three days, and why a household quietly becoming informal is the actual exposureWhat the Department of Agriculture says about a closed refrigerator, a full freezer, and a half-empty one, plus the well pump and the gas furnace with the electric blowerThe utility program worth a phone call today if anyone in your household depends on powered medical equipmentOur main business is wired camera systems, and a wired system stops when the power does. We are not going to dress that up. The thing that fixes it is an uninterruptible power supply, a box with a battery in it that sits between the wall and your recorder, and it is the one purchase in this episode we would actually defend. We do not sell one. It also covers the flickers that corrupt drives, which is the failure most people never see coming. There is one thing in our own catalog that genuinely fits this topic, and we spend more time on why it probably is not for your house than on why it might be. We also published the full outage dataset behind this episode, all 50 states ranked by hours without power and by how often outages happen, built from Energy Information Administration numbers. Free to read, free to download, no email form: https://deluxecctv.com/power-outages-by-state/ Sources named in this episode: the Energy Information Administration, a study of the February 2021 Texas blackouts, the Disaster Research Center, a 2023 systematic review of the social impacts of power outages in North America, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and the Department of Agriculture. Home & Safe is from Deluxe CCTV — the practical side of keeping a home, and the people in it, safe. deluxecctv.com

  6. Oct 2

    Feeling Safe Vs. Being Safe

    Picture a house with every possible protection. Bars on the windows. A deadbolt on the front door that takes a key from both sides, so nobody can break the glass, reach through, and turn the latch. That house is genuinely harder to break into. Then one night something ordinary goes wrong, a space heater or a pan or old wiring in a wall, and every window is a cage, and the front door needs a key that is hanging on a hook somewhere in a house filling with smoke. The Tennessee State Fire Marshal's Office recorded 12 residents who died in home fires between 2012 and 2016 where security bars were a contributing factor. Ten of them were in one house in Memphis. Those were not careless people. They had thought about their safety and spent money on it, and they were protected against the wrong thing. Host Mackenzie works through the gap between feeling safe and being safe, using the front door as the place that gap shows up most clearly. We sell locks and cameras, and most of this episode is about why buying more of them usually is not the answer. In this episode: The three groups every security product falls into, including the ones that work until you quietly stop doing the free things that were already workingWhy careful, sensible people buy against the wrong problem, and why the version of burglary most of us picture came from televisionWhat the FBI counted in 2024: residential break-ins a little over 405,000, with daytime ones outnumbering after-dark ones, in the lowest national burglary rate on record going back to at least 1961The three questions worth asking about anything in your house, including anything you bought from usWhy three or four in 10 burglaries involve no force at all, which means the hardware was never the thing that failedWhat the Bureau of Justice Statistics found about no-force burglaries where somebody was home, including the 18% where a resident simply let the offender inThe utility company scripts police departments around the country describe almost word for word, and why they often arrive in pairsThe free response that works better than any hardware we make, and what a real professional does when you use itWhy the chain latch is worse than most people realize, since it mounts into the same thin trim with the same short screws as everything elseA free walk around your own house: the sliding door you may be able to lift out of its track, the pet door, the gate latch anyone can reach over, and the three places everybody hides a spare keyThe $4 fix, the $15 to $30 one, and how to check whether your deadbolt throws far enough to reach anythingWhy a key-both-sides deadbolt is generally not permitted on a main exit door, and what the residential building code requires of any door you need to get out ofThe one-minute test on a barred bedroom window, why you do it in the dark, and why children especially should practice itFlorida's building code, Miami-Dade Fire Rescue's wording on emergency releases, and the retrofit answer for anyone who has real reasons to want barsThere is one thing we sell that belongs in this conversation, and the reason is not the one in the marketing. A keypad deadbolt opens from the inside by hand, with no key involved on the way out, which gives you what people buy a key-both-sides lock for without the thing that makes it dangerous. It also retires every spare key you have ever handed out. The feature that matters most is the dullest one on the spec sheet, auto-lock, because it addresses the statistic that actually describes most break-ins rather than the exciting one. And here is the limit. A smart lock does not fix your door frame. Bolted to the same thin trim with the same short screws, it fails exactly the way the old one did, while telling you on your phone that it is locked. We would rather you upgrade the screws and skip the lock than the reverse. Sources named in this episode: the Tennessee State Fire Marshal's Office, the FBI, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the Florida Building Code, Miami-Dade Fire Rescue, and the Harris County Fire Marshal's Office. Home & Safe is from Deluxe CCTV — the practical side of keeping a home, and the people in it, safe. deluxecctv.com

  7. Sep 25

    What is Wi-Fi Jamming And How Do You Protect Against It?

