The Wall Street Journal had an interesting article today about the increasing number of home invasions happening to affluent households. Take a look at a snippet of the article below and continue on to the entire post at the link at the end of this post.

Wave of Home Invasions Puts the Wealthy on Alert
By M.P. McQueen From The Wall Street Journal Online

In the past year, billionaire investors Warren Buffett and Ernest Rady, socialite Anne Bass and professional basketball players Eddy Curry and Antoine Walker all have joined a group to which they would rather not belong: victims of home invasion.

In affluent enclaves across the country, from Beverly Hills, Calif., to Scarsdale, N.Y., these high-profile cases and others — many of them unsolved — have set nerves on edge amid what law-enforcement officials and security experts say is becoming an alarming trend. One particularly gruesome case in July underscored the dangers for many, when a home invasion in Cheshire, Conn., ended in the deaths of a doctor’s wife and his two daughters. Two men have been arrested and charged in the case.

In home-invasion robberies — unlike burglaries — thieves hope to confront the occupants, often intending to force victims to open a safe or divulge bank-card PIN numbers. Home invasions aren’t separately tallied by the Federal Bureau of Investigation or by most state and local police. According to the most recent FBI data, residential robberies, which include home invasions, rose nearly 13% in 2006 from 2002, even as violent crime overall decreased 0.4%. Last year, 64,000 residential robberies were reported.

Experts believe home invasions are underreported. Security experts who serve high-profile clients say their clients often don’t report attempted robberies to the police because of privacy concerns. And local law-enforcement agencies only keep track of incidents within their jurisdictions, making it difficult to establish a national picture for these crimes.

Continue reading the complete article at the Real Estate Journal.