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Home Security Through the Dark Months: What the PSNI Burglary Figures Actually Show

The clocks went back on 25 October, and for the next few months most of us will be arriving home in the dark. This is the time of year when the leaflets and the sales emails start, and most of them lead with fear. There is a better approach: look at what the figures for Northern Ireland actually say, work out what that means for your own street rather than for the province as a whole, and then spend your effort on the handful of measures that do the most good. That is what this guide does.

What the figures say

The Police Service of Northern Ireland publishes recorded crime statistics on a rolling basis, with each bulletin covering a twelve-month period and comparing it with the same twelve months a year earlier. For the twelve months to 31 August 2026, PSNI recorded 2,658 burglaries in Northern Ireland, compared with 2,733 in the preceding twelve months. That is a reduction of 75 offences, or about 2.7 per cent.

For the same period, total recorded crime stood at 94,334 offences, down around 0.6 per cent on the year before. Put the two together and burglary accounts for roughly 2.8 per cent of all recorded crime in Northern Ireland.

Three things follow from that, and all three are worth saying plainly.

  • Burglary is a small share of recorded crime. It is serious when it happens to you, and it is not the typical crime recorded here.
  • The trend is slightly down, not sharply anything. A 2.7 per cent fall over a year is a modest movement. It is not a collapse in burglary and it is not a crisis.
  • These are recorded offences for the whole of Northern Ireland. They say nothing about your postcode.

One important caveat on the numbers above. PSNI issues updated bulletins regularly, and each one revises the rolling twelve-month window. The figures quoted here are from the bulletin covering the year to 31 August 2026. If you are reading this some months later, the current bulletin will show different totals, and the PSNI official statistics pages are the place to check rather than any article, including this one.

How to read crime statistics without misleading yourself

Two distinctions do most of the work.

The first is between recorded crime and survey-based estimates. Recorded crime counts offences that came to police attention and were recorded as crimes. Survey research asks the public directly about their experience, and consistently finds offences that were never reported. Neither measure is wrong; they count different things. A change in recorded burglary can reflect a change in how many burglaries happened, or a change in how many got reported, and in a single year's movement it is usually impossible to separate the two.

The second is between the average and your area. Northern Ireland is a small place with very uneven distribution. Burglary clusters by housing type, by street layout, by how much passing footfall a property has, by whether there is rear access through an entry or alleyway, and by whether homes sit empty during the working day. Across Belfast you can find neighbouring wards with substantially different experiences. PSNI publishes figures broken down by policing district, which is far more informative for deciding what to do than a province-wide total. Your local Neighbourhood Policing Team will talk to you about patterns on your streets, and that conversation is more useful than any statistic.

The honest summary is this: the risk to any individual household in Northern Ireland in a given year is low, it varies a lot by area, and the sensible response is proportionate basic security rather than either complacency or an alarm system bought in a panic.

Dark evenings: the cheap things that do the most

The autumn change is not that criminals become more numerous. It is that houses look empty earlier. An unlit house at six in the evening in November reads very differently from an unlit house at six in July. Almost everything worth doing in October and November is about that one fact.

  • Make the house look occupied before you get home. Timers or smart plugs on a lamp in a room that is normally used in the evening, set to come on before dusk, do more than anything else on this list. One lamp in a living room beats a hallway light left on all day.
  • Light the approach. A lit path and doorstep removes the cover that makes an unlit front door attractive to loiter at. Dusk-to-dawn bulbs are simpler to live with than motion sensors that retrigger all night.
  • Cut back what screens your front door. Hedges and shrubs that have grown across the front through the summer hide whoever is standing at your door from the street. Trimming them costs an afternoon.
  • Clear the yard. Ladders, wheelbarrows, garden tools and bins left against a back wall are all useful to somebody who should not be there. Putting them away is free.
  • Close the curtains, but not the whole house. A front room visibly shut up from four in the afternoon every day tells its own story. Normal is what you want.
  • Keep keys away from the letterbox and out of sight through glazed panels, and do not leave spares in the obvious outdoor places.

None of this involves buying a security system. It is worth exhausting this list before considering one.

