Robbing banks: Crime does pay–but not very much.,
Reilly, Rickman, & Witt, Significance, (2012)
While pop media and culture portrays bank robbery as exciting and lucrative, the authors conducted an examination of the actual economic profits and costs of bank robbery in the UK, both to the robber and the bank. The authors were given access to confidential information on the amount of cash lost in bank robberies as well as other data in a cost/benefit analysis of bank robbery. They report that in 2007, there were 80,000 robberies reported to police, 7500 occurred at businesses, but with over 10,500 bank locations in the UK, only 106 bank robberies were attempted, accounting for only .13 % of robberies. Compared to the 2006 data for the US over the 4440,00 robberies reported, 12,000 occurred at banks (2.7%), indicating that in even in the US, bank robbery only makes up a small proportion of robberies.
The authors examined some factors that may influence whether a bank was targeted like size of municipality (defined by distance from a police station), size of the bank based on number of employees and, how busy the bank was based on the number of customers, but none of these factors had a significant effect. Of the robbery attempts in the study, very few were repeat location attempts and the amount stolen also wasn’t related to the size of the bank. Without clear indicators as to which bank branches may be targeted, improvements in bank security must be borne by the whole branch system, the costs of which are often ultimately borne by the customers.
The profitability for the robber was also considered. Using UK data from 2005-2008, of the 364 attempted bank robberies examined, the average loss was £20,330 (five times as much as their US counterparts), however 1/3 of the attempts were unsuccessful with no money stolen, so the average haul for successful robberies was £30,000 pounds. The authors note that with approximately 20% of bank robberies solved, and some of the haul recovered, this does reduce the financial gain for robbers.
The authors constructed an equation using economic constructs to help identify the robbers’ input into the robbery balanced against expected gains and losses from the attempt. Robbers’ input include labor costs (number in the gang), whether a firearm was displayed (capital costs) and a difficulty vector accounting for size of branch, number of customers, and branch security measures. The output (value of money stolen) is a function of all these factors, however the output may also be influenced by robber apprehension and incarceration. The difficulty vector had little significant influence on the take; average travel distance from a police station was 4.5 minutes, the average number of customers was two, and alarms were activated 85% of the time
While the average number of robbers were 1.6 (60% were lone robbers) increasing the number in the gang had a significant effect on increasing the amount stolen. For each additional robber employed, the expected value of the haul increased by over £9,000 pounds (with all other factors being equal). Working in teams indicates more professionalism (including planning and surveillance) and task division and while additional gang members increase the total take, it also reduces the take of each individual gang member.
A firearm was displayed in 36% of the robberies. The display and inherent threat of firearm use was also a significant factor in the size of the haul; with all other factors being equal, displaying a weapon increased the average take by £10,000. However, the use of a firearm in some cases may ultimately affect output as the incarceration costs are higher for armed robbery if they are apprehended.
One factor reduced the profit output. Being more common in the UK, as compared to the US, 12% of bank branches utilized fast-rise security screens. Their use reduced the expected value of robbery haul by over £24,000, all other factors being equal. In a regression model to determine whether the screens foil robberies or just reduce the take, on average, and all other factors being equal, using fast-rise screens reduced the probability of a successful robbery attempt by 32% compared to other security systems. Two thirds of the reduced output effect was from a reduced probability of robbery success when using the screens, while the other third was attributable to the screens reducing the financial value of the robbery haul.
As discussed in the criminological Rational Choice theory as well as in economic models, cost/benefit analysis should be a factor in the commission of the act. If the costs outweigh the benefits, a rational choice would be to not engage in the act. The authors constructed a mathematical formula, utilizing the probability of success, the probability of apprehension, the average take for one robber, and a monetary calculation of the cost of imprisonment in terms of lost income, to determine the tipping point where the costs outweigh the benefits. The formula demonstrated the monetary cost should be in excess of £33,000, which is roughly equivalent to three years’ income from a full-time minimum-wage job. Thus a three year incarceration would represent that monetary cost, as well as have a deterrent effect, however it should be noted that the average sentence for a convicted bank robber in England is a little less than three years.
As a means of income, bank robbery may not be very lucrative though the actual work to income ratio is large. The average annual full-time employment income is £26,000 and at an average of £12,706 per robber per robbery, one bank robbery can support a modest life style for six months. However, with only an 80% success rate, after three robberies (a year and half average income) the likelihood of a success is roughly 50/50 and each subsequent robbery will typically increase the odds of apprehension and incarceration. This overall smaller take may be influencing the overall decrease in UK bank robberies but also may explain an increase in their armored truck/security van robberies as a competing criminal opportunity that provides more returns. The low take in robbery also affects the implementation of security measures. While the authors noted the effectiveness of fast-rise security screens in foiling robberies or reducing their costs, suggesting widespread use could cut successful bank robberies in half, the cost of £4,500 per teller window would suggest the cost of the robbery is a smaller financial cost itself when compared to the security measure.
