Its Not Clear Home Break-Ins Happen More Often During the Holidays

By Kelly O'Brien

Boston.com Staff | 12.10.14 | 5:10 PM

Every year, along with the snow and the Christmas lights, comes a flood of warnings to protect your home from burglars looking to take advantage of all the houses left empty during holiday vacations. Call it the Home Alone effect.

But google something along the lines of holiday home break-ins and youll see a lot of tips written by insurance agencies or companies selling home security systems. Not surprisingly, some of those tips include Buy our security equipment, or Get our insurance.

So are holiday crime sprees just a myth cooked up by self-interested corporations and classic 90s films? Or do the numbers justify the fears?

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Boston.com dove into the stats from the last few years, punching our calculators and tabulating the averages to bring you the answer, which is it kind of depends.

First, lets look at the data from Boston proper, which bears out the common wisdom to some extent.

The Boston Police Department breaks its crime data down by week, so we actually get to see how the trend changes within the month of December in 2012 and 2013.

The first half of December is pretty normal (i.e. the blue and green bars are about the same height as the purple bar, which represents the average of all 52 weeks of the year), but in both years those last two weeks where Christmas and New Years fall saw significantly more burglaries than the normal week.

See the article here:
Its Not Clear Home Break-Ins Happen More Often During the Holidays