The Door Is a System

FBI figures for 2019: forcible entry accounted for 55.7% of burglaries, unlawful entry with no force at all for 37.8%, and attempted forcible entry for 6.5%. Sit with the middle number. Over a third required nothing but an opening.

The highest-value intervention available costs nothing and is a habit — locking doors and windows, including upstairs and the garage service door.

For the majority category, think about the door as a system rather than the lock as a product. A deadbolt is only as good as what its bolt lands in.

The common residential failure is the frame splitting or the strike plate tearing out, not the cylinder being defeated. Long screws into the structural framing behind the jamb, and a reinforced strike, cost very little.

That is engineering reasoning, not a laboratory citation. No independent study quantifying it was found — every source asserting it sells doors or opens them.

On lock grades: ANSI/BHMA A156 grading tests cycle life and impact. Grade 1 is tested to a million open-close cycles against 800,000 for Grades 2 and 3, and cylinder impact resistance separates them sharply — ten blows, five, and two. All grades share the same minimum force requirement on the lock body, which surprises people.

UL 437 is the separate standard for resistance to picking, drilling and manipulation; that is the mark to look for if covert attack is the concern.

And note what the national data does not contain. “Forcible entry” is a broad category, and crime statistics do not separately count lock picking or bump keys.

The security world asserts these are rare in real burglaries. That is consistent with brute force dominating. No statistical source for that claim is cited here.

Last, glass beside a lock is a lock with a doorbell. Laminated glazing or security film changes that.

Check fire egress rules before installing anything requiring a key to exit. A door you cannot get out of in a fire is a worse hazard than the one you were solving.