Reilly, B., Rickman, N., & Witt, R. (2012). Robbing banks: Crime does pay–but not very much. Significance, 9(3), 17-21.
Professionals or amateurs? Revisiting the notion of professional crime in the context of cannabis cultivation.
Bouchard and Nguyen, World Wide Weed, 2016
The authors discuss how historical literature (like Edwin Sutherland’s The Professional Thief) recognizes the level of a professional criminal but more current research hasn’t explored the concept as to its validity or applicability to any great degree. The authors explore defining professionalism by constructing a four classification matrix ranging from amateurs to professionals and applying that to marijuana cultivators in Canada.
There are certain elements that constitute professionalism in all fields; skill and knowledge in the craft or occupation as well as a commitment to the craft or occupation including its function as full-time or significant employment and immersion in its social milieu. Skills would include, good growing skills like feeding, watering, breeding, cloning, trimming, and light management. Skills also involve grow operation construction, management, and security and these skills could be operationalized as outcome measures such as plant (or lamp) yield, attrition rate (proportion of plants harvested), and criminal earnings. The social milieu in this case would be association and connectedness to other growers and laborer/service providers within the industry and subculture, receiving and offering mentorship, and an appreciation for, and dedication to growing, marijuana The matrix classifies commitment and skill level as either being low or high, resulting in four categories; Amateurs (low skills, low commitment) Average Career Criminals/Growers (low skills, high commitment), Pro-Ams (high skills, low commitment), and Professionals (high skills, high commitment).
Figure from authors’ publication
The authors apply this matrix to a series of interviews conducted with 13 marijuana cultivators in Montreal, Quebec, and Vancouver. The Montreal and Quebec growers were all white males, and the 4 growers from Vancouver were of Vietnamese descent (“the Vietnamese population has been identified as key players in Vancouver’s cultivation industry”) and two were female.
Of the 13 growers, their classification defined three Professionals, five Pro-Ams, three Amateurs, and two Average Career Growers. The authors didn’t feature all the interviews but examined two case studies as descriptive of the classifications of professional and average career grower. In defining the categories, the authors note that the professionals had been involved in growing for 7 years or more and owned or managed operations larger than 100 plants. However, also linked to professionals was a social opportunity structure. For their professional case study of a grower with 12 years’ experience, this entailed having early or intimate introduction to the social milieu through family and friends, early growing experience, and social and technical mentorship by more experienced growers. An early introduction and mentorship allowed the development of growing skills. This commitment and skill level led to more trust, responsibility, and contacts, which led to involvement in larger growing operations, which allowed for involvement and gaining experience in different industry areas and tasks. As this professional became involved in areas of hash production, clipping at large sites, cuttings production, helping manage a large site (2,000 plants), and finally moving on to managing a large site, legitimate employment tapered off, replaced by illegal income.
Their other case study involved a Vietnamese average career grower of 5 years. Different then the professional, this grower entered the industry mainly as a way to make money and had no initial indoctrination into the milieu. She did not receive any mentoring and began to learn the skills only as she became employed in an existing grow operation. While aspiring to reach a professional level, this grower was unsuccessful as she lacked good growing skills with a lot of trial and error experiences and had difficulty in the management of a grow operation. She eventually left the industry after not achieving her desired level of income. In the context of the cannabis cultivation industry, these average career growers are attracted to the potential to make money but never realized that cultivation would be so much work or would require a learning curve.
The authors didn’t discuss Pro-Am growers in much detail but they note “A review of the past typologies of growers found a similarly high prevalence of growers who were sometimes highly skilled but never transformed those skills into a full-time occupation”. The Pro-Am classification accommodates these types of growers as “labeling them as either professionals or amateurs would be unsatisfactory.” The authors consider that “Pro-ams are interested in the intangible rewards from cultivation; they are passionate and knowledgeable about the plant, its appearance, its taste, and its physiological effects. They are not amateurs but connoisseurs; not professionals but aficionados. Even if cultivation can be time consuming for pro-ams, it is not a full-time occupation, and never a means of living. Many of these participants are accomplished growers but opt to grow smaller amounts for personal consumption rather than profit.
The authors conclude that this classification system provides a useful discrimination tool that can be applied not just to growers. The classification system could be used to explore and research the professionalism of all types of criminal activity and that professionalism in criminals careers can be defined both by the skills of the offender and the degree that the offender is committed to a particular offense or type of offending. This commitment can be gauged by the characteristics noted by the authors; early introduction to, and involvement with, the milieu, an active mentoring process, and increased labor and involvement in larger activities or operations.
