Let’s say you NEED money and your only option is to rob someone/someplace, why on earth would you pick a bank? Why do robbers pick a place where employees are trained to deal with robbery and where dye packs, silents alarms, cameras and gaurds are all par for the course?
Why not rob bars at closing time? Why not beauty salons? Why not college book stores after first week of classes? Why not outlets after sales/Sundays? Granted banks will always have more money than these places, but your chances of getting away are much, much, much better. Why don’t we see more robberies of cash-heavy places?
Is it that bank robbers are just stupid and greedy or is it because robbing a bank is way more justifiable to the robber than robbing a business?
Maybe there is an ethical/moral angle at work. Or maybe bank robbers are just too harebrained to think about it. Any studies or theories about this?
Because they’d be burglars instead if they decided to rob houses.
It used to be very lucrative. Now it is not so much, and the vast majority of banks robberies are of the form “quietly give note and get small amount of money. Leave quickly” form, and not “run in shooting.” I suppose another reason might be that it presents higher risk but higher reward than convenience stores.
Each bank employee experience may be different, but the extent of my training was to a) remain calm and b) do what they say. If you can give them the dye/RFID pack or push the silent alarm, all’s the better.
Twice dammit!
Many liquor stores, gas stations, and the like have some safeguards in place. You’ve seen the signs that say things like “Less than $50 in cash on premises at any time,” and “Employee cannot open safe,” right? You can’t knock over these places for more than a hundred bucks. Restaurants can have dozens of patrons there, watching you, possibly armed, and half their business is on credit and debit cards nowadays anyway. Large department stores do have security staff.
College bookstores, actually, aren’t a bad idea. Some of them are tucked away deep inside buildings, which could make it harder, but on book buy-back day at the end of the term they might have thousands of dollars in cash on hand, and many states prohibit concealed carry on campuses.
Other establishments are robbed all the time. Bank robberies make the news because they are places specifically set up to combat theft. A successful robbery at a bank is a notable accomplishment.
Banks have more money. If your going to rob a place then retire a banks the place to hit. You’d need to rob a number of other places to get the same total.
Of course this has been changing as time goes on. With electronic currency taking over there is less need for banks to keep as much cash on hand as they used to.
There is also the stupidity factor among criminals. Many of them are pretty dam stupid to begin with so robbing a fortified location might seem like a good idea. Most likely they’ll be caught robbing a bank. Those smart enough to plan out a successful bank robbery can make money in a more honest fashion.
When I worked for Home Depot, robberies where a serious concern. We had many policies in place because stores had been and were being robbed. On a good weekend we could end up with 2 million cash on hand. Home Depots general strategy to deal with that type of money was to get it out of the store and into a bank as soon as possible. By the time the vault hit a million dollars there needed to be armed guards there, with an armored car on it’s way.
I remember a story in the paper about 25 years ago about a bank robbery. In the story they had a statistic that the average bank robbery took about $3500 in cash. That is not retiring, that is a middle class 1 week vacation to Hawaii.
I can see the OP’s point. Robbing banks is not very lucrative. Bank robberies also have the problem that the FBI takes them very seriously. Knocking over a liquor store does not generate the same sort of response.
Interestingly enough the popular target in the bad old days was the county treasurer’s office. Jess James and the boys knocked off a number of court houses in Northwest Missouri before they turned to banks and trains.
I should add the $3500 is probably more than you get robbing the liquor store. So robbing banks is still probably more lucrative than holding up small businesses.
Right. Even if the risk in robbing banks is considerably greater per attempt, the total risk of one bank robbery versus however many convenience stores might make it a good bet.
That figure has to be averaging in attempts that I would class as failures, even if the robbers are not apprehended. Or it is otherwise skewed to discourage would-be robbers.
I always had the fantasy of robbing the restaurant at the top of a ski resort - at the time, everyone paid in cash, there were tons of customers, everything was expensive, and best of all, it wouldn’t raise any eyebrows if you were wearing a face mask. Get away would be simple, also - just ski down the hill, and change your clothes on the way.
Regrettably, I’m I was too honest (and chicken) to do it.
WAG: rock cocaine is the precipitating factor in most bank robberies. Rock makes you invincible, omnipotent, and bulletproof—at least for five minutes. And you need a minimum of $3000/month to supply a daily habit. Well over 50% of all people arrested for immediate-gain property crimes have controlled substances in their system, and different crimes are correlated with different abuse profiles. Burglars, for example, are generally found to have either opiates or benzodiazepines in their system as opposed to stimulatory drugs such as cocaine or methamphetamine. I have a couple of criminology texts on the subject of drug-induced crime; I’ll look through them and see if I can come up with some actual numbers.
Hmm. The second cite is the one with meat to it. I haven’t read much. At a glance, it sounds like maybe a lot of robberies consist of a quiet demand note in a customer line, with hardly anybody aware of what’s happening. So maybe they’re just taking the loose cash in one teller’s top drawer? Nothing from the small lockboxes at the counter, nothing from the other tellers, and of course nothing from the vault. Hardly worth making movies about.
The same report also considers banks to be low risk targets for robbers.
The explanation I’ve heard given in the past is that these days, bank robbers are idiots, the dimmer members of the criminal subculture. Who not only don’t get away with much as said upthread but get caught because they have no plans beyond “get away from the bank”. We’re not talking about “master criminal steals millions, launders the money and lives in another country under an assumed identity” here, we’re talking “idiot steals a few thousand and gets caught because he started trying to pay for things with huge wads of (possibly dyed) cash”, or someone heard him bragging about it to his friends, or he and his friends get into a fight over the money because they didn’t plan how to divvy it up beforehand.