With the holidays here and porch theft becoming a bigger concern, a new study conducted by Porch.com identifies “America’s holiday burglary hotspots“. As you will see, Prescott was spotlighted for having the second largest spike in holiday break-ins. Prescott was second only to the Atlantic City/Hammonton, NJ area.) According to the study, burglaries in Prescott jump by 71% in December, as compared to the monthly average. Here are some of the other findings:
• 83,000 burglaries occurred during the holiday period last year
• Crimes during holidays account for 8.1% of all crimes committed throughout the year
• An estimated $130.5 million in value was lost to holiday burglaries in 2021
• The average dollar amount for a holiday burglary is $2,891 – 5% higher than the average on other days ($2,740)
• Las Vegas sees the nation’s costliest holiday burglaries with each taking an estimated $9,165 in stolen property
• Holiday burglaries bottom out most in New Mexico, where they are 76% less likely to occur during the festive season
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Roughly 1 million burglaries take place in America annually. Roughly 83,000 of those take place during the month of December — or in other words, during the holiday season.
Armed with the most detailed crime statistics from the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer, we combed through residential burglary reports to determine where holiday burglaries are most prevalent, how much value Americans lose to burglaries during the holiday season, and much more.
Costlier But As Frequent: Holiday Burglaries In a Nutshell
If the number of overall burglaries was distributed equally across all months of the year, each month would see about 8.3% of the yearly crimes committed.
This is, a little more or less, actually the case when we look at burglary statistics at the national level. December burglaries make up 8.2% of all burglaries that occur in the United States annually.
Here’s Where Holiday Break-Ins Spike Highest
Continuing on from New Jersey being the state with the highest share of burglaries happening around the holidays, the top metro by the same metric is also in the Garden State. (“Metro areas” are defined as densely populated cities in combination with any geographically surrounding areas with a comparable density.)
In Atlantic City-Hammonton, NJ, a metro on the famous Jersey shore, almost one in five burglaries (18.3%) occurs during the month of December; burglary is 120% more likely to happen at this time of year than in any other month.
In second place of this unfortunate ranking is the Prescott Valley-Prescott, AZ metro area, where the number of burglaries jumps by 71% in December, as compared to the monthly average.
Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN-WI (incidentally home to Winnetka, IL, the setting and filming location of Home Alone), comes in at third place, where holiday burglaries see a 66% bump during December.