    Detectives in Glendale, California, reviewed security footage after a run of residential burglaries, looking for the moment someone came through the door. There was no black screen, no static, no frozen frame, no timestamp jumping forward. The recording ran smoothly and continuously and was entirely ordinary, right up until somebody opened a drawer and found it empty. The sergeant's word for it was seamless. This episode is about burglars knocking wireless cameras offline, which you have probably seen described online as Wi-Fi jamming. A fair amount of what is being said about it is wrong in ways that happen to be convenient for companies like ours. We sell wired cameras that record locally, which is the one setup this attack genuinely cannot reach. We are going to spend most of this episode explaining why that still should not be the reason you buy anything. Host Mackenzie separates two different attacks that share one name, works through what the police cases do and do not establish, and lands on a router setting that stops the common one for free. In this episode: Two attacks sharing one name, why they are not equally common or equally fixable, and why neither one involves a password or a stolen anythingThe true radio jammer, which is illegal in the United States under two separate sections of the Communications Act, with no exemption for a business, a classroom, a residence, or a vehicleThe cheaper version in most of the videos you have seen, which forges a single administrative message your camera has no way to verify, on hardware that costs about $30Why your phone shrugs this off and an outdoor camera cannot, since Wi-Fi is its only route to the recorder, the cloud, and the alert on your phoneThe $600,000 fine the Federal Communications Commission issued in October 2014 after a hotel used that same forged disconnect on guests' personal hotspotsWhat Glendale police went public with in March 2024, the Los Angeles case disclosed two weeks earlier, and why CNET's read of the same public record came out considerably more cautious than the coverageThe structural reason this is so hard to confirm, since a broken window leaves glass, a pried door leaves tool marks, and radio waves stop existing the moment somebody switches the device offThe targeting profile the reported cases share, and why it looks nothing like the ordinary break-in from episode twoThe first thing to check, for free: whether your camera writes footage to a card or a box in your house rather than only to the cloudThe alert most camera platforms offer, and almost nobody switches on, which turns a silent attack into a noisy oneProtected Management Frames, the router setting that stops the forged disconnect cold, why it is already on if you run WPA3, and why optional beats required in a house with older equipmentEverything a jammer still does not do, including the deadbolt, the $4 of strike plate screws from episode four, the window latch, and the dogOur commercial interest here, stated plainly so you can weigh what we say against it. We sell wired cameras that connect to a recorder inside your house via cable, with no wireless link for anyone to interfere with. That is a real structural advantage against this specific attack, and it is still not a good enough reason to buy a system. If jamming is what made you reach for your wallet, you have been sold a feeling rather than a risk assessment. There is also an answer we do not sell at all: cellular backup, and we go through its one real drawback. Sources named in this episode: the Federal Communications Commission and the Communications Act; the Glendale Police Department; the Los Angeles Police Department; CNET's analysis of the public record; and the 802.11w Wi-Fi standard. Home & Safe is from Deluxe CCTV — the practical side of keeping a home, and the people in it, safe. deluxecctv.com

  8. Sep 18

    Package Theft: From the Data to Your Porch

    The notification says delivered. There's a photo attached, taken from about waist height, showing a box on your step. You get home an hour later, and there's nothing there. Most of what you'll read about that moment is a number: 58 million packages, 120 million, $14 billion. Pick a figure, pick a source, and you can find something that sounds authoritative. We sell security equipment, and we went looking for the real one. We couldn't find it. Neither could the Postal Service's own auditors. Host Mackenzie starts with what isn't known, then works through what the research actually shows about how this crime happens. It turns out to be a matter of sightlines and distance rather than anything our industry sells hard. In this episode: Why package theft barely exists as a countable crime: the FBI doesn't separate it from other theft, the Postal Service files it together with mail theft, and retailers, carriers, and police don't share what they collectThe part nobody enjoys saying: a share of reported thefts are packages that were misdelivered, never shipped, or occasionally not stolen at all.The figure we do trust, and it's smaller than you'd expect: an average loss of about $106, from a survey where people's fear of package theft ran higher than their fear of burglaryWhat 67 surveillance videos showed when criminologists went through them frame by frame, including the 73% who never checked whether anyone was home, and why the authors call their own recommendations provisionalThe one number that should decide where your boxes land, and why nothing at all was recorded beyond 51 feet from the curbWhy this is nothing like the burglary decision covered in episode two, where 83% of offenders checked for an alarm before committingThe free carrier settings most people never turn on, and what a postal official told the Inspector General about the one variable that actually mattersParcel lockers, hold for pickup, and redelivery: the options where the box never sits outside in the first place.The retailer loss prevention manager who told the Inspector General that his own company's branded boxes are taken more often said so repeatedly and was overruled by marketing.Two limits worth knowing before you spend anything: retailers can override your delivery instructions, and no carrier is obliged to use a lock box you put outThe 10 states that have passed package theft laws since 2019, why California isn't one of them, and what Penal Code 484 does insteadWhy criminologists call those felony upgrades largely symbolic, and why we're still telling you to file a police reportWho to report to, in the order that actually gets you made whole, and the one situation where this is a federal matter rather than a local oneRegarding the cameras, we had to reconcile two pieces of evidence that appear to disagree. Those 67 videos all came from doorbell cameras, which means every theft in that dataset happened in front of one. But when Stickle and Jackson surveyed 309 people who admitted to stealing packages and asked what would stop them, a doorbell camera scored 4.54 out of five, beaten only by the homeowner being home. The resolution lies in how the researchers split the sample: people with four or more thefts behind them rated the same deterrent well below that of one-time offenders. A visible camera turns away the opportunist as they walk past. It does not turn away the person doing this every week. You're buying a filter, not a wall. And tied near the top of that same list, level with a neighbor: a lock box on the porch. We don't sell lock boxes. We're telling you about them anyway. Sources named in this episode: the United States Postal Service Office of Inspector General white paper on package theft (May 2025), Stickle et al. in Criminal Justice Studies, Stickle and Jackson in Crime Science (July 2026), a 2022 study in the American Journal of Criminal Justice, Consumer Reports, and USPS, FedEx, and UPS delivery documentation. Home & Safe is from Deluxe CCTV — the practical side of keeping a home, and the people in it, safe. deluxecctv.com

