From the article: Now attention is shifting to another burglar-thwarting development: Working from home. Burglars try to avoid dwellings with people in them, a

From the article: Now attention is shifting to another burglar-thwarting development: Working from home. Burglars try to avoid dwellings with people in them, and at-home workers also provide residential neighborhoods with what urbanist Jane Jacobs famously dubbed “eyes on the street,” an informal system of surveillance that makes it harder for miscreants to get away with stuff. A more sophisticated analysis released as a (not yet peer-reviewed) working paper earlier this year by Jesse Matheson, Brendon McConnell, James Rockey and Argyris Sakalis, all economists at British universities, found that that in England and Wales (which experienced a pandemic drop in burglaries similar to that in the US) neighborhoods with residents more likely to work from home experienced steeper burglary declines. To be precise, a 9.5 percentage point (one standard deviation) increase in WFH share “leads to a persistent 4% drop in burglaries.”