How to Think Like a Street Thief and Make Yourself a Harder Target

A phrase that’s thrown around when talking about the subject of security and how best to protect against theft, is to “put yourself in a thief’s shoes.” Meaning that you should contemplate how a thief would break in and then build your security plan around measures to counter possible routes of ingress and even egress. This can also be referred to as Red Teaming.

This thinking like a thief business can be tricky, because we’re not seasoned criminals. We haven’t learned through our own lessons, what works and what doesn’t. This being said, I have something I’d like to share today that I can finally recommend to people for getting inside the mind of a thief.

Street Thief

My recommendation for delving into the mind of a criminal, is a film called Street Thief. In Street Thief, filmmaker Wesley Walker follows a Chicago thief that goes by the name Kaspar Carr, as he plans robberies of supermarkets, night clubs and even a large heist involving a movie theater.

The tactics and tradecraft Carr uses to case homes and businesses, extract information and elude capture are amazingly accurate. While I won’t spoil the movie and the truth behind the mystery at the end, I’d highly encourage you to watch it with a fresh set of eyes and pay attention to the techniques portrayed.

Carr uses things like a scanner to monitor police frequencies, specific tools to brute force his way into safes, disguises and misdirection to gather intelligence on potential targets and much, much more.

If you’ve seen Street Thief and know about the mystery at the end, or the identity of the thief, don’t spoil it in the comments for others that haven’t seen it. Also, if you haven’t seen it, give it a watch on iTunes (Netflix doesn’t have it to stream, but it does to rent as a DVD) without looking up too much info about it.

Please feel free to discuss the tactics from the movie in the comments, I’d certainly value anyone’s insight into the psychology of a criminal the film captures.