Doors and windows, in order of priority

If you are going to spend money on hardware this autumn, this is roughly the order that gives the most benefit.

  • The cylinder on uPVC and composite doors. An older unprotected euro-profile cylinder is the best-documented weak point on this type of door. Look for a cylinder certified to three stars under TS007, the technical specification published by the Door and Hardware Federation and the Glass and Glazing Federation and recognised by Secured by Design, or one carrying Sold Secure Diamond.
  • A multipoint mechanism that works properly. If the handle needs force, or the door needs lifting or leaning to lock, the mechanism is not fully engaging and should be dealt with before it fails completely. This is also the cheapest time to deal with it, since a cold snap is what usually turns a stiff door into a stuck one.
  • Timber final exit doors. Here the relevant benchmark is BS3621, a British Standard published by BSI, and a certified lock carries the Kitemark on the faceplate.
  • Accessible windows. Key-operated handles are only useful if the key exists and is kept somewhere sensible in the house. Check every ground-floor window and anything reachable from a flat roof, extension or boundary wall.
  • Rear and side access. Gates, entries and alleyways are typically the weakest part of a terraced property and among the cheapest to improve.
  • The garage connecting door. If your garage opens into the house, that internal door is an external door in security terms, and it is often the least substantial one on the property.

Going away

Christmas and New Year are the period when houses in Northern Ireland stand empty for several consecutive days, which is a different problem from an empty working day.

  • Tell a neighbour, not the internet. Somebody who will take in post, move a delivery off the step and park on your drive is worth more than any gadget. Posting the holiday photographs after you get back costs you nothing.
  • Deal with deliveries. A parcel on the doorstep for three days is a reliable signal. Hold deliveries or redirect them to a neighbour.
  • Vary the lighting. Timers on two or three lamps on different schedules read as a household. One lamp on from dusk to midnight every night for a fortnight does not.
  • Check the unoccupancy clause in your insurance. Policies define a point at which a property counts as unoccupied, and some conditions change at that point. Read it before you book, not after.
  • Do not hide valuables in the obvious places, and photograph anything of real value for your own records.
  • Lock the internal garage door and the shed, which people routinely forget while carefully locking the front.

Sheds, tools, bikes and the car on the drive

This is the part of home security most often ignored, and the contents are frequently worth more than people realise. Garden and power tools, bicycles, golf clubs and camping equipment add up quickly, and a standard home insurance policy usually covers outbuildings under a separate and much lower limit than the main house. Check what that limit is before assuming the shed is covered.

Practical steps: a decent hasp and staple properly fitted with coach bolts rather than screws, hinges that cannot simply be unbolted from outside, no window to see through or a window covered from the inside, bicycles locked to something fixed inside rather than merely stored inside, and tools marked so they are identifiable. For cars on a driveway, keep keys away from the front door and out of reach of the letterbox, and keep nothing visible inside the car, including the sat-nav mount that advertises what used to be there.

If it does happen

  • If anyone is still at the property, or you feel at risk, ring 999. If you have come home to a burglary already over, 101 is the non-emergency number. Report it either way: unreported burglaries are invisible in the figures and in local policing decisions.
  • Leave things as they are as far as you reasonably can until police have attended, and do not tidy up.
  • Get the crime reference number and keep it. Your insurer will ask for it, and a claim without one is harder work.
  • Photograph the damage before any repair, including the door and the lock.
  • Get the locks changed where keys have been taken or a lock has been damaged, and keep the invoice for the claim.
  • Ask about Victim Support and local crime prevention follow-up through PSNI and nidirect. Both exist and both are underused.

The figures above are reassuring in the aggregate, and they will be no comfort at all to the 2,658 households behind them. That is the case for doing the cheap, boring things in October rather than the expensive ones in a hurry afterwards.

Sources

  • Police Service of Northern Ireland — police recorded crime statistics, twelve months to 31 August 2026
  • Police Service of Northern Ireland — crime prevention advice
  • Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency
  • nidirect
  • Secured by Design
  • Door and Hardware Federation
  • Glass and Glazing Federation
  • Sold Secure
  • British Standards Institution
  • Master Locksmiths Association
  • Association of British Insurers