MONDAY tends to be a busy day for Garda Pat Carr, scenes-of-crime (SOC) officer at Dun Laoghaire Garda station. As many as 10 burglaries could be facing him after a weekend, and his face is framed in many a suburban bedroom window as he searches for clues to the identity of the burglar.
Burgling techniques change, but the key to the SOC officer's job is still the old-fashioned fingerprint. No matter how careful a burglar tries to be, he will 0ft betray himself by leaving a few "dabs" behind him. This is especially true if he is a drug user in urgent need of a fix, and many burglars are.
If Garda Carr doesn't find prints, the investigation will be more difficult. But in the case of aggravated burglary, especially, there may be other forensic clues, like cloth fibres. Blood too is a frequent giveaway, with so many burglaries involving glass breakages and so many drug-using criminals working in a hurry.
Garda Carr's main areas of operations are Dun Laoghaire and Kill o' the Grange. The other constituents of the F District - Cabinteely (which includes Foxrock) and Dalkey - don't have as many burglaries, simply because few of the burglars live there.
Yesterday morning found him in a house in Glenageary, where neighbours had reported a broken upstairs window. The attempted burglary - nothing was taken - was typical in many ways, untypical in others.
The typical bits included the fact that the owners were away. Thick shrubbery gave the raider the seclusion he needed. The house was unalarmed and surrounded by houses with alarms - a classic feature of burglaries in mature estates. The would-be burglar forced an upstairs window in case the lower half of the house was alarmed, also a standard tactic.
Less typical is that he chose a front window, and that he fled when it broke. In fact, he appears to have been using a shovel from the house's garden shed to prise open the window when it shattered in a double-glazed crash.
According to the normal pattern, Garda Carr points out, a burglar will gain entrance from the back of the house. He will then put a snib lock on the front door to prevent entry, secure a quick exit for himself by, for instance, leaving a window open, and turn over the house with as much deliberation as time allows.
If he is surprised by an alarm (or a window unexpectedly breaking) he will make straight for the master bedroom, grabbing jewellery, money and whatever else he can find in a frantic two or three minutes before fleeing. The man in Glenageary had simply fled, suggesting among other things that, if he was a drug user, he wasn't desperate.