They are where the money isn't
When most of us think about bank robbery, we think about people inventing complex derivates and amassing fortunes while the institutions that house them amass fine, bankruptcies and bailouts. But it turns out that your grandparent’s bank robberies are coming back into fashion. American Banker says that violent bank crime has become increasingly less common in the past decade, but that the rate of robberies has ticked back up in recent years.
At first I thought this might be a hipster revolt, like with vinyl records, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. So I’ve no idea. I don’t understand bank robbery. I remember getting into an interesting discussion about bank robbery at a lunch a while back. We were talking about risk and risk analysis. I was trying to make some points about why proper risk analysis like this is a more cost-effective way to proceed than (for example) panicking about newspaper stories on hacking, and that led to a train of thought around cost-benefit analysis for the robber, not the bank. Are robbers put off by thick doors and barred windows and such like? Are robbers deterred by visible, physical symbols of security? Come to that, should be bother with physical security at all in banks?
This is a fair point. So it set me thinking: if you are an amoral sociopath desperate to amass as much money as possible, are you better off robbing a bank or working for it? As a responsible father, I want to help my sons chart the best course for life. Right now, they are at University studying socially useful subjects in science and engineering. Having myself studied science only to become trapped in mortgage serfdom and forced to work until I drop, I am trying to persuade them to become Somali pirates or Wolves of Wall Street, without much success so far. So I understand that side of the equation, but am less certain of the other. Remember that old paper “The Decision-Making Practices of Armed Robbers” by Morrison and O’Donnell. It’s a study of armed robbery in London and one of my favourite papers. It is based on first-hand research (viz, the analysis of over 1,000 police reports and interviews with 88 incarcerated armed robbers).
While it’s about the UK rather than the US, I’m sure the thought processes of the perpetrators must have some similarities. Crucially, the paper notes that “almost all of these robbers evaluated the offence as having been financially worthwhile (aside from the fact that they were eventually caught and punished for their crime)”. So robbing a bank seems like good idea, if you exclude the possibility (in fact, the likelihood) of being caught. I suppose this is standard Jordan Belfort, Bernie Madoff thinking thought isn’t it? Unless people believe they will be caught (and these people don’t) then they only consider the upside.
(One of the interesting snippets it contains is that a great many of the armed robbers in the UK use imitation firearms even though they could have access to real ones. I imagine that in the US the use of imitations is vastly less prevalent, since it’s presumably harder to buy an imitation gun than a real one there.)
So, what to do? While glancing back over the paper I note that the authors say that it doesn’t seem practical to “expect financial institutions and commercial properties to reduce counter cash much more than they already have”. That may have been true when the paper was written a few years ago, but it clearly isn’t true now, since both bank branches and businesses in many countries are becoming cash free. And this is a good thing, because as we all know there is a direct and measurable relationship between the amount of cash out there (more on this later) and the amount of crime. As the paper says, “even when the amount of money obtained was quite small (an element often touted in support of the irrationality of economic criminals), it must be recognised that even apparently small sums may be adequate for the offender’s immediate needs. Hence, gains may be subjectively much larger than they appear”.
It's a stick up
The rewards of armed robbery seem to me, then, as an educated middle-class professional, to be rather low. Yet they are still sufficient to attract the robbers, because their needs are immediate and limited. I want a holiday home in the South of France but the guy in the Nixon mask isn’t robbing a bank to pay his way through college or to obtain seed finance for a start up, he just needs to buy a car or some drugs or whatever. This paper seems, then, to indicate that so long as there is some cash in the till, there will be robberies. This is not an observation confined to banking. A study of the American Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) program found that “the EBT program had a negative and significant effect on the overall crime rate as well as burglary, assault, and larceny".
What they are talking about here are US programmes where benefit recipients are paid electronically and given cards that they can use in shops instead of being given cash. The authors found a 10% drop in crime correlated with the switch to EBT. It seems pretty overwhelming evidence, and even more so if you read the paper, which notes no impact on crimes that do not involve the acquisition of cash. If we can to stop armed robberies, that would surely be an excellent social benefit to the move to cashlessness and would help us to explain the nature of appropriate regulation to legislators.
But back to the specific point about the relationship between bank cash and robberies. With the rewards from robbing banks and businesses falling armed robbers, like everyone else, follow the money – literally – and so cash-in-transit (CIT) robberies are now the preferred option. We see the same in Europe where countries that have much higher usage of ATMs have much higher CIT robbery rates than countries that have lower ATM usage (see, for example, Sweden and Denmark).
Overall, then, we see another early indication of the emerging post-cash era: Spending on physical bank security is being reduced and spending on virtual bank security is being increased. We do, indeed, live in interesting times.