CHICAGO -- Ever since he was laid off in March, Frank Beil has been on the lookout.

He keeps an eye out for cars moving slowly down the street or strangers walking along the sidewalk of his suburban Chicago neighborhood. He wonders about the times he answers the phone and the caller hangs up.

"You don't know if that might be people staking you out, finding out if you're home or not," said the 71-year-old hospital chaplain from Glenview.

Beil is watching for burglars, and police nationwide credit him and those like him for one of the few bright spots of the recession: The number of home burglaries is falling in some cities and towns.

"With a lot more unemployed people, a lot more people are staying home, and they see more in their neighborhood," said Sgt. Thomas Lasater, who supervises the burglary unit of the police department in St. Louis County, Mo., where authorities recorded a whopping 35 percent drop in burglaries during the first six months of 2009.

Richard Rosenfeld, a sociologist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis who has studied crime trends, said rates typically rise during a recession, especially property crimes.

"We've seen that in every single recession in the U.S. at least since the '50s," he said. "I would have expected by now some upward movement in burglary numbers."

In some cases, homeowners are even thwarting burglars. It happened in February in Bellevue, Wash., when would-be burglars broke into a home not knowing that -- as they

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stacked televisions, a computer and other valuables by the door -- the home's owner was not only unemployed, but in the basement.

Then they looked outside and saw that the getaway van they had left idling outside was gone.

"I drove to a friend's house up the street," said Patrick Rosario, the 33-year-old homeowner who took off in the van after he crept outside.

The burglars couldn't believe what happened. "My neighbor drove by and saw their faces and they had big O's for mouths."

BY THE NUMBERS

In Minneapolis, the number of burglaries reported in roughly the first nine months of the year dropped more than 15 percent compared with the same period last year, and more than 25 percent compared with that period in 2007.

In Boston, the 2,199 burglaries reported in roughly the first nine months of the year is 335 fewer than in the same period last year.

Aurora, a city of 170,000 outside Chicago, had 560 burglaries through the end of September, a 15.5 percent decrease from the same period last year.

And in Shelby, N.C., a town of 21,000, the number of burglaries through August was 23, compared with 60 for the same time last year.