  9. Sep 11

    The Burglary That Starts In Your Driveway Or Street

    You come out on a Tuesday morning and the car door isn't quite shut. The glove box is hanging open, the papers that live in it are on the floor mat, and the console is open too. So you check: wallet, cash in the cup holder, sunglasses. Nothing is missing. You push the console shut and go to work. By lunchtime, you've mostly stopped thinking about it. That they took nothing is not the good news in this story. It's the part that should have your attention. Host Mackenzie follows one sequence of events from a car in a driveway, through a garage, to a door most people have never examined. It ends with the cheapest fix we've ever recommended on this show: a few dollars, about ten minutes, available at any hardware store, and not something we sell. In this episode: Why a parked car on a residential street is closer to a row of handles than a locked box. Fremont Police Department calls this a crime of opportunity and notes that cars may be tried at random, whether or not anything valuable is visible inside.The habit many people have backwards: locking the car when they walk away from it in public, then leaving it unlocked in their own driveway overnight.The honest inventory of what's already inside your car, including registration and insurance information, a spare key, or a gate fob.Why the fact that nothing was taken may be the detail that matters most.Why two events may never get connected when nothing happens next that night or even that week.Why replacing a garage remote may not solve the underlying problem, and what the learn button on the opener motor does instead.Why a garage should be treated as an entry point to the home, not simply another room.One thing worth checking tonight: whether your garage is included in your alarm system.Why the door between your garage and the rest of your home deserves the same attention as any other exterior entry door.How this episode fits with episode two: one burglary pattern begins with an empty house. This one begins with an unlocked car. Two patterns, two different opportunities to intervene.The one alert in this episode you'd actually want waking you at 2:10 in the morning, and why the answer isn't going downstairs to investigate.And the recommendation we'd put above everything else: check the screws holding the strike plate on your doors.On many doors, short screws secure the strike plate primarily to the trim or door jamb. Seattle Police Department crime prevention guidance recommends longer screws that reach the framing behind it. Check the hinge side while you're there. A box of screws and a screwdriver. It may be the least impressive-sounding recommendation we've ever made, but it's one of the simplest ways to strengthen a vulnerable point in a door. Sources named in this episode: Fremont Police Department, Seattle Police Department crime prevention guidance, and FBI incident data analyzed by Everytown Research. Home & Safe is from Deluxe CCTV: the practical side of keeping a home, and the people in it, safe. deluxecctv.com

  10. Sep 4

    How To Protect Your House After Leaving For a Long Weekend

    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 CoastThe 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 handleThe lights mistake people make in both directionsThe vacation photo, the note for the delivery driver, and the out-of-office reply — three things that answer the only question anyone would haveThe full pre-trip list in order of what it does for you, starting with the free itemsThe garage remote in a car at long-term parking, sitting next to your registrationWhy a muted camera app is not a security system, and the ten minutes that decides whether you get anything out of the hardwareAdvice from a company that sells cameras: stop watching yours from the beachWhat 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

  11. Aug 27

    What Actually Stops a Break-In?

    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 hasThe number that reframes everything: fewer than one in six property crimes ends in an arrestWhy the useful question isn't how do I catch someone — it's how do I not get chosenThe five findings from the burglar survey, including what they actually check before committingLock picking is a movie thing: seven in eight forced a door or walked through an open oneDeterrence vs. evidence — the same camera bought for two different jobs, and why the beautiful wide shot of your front yard is nearly uselessThe sign without the system: what a bluff buys youThe 13 percent who said nothing would stop them, and why we're telling you about themA 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

  12. Aug 21

    Is Your Kid Ready to Be Home Alone?

    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 insteadThe three readiness buckets: your child, the circumstances, the safety skillsFive house rules that actually matter, including the phone script and the delivery-driver problemThe number most parents don't have programmedHow 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 openA realistic two-week rollout, plus why the readiness answer moves again by OctoberSources 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

  • 12 Episodes

About

Everyone deserves to feel safe where they live.   Home & Safe is a show about how you actually get there. If you own a house, rent an apartment, run a shop, or are just tired of wondering whether that package will still be on the porch when you get home, this is for you.   One clear question per episode, answered in plain language. Because feeling safe at home isn't a luxury, and it shouldn't take an expert to arrange it.  Brought to you by Deluxe CCTV. 

Information

  • Creator
    Deluxe CCTV
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    12
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Home & Safe
  • Show Website
    Home & Safe