Thursday, May 16, 2024

"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


12 comments:

  1. Seems like the Israeli events of October 7 should be informative when it comes to the topic of safe rooms. It seems to me that they were sometimes effective, sometimes not. If nothing else, they bought some time. Time in which the occupants could arm themselves and prepare to fight back, were they so inclined. It all depends on what contingencies one plans for.

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  2. Humbly disagree.

    Most of us are taught in case of a break in to find a place to fort up and let the bad guy/guys come to us. We pick the place of contact. Let them steal what they want but unleash Hell on them if they come to attack us.

    A safe room does exactly that. It allows someone to fort up and escape detection. It's pretty rare for a burglar to light the place on fire. In a riot it's best to have left town ASAP.

    The bigger problem for NYC residents is the ownership of firearms to defend oneself and family.

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  3. If something stupid and deadly is about to happen someplace, the first rule of survival is always Try Really Hard to Be Someplace Else.

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  4. Hardening one's entrances and windows is not a bad idea. If only to slow the invaders whomever they be and give you a chance to put your family in a safe room.

    And, in places like NYFC, it's the only possibility that people have to defend themselves. As it is shown, repeatedly, that there is no right to self defense in those locations.

    I agree that not being in places like that is the best choice, but sometimes people don't have good choices, being tied to crappy places by family requirements or jobs or other things.

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  5. obstacles, barriers, covered by fire from cover, coupled with mobility. primary, alternate, contingency,emergency positions. fixed positions are death. ask the israelis. burglars are one thing, but rioters/marauders will just burn you up in your house if they can't get in. chain link fencing hanging from the overhang will stop molotovs and bricks. i'll defend from the wooded knoll overlooking the whole place and the approaches. better to die on my feet.

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  6. Hmmfff, your opinion is reasonable.

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  7. Safe room with firing ports...

    Because outgoing fire is always convincing

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    Replies
    1. Yeah, think less "safe room" and more "fighting postion"

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  8. Just give me 300 meters, God and my Mauser.... or a well-sighted AR...

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  9. The fun thing about apartment living in crime-ridden cities is that you want limited entry/exit points for security, but for fires you want lots of unobstructed ones. So there's always going to be a bit of conflict between those two goals. The fix, of course, is to not live in such a place but that can be tricky to do based on employment etc.

    I note that tall buildings in Japan (where tall is probably 4-5 floors and up, possibly just more than 2) require multiple exits/stairs now. But this is relatively recent and there are a ton of crappy buildings in Japanese cities with a lift and one set of stairs with the stairs often used as storage by the businesses on each floor... I try not to visit these places but sometimes you have to

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  10. If nothing else, one can get an attentive, noisy dog for not very much money, potentially making ne’erdowells think twice and certainly raising the alarm to occupants.

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  11. It's a trade-off.
    My husband is 75, I am 73. We are located in a smallish city, mostly to be close to medical facilities and within reasonable access to highways. A pullup bridge is located between us and the no-so great sections of town. Not that there are not sketchy neighbors (mostly renters) near us, but they are heavily outnumbered by good neighbors, many of them armed.
    We are just NOT up to locating in rural or remote places. So, we have found a home that doesn't look that much different from the rest in our area, but is wood siding over brick. Basement with a metal door (against which I may put a couple of sliding two by four barriers further blocking access). Glass block windows.
    I'm planning thorny barriers near windows, we have an aging dog (will replace with one larger and more protective after he passes), and fencing around, except in the front. Not sure what I will do about hardening that part.

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