Floresville’s Burglary Rate Runs Above the State’s. Your Back Door Doesn’t Have To.

Floresville’s story begins with Don Francisco Flores de Abrego, a Canary Islands settler whose ranch headquarters stood a few miles from the present town in the 1700s. By 1833 the heart of the community was a cluster of essentials: the Flores home, a chapel, and a graveyard. The town that grew around them carries the family name.

Wilson County was created in 1860 and named for James Charles Wilson, and after the Civil War the county seat moved to Floresville. The first courthouse burned. Its replacement, an Italianate building designed by Alfred Giles and finished in 1884, still anchors the square and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978. The courthouse lawn also holds a cement peanut, which tells you nearly everything about local priorities.

Being the county seat shapes daily life. The courthouse, county offices, and the businesses that serve them bring a steady weekday stream of people into town who don’t live there. That traffic is good for local shops, and it is also a reason homeowners on busier streets benefit from a camera that records who comes up the walk.

Peanut farming took root around 1915, and the Peanut Festival has drawn crowds since 1938. Festival weekends bring visitors by the thousand, which is good for the square and a reminder that the busiest days in a small town are also the days when houses sit empty while their owners are downtown.

With a 2024 burglary rate above the state’s, the practical response is to protect the ways in that nobody watches. Back doors, side doors, and garage service doors appeal to burglars for one simple reason: nobody on the street can see them. A monitored home security system with contacts on every exterior door, a motion sensor in the main hallway, and a loud siren cuts a burglar’s visit short. That last part matters: most burglars want to be gone in minutes anyway.

The 2020 Census also counted about one in ten Floresville housing units as vacant. An empty house next door is a mixed blessing: quiet, but unwatched, and a natural staging spot. If you live beside one, a camera covering the shared side of your property and a motion light on that wall are inexpensive peace of mind for both lots.

The Census Bureau estimates two-thirds of Floresville’s occupied homes are owner-occupied, leaving roughly a third rented. For tenants, the best systems are the ones that leave with them: wireless sensors, a video doorbell, and a camera that mounts without major surgery on the landlord’s siding.

For landlords, the useful tools are smart locks that change codes between tenants and sensors that report water leaks in a unit that might sit empty for weeks. Texas law sets specific requirements for the locks and security devices a rental must have, and our summary of Texas rental security device law explains them without the legalese.

The blocks around the courthouse hold shops and offices, and like most older downtowns, plenty of them have rear doors that see little traffic after dark. A quiet rear entrance, a cheap padlock, and nobody around until morning is the setup a commercial burglar hopes to find.

We design business security around those hours. Monitored contacts and glass-break sensors on every entry, cameras on the rear door and the parking area, and access control that records which employee opened which door. In older buildings we use wireless equipment where running new wire would mean opening brick or plaster.

Owners of small shops often ask whether cameras alone are enough. They are helpful, but footage reviewed the next morning only tells you what you lost. Pairing cameras with monitored sensors means someone is notified while the intruder is still inside, which is the difference between a police report and an arrest.

San Antonio Protection Services is a locally owned San Antonio company, in business since 2010 and licensed by the Texas DPS Private Security Bureau under license B16898. Floresville is an easy drive south down U.S. 181 for our technicians. We walk your home or business with you, check every door, and test any existing equipment.

Then you get a written plan with clear options. Every system can report to 24/7 alarm monitoring at a UL-listed central station. Nobody pressures you to sign at the kitchen table. The first step is a free security assessment.