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For the majority of applications, locks are for "keeping honest people honest". With the right tools most locks take seconds to circumvent, think breaking a win

For the majority of applications, locks are for "keeping honest people honest". With the right tools most locks take seconds to circumvent, think breaking a window, cutting the steel, drilling out the lock. For situations where it actually matters, professionals know to secure elsewhere before the actual lock is considered.

Cthulhu_ 5y ago
I mean, ideally you have a breaking break-in so that you have evidence for the insurance that you have, in fact, been broken into. Best to have a lock that is easier to break than to pick IMO. But yeah, the base premise is that it should avoid crimes of opportunity. Like the steel cables to lock laptops and screens to tables; they won't stand up for a pair of sturdy snips, but they can't be snatched up quickly.
- buran77 5y ago
  For people willing to commit insurance fraud putting a few scratches on the lock and door to make it look legit isn't really that much of an effort. Are insurance companies actually conditioning their conclusion based on this kind of evidence? The real value of a lock that's hard to pick is that it forces the burglar to carry more tools and use noisier, time consuming methods. All of this makes the break-in far more obvious and detectable much faster by neighbors, or anyone really, even the owner. And you want to make the job harder and riskier for the burglar so the bar is higher for how willing they must be to go through with the job. Most burglaries are "blind" ones, meaning the burglars have a reasonably good idea of the job's value and difficulty level. So if you have a lot of valuables you have to do your darnedest to raise the job's difficulty: make the break in take time, be noisy, and generally draw attention, or forcing the robbers to leave a lot of evidence behind.
  - hvidgaard 5y ago
    Not the comment you replied to, but the parent comment. I agree with what you said, but I wanted to put in the context of what I wrote. Unless your windows and doors have actual anti burglar features, the lock doesn't matter at all. A large screwdriver is often enough to force a window open and a pry bar will make short work of a door. Not until those have been properly secured does the lock matter. And according to some insurance companies in Denmark, thieves does not pick locks anyway. They use a method of force.

Cthulhu_ 5y ago

I mean, ideally you have a breaking break-in so that you have evidence for the insurance that you have, in fact, been broken into. Best to have a lock that is easier to break than to pick IMO. But yeah, the base premise is that it should avoid crimes of opportunity. Like the steel cables to lock laptops and screens to tables; they won't stand up for a pair of sturdy snips, but they can't be snatched up quickly.

buran77 5y ago
For people willing to commit insurance fraud putting a few scratches on the lock and door to make it look legit isn't really that much of an effort. Are insurance companies actually conditioning their conclusion based on this kind of evidence? The real value of a lock that's hard to pick is that it forces the burglar to carry more tools and use noisier, time consuming methods. All of this makes the break-in far more obvious and detectable much faster by neighbors, or anyone really, even the owner. And you want to make the job harder and riskier for the burglar so the bar is higher for how willing they must be to go through with the job. Most burglaries are "blind" ones, meaning the burglars have a reasonably good idea of the job's value and difficulty level. So if you have a lot of valuables you have to do your darnedest to raise the job's difficulty: make the break in take time, be noisy, and generally draw attention, or forcing the robbers to leave a lot of evidence behind.
- hvidgaard 5y ago
  Not the comment you replied to, but the parent comment. I agree with what you said, but I wanted to put in the context of what I wrote. Unless your windows and doors have actual anti burglar features, the lock doesn't matter at all. A large screwdriver is often enough to force a window open and a pry bar will make short work of a door. Not until those have been properly secured does the lock matter. And according to some insurance companies in Denmark, thieves does not pick locks anyway. They use a method of force.