Sorry it's taken so long to answer this -- and sadly, there isn't really a decent answer I can come up with... the Met Police (for example) don't distinguish between garden and other thefts/ burglaries when collating figures. So, for example, there were 70,169 incidents of "burglary in a dwelling" in thr Met area between April 2000-March 2001, *down* from 79,504 in the previous 12 months.