This was the MO of the guys who knocked over our neighborhood when I was a kid. They looked for a house where the lights were off, then smashed the window with whatever was around and stole the electronics.
It was annoying in our case because they broke the window on the door before realizing it was one of the doors where you need a key on the inside too, so they broke the window over another door, found the same problem, and finally just smashed a window. So our stuff got stolen and we had to replace three windows instead of one.
These guys were pros too. They apparently had been making a big road trip of B&E, driving into town and finding a couple of neighborhoods to clear out before skipping town. The cops told us they were finally caught a month later a couple of states away, but all of our stuff had already been pawned off. They were apparently hitting half a dozen houses per day for weeks on end. They clearly had no time to waste picking locks.
