DO IRISH burglars have secret codes that they mark on houses during field research? If there are any burglars reading this, they might write in and let me know (not forgetting to include their names and addresses, so I can acknowledge them properly). But I ask only because of an intriguing item in the Paris Insider's Guide, which I picked up on my last visit to that city.
The guide is designed for "international residents and visitors". And courtesy of the Neuilly-sur-Seine police station, it includes a glossary of coded chalk-marks that French burglars supposedly leave on buildings they have observed on their rounds, for their own or other thieves' later benefit. It's a sort of Neighbourhood Watch system for criminals.
The codes range from a simple X, meaning "burglary planned", to a rectangle with a circle on top, meaning "burgled already". In between, there are pictograms warning about dangerous residents, dogs or neighbours, and others suggesting weaknesses in the household that can be exploited - eg, "The husband likes women"; "Charitable people" or "To be welcomed, talk about God". One the one hand, this is not a new idea. The New York Times archive has a story from 1903 reporting police suspicions in Chicago about the existence of a "Burglars' Aid Association", members of which were said to leaving "crosses, circles, and pictures of dogs" on buildings they cased.
On the other hand, I doubt if the use of burglar codes could be widespread, even in Paris; or it would surely be an invaluable source of police intelligence.
Then again, you would expect French burglars to be well organised. And the codes suggest an almost bourgeois approach to their work, which would not be surprising either. One can imagine the typical Gallic burglar having a 35-hour week, insisting on 90 minutes for lunch, and absolutely refusing to stay in Paris during August, even if everyone else is at the beach and all the apartments have been left unguarded.
He would probably have studied house-breaking at the prestigious Ecole Supérieure des Cambrioleurs - at Neuilly, perhaps - gaining his professional licence only after rigorous exams, in which knowledge of the codes was worth 20 per cent of the total marks.
No doubt he would be strongly opposed to Nicolas Sarkozy's economic reforms. And it goes without saying he would despise the "Anglo-Saxon" burglar for his rampant neo-liberalism, with the consequent long working hours and poor conditions he had to endure.
IN WHICH vein, broadly, the Economist magazine ran an interesting piece a while ago headlined "The Decline of the English Burglary". The gist of it was that although the domestic break-in retained its image as the "premier British folk-crime", the reality was that its incidence had fallen sharply in recent years (a trend we seem to be following here).
More than that, the magazine noted a dramatic slippage in standards, quoting the head of crime at the Cleveland police force thus: "Burglars are not nearly as well prepared as they used to be. Many don't even bring a bag to the job." There were several reasons cited for the decline. Firstly, some of the old favourite burglary targets - video recorders, for example - had become so cheap in real terms as not to be worth stealing. Others, such as televisions, had held their value, but had grown too bulky to take. After all, what use was a swag-bag in an era when a flat-screen television could be the size of an armchair? Meanwhile, the attraction of smaller items - credit cards, mobile phones, etc - had increased. But by their nature, these tended to be carried around on the person, attracting pickpockets and muggers rather than burglars.
Above all, in burglary as in so many walks of life, there had been a drift towards casualisation, with skilled house-breakers - many of whom specialised in certain goods - being replaced by part-timers, usually drug addicts, with little or no skills and lacking the energy or concentration levels needed to plan big jobs.
The effect of the changes extended beyond mere burglary, the magazine noted. Ancillary trades, such as the "fencing" of goods, had also gone into decline.
No doubt all these things are cyclical. The Economist's headline deliberately echoed George Orwell's 1946 essay Decline of the English Murder. In this Orwell noted, not a reduction in murder numbers, but what he saw as a fall-off in their entertainment value, as measured by their coverage in the News of the World.
He suggested that England's "great period in murder, our Elizabethan period, so to speak" had occurred between about 1850 and 1925. But English homicide appears to have experienced a major revival since Orwell's time. And so it may be with burglary.
As for Paris, if you're buying or renting an apartment there, the Insider's Guide advises you to learn the meaning of any symbols you find chalked near the door, and "don't forget to wipe them off". Personally, to be on the safe side, I suggest that if you don't see any, you should draw one yourself. A tilted rectangle with slightly overlapping lines might be a good one - meaning, as it apparently does, that your flat or house "belongs to a police officer".