During my freshman year at the University of Maryland, I always seemed to be locking myself out of my dorm room. My friends used to tease me about the constant sad walk of shame I had to take down to the front desk to ask some underpaid student for help every time I pulled the dorm room door shut, forgetting I left my keys inside. But I didn’t mind their mocking because of a very important truth: My door was locked. And, if I couldn’t get into my room, neither could anyone else.

That satisfying click of a lock has always instilled an instant sense of safety in me, knowing that myself, my family and our stuff were on one side of a door and no one on the other side could get in unless I let them. It’s just what you do — “muscle memory,” as Liz Deutermann of Chevy Chase called it.

But in the past couple of weeks, in the wake of the murder of a local T-Mobile employee, I’ve gotten a lot of messages from former Baltimore City residents, along with people across the country, decrying the dangers here. So many of them measured their relative sense of safety by a curious metric: Where they used to live, or live now, they never had to lock their doors.

Maybe it’s because I grew up here in the land of deadbolts, but I’ve never understood that. You might call me a cynical city person hardened to my neighbors, but I like my neighbors fine. When I’m ready for them to go home, that lock goes on. Along with the security system.

“Every front door comes with a lock, and every knob comes with a lock,” said Deutermann, whose father was a literal locksmith and taught her well. “Things lock. Lock the door.”

That seems so simple. So why wouldn’t you? Geography seems to be a factor. A 2021 survey by SafeHome.org, which specializes in home security advice, revealed that residents of the northwestern United States are least likely to lock their doors (54%), while those in the Southeast are most likely to turn that key (81%). Seventy-five percent of those in the Northeast, where Baltimore is located, lock their doors. Also, according to the survey, people who live in apartment buildings, where you’re very close to your neighbors, are the most likely to lock up, while mobile home residents, who might live farther out, are the least likely.

So is this the difference between living close to people and being way out? Matt Lightner was raised in Northeast Baltimore “in the latchkey generation, when locking the door was just something we had to do.” (Note the term “latchkey,” denoting that kids staying home alone should lock their doors for safety.) But even this veteran door locker was temporarily swayed when he and his wife moved to a new community in Denton, Maryland, where they “became quick friends with everyone, and we kind of had an open-house policy where we left the doors open for our neighbors.”

That all ended eight months after they moved in, when the couple returned home from a neighborhood party, “literally three minutes from my house, to Sammy, our brown lab, barking. We quickly went toward the backyard, and we could see someone jumping our fence. Our back door was locked, but our front door was unlocked,” said Lightner, who now lives in Bowie. “We got there just in time. After that, we locked our doors.”

Is there another reason besides safety? A 2015 Scientific American blog said that locked doors are “a self-defined barrier between yourself and other people” and that coming into someone’s space without invitation, which a locked door seemingly implies, “may be a violation of self. This is one of the reasons break-ins have the emotional impact that they do: trespassing on an individual’s private space removes some of the individual’s control over that space.” And if privacy, as the piece claims, is a luxury, “The No Lock People flout this sense of luxury.”

I think there’s something to this. But what if luxury is not about cashmere and bubble baths but a sense of safety that might be sought in a “nicer” neighborhood or a gated community? You have the luxury of not fearing someone breaking into your house, and maybe, just like the cashmere, you find your identity in possessing that peace of mind, warranted or not, when other people don’t.

“I think there was a time in my town in which people did not lock their doors,” said Kristi Swartz, who grew up in Crofton in Anne Arundel County. “It was this happy little town, with trees and schools and libraries everywhere. Everybody knew each other and, in my mind, it was just a very small place with a three- or four-mile radius, until I realized it’s not really a small town. But my perception changed as I got older.”

And door-locking people sometimes carry that attitude with them wherever they go. “I’m one of those people who go back and check my doors to make sure I did lock them,” said Leyla Krikor, who grew up in Phoenix, Maryland. “On campus at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, I would double-click my car to make sure it beeped, and my best friend would laugh at me. ‘What, you think someone is gonna break into your car?’ Maybe. In the summer, we lived with my grandparents on their dairy farm in the country, and they’d sleep with their screen door open. And I was terrified.”

There are more extreme reasons for not locking your doors ― a friend told me about remote Svalbard, Norway, where neighbors do so in case they’re being chased by one of the area’s many polar bears. That makes sense. The No Lock People think us Lock People are “suspicious, paranoid people, but it has nothing to do with anyone else. It’s about my stuff,” Deutermann said. I agree. I don’t think that being aware of your surroundings and doing a simple thing to keep you and your stuff safe seem extreme. It’s just what you do.

“I guess the lesson I learned is that crooks are gonna be crooks everywhere you go,” Lightner said.

leslie.streeter@thebaltimorebanner.com