"Panic rooms" and "safe rooms" are greatly overrated

 

An article in the New York Post set me to thinking.

New Yorkers are fortifying their homes with panic rooms and bullet-proof doors like never before over fears about crime, migrants and national turmoil — and it’s not just the city’s elite partaking in the trend.

“Not every [customer] is an ultra-rich stockbroker — a lot of them are just people, middle-class kind of people,” said Steve Humble, founder of the home-defense contractor Creative Home Engineering.

“I’d say the pandemic really kicked off an uptick. Business was really good throughout the pandemic time, and it really hasn’t slowed down,” said Humble, who specializes in top-of-the-line secret doors disguised as bookshelves, fireplaces, mirrors, blank walls and whatever else a client can think of to conceal a safety room behind them.

He is one of numerous home-defense contractors who told The Post that the past four years have been a boon for business, with New Yorkers from all walks of life shelling out thousands of dollars to outfit their homes with hidden rooms, bulletproof doors and a swath of other covert security systems to keep the baddies at bay should they come knocking.

The driving force is a decline in New Yorkers’ sense of safety — assaults in the Big Apple reached 28,000 for the first time on record last year  — and the perceptible shift toward volatile instability that many people feel is ramping up across all of American society, Humble and others say.

There's more at the link.

I suppose a panic room might be a defense against a psycopathic nitwit who can't add two and two together to get four.  Such an assailant might not be able to distinguish between his shoe size and his IQ.  However, for almost all other attackers, a panic room simply gives them an excuse to rob the homeowner blind while he/she/they cower in their illusory "safe place", unable to stop them.  What's more, check the police response times in your neighborhood.  It often takes cops ten to fifteen minutes or more to respond to most 911 calls.  During that time, while you're cowering in your safe room, what are the home invaders doing to you and/or your possessions?

It gets worse.  Panic rooms offer an attacker an opportunity to murder everyone in the building, because they make it almost impossible to escape.  If the attacker simply strikes a match or two and sets fire to the place, how are those in the panic room to get away from the flames?  Panic rooms pin down their occupants, fix them in place.  It's no good saying that they can have hidden exits to escape such a fate;  those exits have to come out somewhere, and if (as it almost always is) those exits are on the same property (much less in the same building), who's to say they won't have caught fire by the time those in the panic room want to use them?  And what if they use them, only to emerge surrounded by frustrated attackers who've been looking for them?

Tying yourself down to a supposedly secure location, but one where you're unable to defend yourself against attackers, is a disaster waiting to happen.  I'd much rather harden the exterior of my home, making it as difficult as possible for someone to break in, and then defend my family and property from inside.  Even more tactically suitable would be to prevent the attackers from approaching in the first place.  This is why one should select a home in as safe a neighborhood as possible (although in today's climate of highly mobile criminals, street riots and other crimes, that safety may be illusory).

One last point.  If you're in an apartment building or condo complex, you've made yourself hostage to the security-mindedness and safety-consciousness (or lack thereof) of everyone else living there.  Trapping yourself above ground level is always a security risk.  You don't need an attacker to strike a match:  a domestic accident can start a fire just as easily as a criminal.  How are you going to get out of your apartment and down to ground level?  Are there multiple exits, and paths to reach those exits?  Is the building constructed of relatively fireproof materials?  What businesses or attractive targets are in the building that might attract criminals to it?  Unless and until those questions are satisfactorily answered (and, if necessary, their answers have persuaded you to move to a safer location), a panic or safe room is a lot lower on the priority list.

I won't worry about a panic room.  After eighteen years living (and frequently fighting) in a war zone, I'd rather arm myself and inflict panic on my attackers!

Peter