Bouchard, M., & Nguyen, H. (2016). Professionals or amateurs? Revisiting the notion of professional crime in the context of cannabis cultivation. In World Wide Weed (pp. 129-146). Routledge.
Differentiating contract killers: A narrative‐based approach.
Yaneva, Ioannou, Hammond, & Synnott, The Howard Journal of Crime and Justice, 2018.
The authors desired to construct a psychological-based typology framework that will assist in the analysis and understanding of contract murders. Previous attempts at typologies have utilized professional, semi-pro and amateur categories, solicitor or contractor designations, or more behavior-based categories of aggressive behaviors, inept behaviors, and criminally sophisticated behaviors. However the authors consider a psychologically based framework will also serve as a n investigative tool in profiling contract killers through the crime scene indications of offender characteristics. They utilized the Narrative Action System that suggests that for the full range of human action, four different fundamental narrative action modes are utilized: Professional’s adaptive adventure, Revenger’s conservative tragedy, Victim’s integrative irony, and Hero’s expressive quest. These typologies represent behavioral styles, attitudes, outlooks, and behavior motivations. “In psychological terms, criminal and deviant behaviors form a distinct subset of this general set of human actions, distinguished from other behavior by the absence of legal or moral code.” The themes have been utilized on other studies of different types of criminal behavior and the authors attempted to see if it can be utilized with contract killers. The characteristics of these typologies are discussed below in the context of contract killer behaviors.
Using media accounts as a source for data, 75 cases from nine different countries were subjected to content analysis. A total of 83 individual variables were derived from the analysis, 65 behavioral variables (crime scene behaviors) which included things like location and types of wounds delivered, body position, how the victim was controlled, and how the victim was isolated. For example they found the most frequently engaged in crime scene behaviors were: weapon brought to crime scene (88%), victim was ambushed (84%), victim’s body left at crime scene (83%), murder happened as planned (83%), victim was found as fell (80%), victim was shot (68%), victim had head wounds (58%) and offender used a vehicle for transportation (53%). They incorporated 56 of these variables into multidimensional scaling to explore subsets of behavior. The remaining 18 variables (victim, instigator, and offender characteristics) like gender, age, instigator motive, victim-instigator relationship, instigator-offender relationship, and offender’s previous convictions were used for descriptive purposes. For example, instigators were 51% female, financial gain was the instigator’s primary motive (43%), and only 44% of offenders were strangers to the instigators.
The authors used Smallest Space analysis which “is a non-metric multidimensional scaling procedure in which the relationships between variables are represented as distances in space and the resulting spatial configuration is examined to determine whether meaningful regions can be identified”. The most common features to all contract killings, as noted above, form the core of behavior typical to all the offenders while the other behavioral variables in the periphery reflect the different aspects of the contract killer. This core behavior demonstrates these murders are typically very instrumental and centered on monetary gain and not the victim or the murder itself.
The authors’ analysis of the data describes the characteristics of different contract killer typologies linking their psychological and behavioral components as shown below.
The Professional’s adaptive adventure-View themselves as professionals and display methodical and criminally sophisticated behavior. They view each job as an adventure, seek to master the environment, and take pride in a job well done. Offenders tend to be masked and forensically cognizant, and use firearms at close distance.
The Revenger’s conservative tragedy-Sets out to right a wrong or address a problem, has a selfish or ambivalent nature, and rationalizes the crime as necessary or the right thing to do. Their extreme violence is not expressive but instrumental, often to send a message from the instigator. The offender and victim may be acquainted and are often abducted or lured. This typology is usually found in organized crime.
The Victim’s integrative irony-Generally inexperienced, and dispassionate, they hold a pessimistic world view and lack a moral code. There is evidence of incompetence at the crime scene and they may commit the murder for drugs/drug money or some other support. This typology is associated with mistakes in the job, and kills in the home and while the victims were sleeping, typically slashing their throats. There may be expressive behaviors at the crime scene that aren’t readily apparent.
The Hero’s expressive quest-A mix of instrumental and expressive behaviors; characterized by excessive, extreme violence that demonstrates their power and demands respect but instrumental in their preparedness. They may depersonalize the victim and use available weapons at the scene that includes vehicles, stabbing, and bludgeoning.
The characteristics for each typology as derived from the analysis are shown in the authors’ figure below.
The authors conclude that this typology can be used as a basis for examining the individual type of contract killers so as to examine the connection between the psychological construct and behaviors, as well as an investigative tool to link possibly similar offenses together, and as a basis for therapeutic treatment approaches.
Yaneva, M., Ioannou, M., Hammond, L., & Synnott, J. (2018). Differentiating contract killers: A narrative‐based approach. The Howard Journal of Crime and Justice, 57(1), 107-123.