news-record.com

GREENSBORO - Months after her Wedgewood neighborhood home was broken into, Beth Sizemore has a new routine: regular visits to pawn shops, looking for her jewelry.

She's not looking for the most expensive pieces or the thousands of dollars of electronics the thieves made away with - those she can replace. She's looking for a necklace her mother gave her. She hits all the pawn shops, hoping to buy back the necklace before someone else gets it.

"Hopefully nobody else will see anything in it," she said. "It makes me think of my dad."

Sizemore is one of an increasing number of Greensboro residents who have been victims of property crimes, a category that increased in the first six months of this year, according to statistics released Monday.

Police reported 1,869 residential burglaries in the first half of 2008, a 12.5-percent jump over last year's 1,661.

The city's eastern division regularly reports the most burglaries, said Det. K.A. Davis, a supervisor of the police department's property crimes squad. But people all over the city are experiencing break-ins.

Donna Newton , coordinator of Greensboro's Neighborhood Congress , has been getting the most calls recently from affluent western neighborhoods. The calls come from people asking her how to start a neighborhood association or a community watch program because of increases in burglaries.
Thieves target electronics and cash, Davis said.

Flat-screen televisions, video game consoles and laptop computers are small, light, hard to identify and expensive. Thieves then sell the items on the streets or trade for narcotics, Davis said.

"I guess some people might be stocking up their house," he said.

Though burglars often look for the newest technology to steal, they are getting into your house the same old way they always have: by kicking in the door or forcing a window, Davis said. Burglars will often ring the front doorbell to see if anyone is home, he said. If there is no answer, the thief will go around the house and break in a back door or window.

That's what happened to Sizemore. Despite having a deadbolt locked at the time, thieves - she thinks there were at least two - pushed in the door and went from room to room, even cleaning out envelopes containing her young children's allowance. Now she has installed reinforced steel doorjambs and an alarm system.

Before a recent trip out of town, she sent an e-mail asking her neighbors to keep an eye out. She was pleased to learn that, while she was gone, someone confronted a workman at her house - albeit one there legitimately.

"The whole neighborhood is kind of up in arms," Sizemore said.

Chuck Dietlin lives in a quiet, easily overlooked neighborhood on a lake near the edge of the city.

He felt so secure there that he never locked his car doors until a week ago, when all three of his vehicles were broken into. Thieves took CD players, sunglasses and change. The thefts weren't a catastrophic loss for Dietlin, but the break-ins did challenge his feeling of security.

Violent crime is holding steady, up 1.3 percent over the same time last year with a notable increase only in rape. Police say that is a small threat to the public at large because most rape victims know their assailants.

Aggravated assault, commercial robbery and murder have all decreased, compared to the same time last year.

Robberies are counted as violent crimes because a criminal uses violence or a threat of violence to rob someone.

Burglaries are property crimes because usually the property owners are not present or not aware of the theft until later.

Robberies are also up, but by less than two percent. Such a small increase runs counter to national and regional trends, said Sgt. Gerald Stevens, supervisor of the police department's robbery squad.

"I think our robbery rate this year is not up as much as other cities, due to having more bodies working on it," Stevens said. Since November, the department has temporarily reassigned two squads' worth of patrol officers to work on robberies. "We've been able to put a little more water on the fire," Stevens said.

Contact Sonja Elmquist at 373-7090 or sonja.elmquist@news-record.com