Crime

(these ideas drawn from Goode, 1994-2008 chapter 6. See the disclaimer)

• Crime versus Deviance
• Common Law and Statutory Law
  • Pre 1066: England; decentralized: shires
  • King Henry II (1154-1189): traveling judges
    • Decisions codified: Common Law (case or judge-made law)
  • Ancient tradition, precedent, "primal"
  • Laws whose existence began as statutes: Statutory law
    • Consensus: more or less
    • Encompasses most of criminal law
      • White collar crime
      • drug law
      • gambling
    • Changes
• Constructionism versus Positivism
  • Definitions
  • Relativity
  • Causes and consequences

Economic Crimes

(from Goode, 4-7th editions,1999- 2005)

We are:

• All Victims
• All Perpetrators

TYPES

• Urban industrial society: Impersonality
• Anomie Theory
  1. Emphasis on money and buying power
  2. Blockage
  3. De-emphasis on legitimate means
• Not poverty per se, but Relative Deprivation: Affluence and Poverty
• Alienation
• Propinquity: Routine Activity

• Robbery entails victim confrontation; it is a theft involving force, violence or the threat of violence.
• It is the only crime that is both a property crime and a crime of violence.
• Robbery is a vastly less common offense than the other forms of stealing property.
• Most offenders simply do not wish to engage in robbery because it is a dangerous, high-risk activity.

2004 FBI STATISTICS

400,00 robberies (down from 2002, 550,000 in CVS)
2.1 million burglaries
7 million simple thefts or larceny

Of the 400,000 robberies that took place in 2004:
49% took place on the street or on a highway
12% occurred in a residence
24% were robberies of a "a commercial house" i.e. a bank, or convenience store
15% were "miscellaneous"
 

·   The Total Financial Take for Robbers in 2004= $525 million and The Arrest Rate was 26%  (stable)

• Cash or property worth an average of $1,308 per incident
• $4,221 per bank v. $653 per convenience store v. $1,749 service station v. $1,488 private residence

BUT: If a typical robber steals only $1,308 per offense, and assuming his crime is reported half the time, and he is arrested only a quarter of the time his crime is reported, he will earn around $9,000 for each arrest.

• the more that is stolen, the greater the likelihood that the incident will be reported.
• Commercial robberies are almost always reported.

The average robbery represents an extremely risky and unlucrative means of earning a decent income. It is appealing because it yields a fairly substantial amount of cash in a very short period of time.

RURAL v. URBAN
 

• Robbery is overwhelmingly a big-city offense. The likelihood of being a victim of a robbery in a big city is a lot larger than in a small town or a rural area.

•  2004, the robbery rate urban areas was over 25 times as high than for rural areas
• Rural - 15.7 per 100,000 v Urban - 375.6 per 100,000 (cities with a population of a million or more).
• Big cities offer robber anonymity.
• Daring and poverty

Most people are robbed by a Strangers - (Harlow 1987)- a victimization survey:

• Seven out of Ten cases of robbery by a single offender (69%)
• Eight of Ten cases involving a multiple offender (82%)
• For single offenders One in Ten (9%) was a casual acquaintance. One in eight (12%) was well known to the victim, but was not a relative.
• 4% of all single robbery offenses entailed one spouse robbing another
• 2 % entailed relatives robbing one another.

Robbery is not a completely homogeneous category. However, robbery tends to be a crime between strangers, in which the victim does not usually know the offender. As, a consequence, it is a crime vastly likely to take place in large cities rather than in small towns and rural areas.

Who is victimized by robbery? (2002)  

• Males are twice as likely to be robbery victims - 2.9 per 1000 than females 1.6 per 1000
• Teenagers (16-19) and young adults (20-24) are most likely to be victims - 4.0 per 1000
• Elderly (65 and older) are least likely 1.0 per 1000
• African Americans are more likely to be victims 4.1 per 1000 - 2x's as high as for whites -1.9 per 1000.
• Lower-income persons are more likely to be robbed than the affluent - Families earning $7500 annually were 6x's as likely to be robbed than families earning $50,000 annually 6.3:1 per 1000.

• Robbery is it is very powerful indicator or measure of someone's involvement in or commitment to criminal behavior; A good predictor of future criminal activity.

• Usually the robber threatens his victims with harm, rather than actually harming them.  However, a significant minority is harmed.

• Harlow 1987 Victimization survey: Victims were injured in 33% of all robberies. 15% required hospital care and 2% had to stay overnight.

• FBI - In 1998, 1 in 14 murders were committed during a robbery. ( 1,092 out of the 2,314 murders during a felony).

• The likelihood of being injured during a robbery varies with the nature of the weapon.

• Although robberies committed with a gun are the least likely to result in injury, and strong-arm or weaponless robberies are the most likely to result in injury, if the perpetrator uses a gun, death is more likely than for any other type of robbery. But: the victim is unlikely to be killed during the course of a robbery ( in 1998, less than one out of a thousand of all robberies).
• The use of a weapon and the occurrence of injury strongly influence whether a robbery will be reported to the police.  In 1987, Victims reported robberies in:
  • 45 % of all strong-arm robberies
  • 54 % of all robberies in which a knife was used
  • 73 % of those in which a gun was used
• 49% of non-injury
• 61% of minor injury
• 76% of serious injury robberies

Who is the robber? According to the 2002 Uniform Crime Reports of all arrested robbers: Robbers are predominately Young, Black and Male.

• 90% were Male
• 54% were ‘Black’
• 44% were ‘White
• Young - 61% were under the age of 25, 26% were under the age of 18 and 5% were under the age of 15.

BUT:  These statistics represent arrested robbers, not robbers in general. Those who are not caught will differ. They are older, wiser, more cautious, more professional, and more experienced.

National Crime Victimization Surveys

• 89% were male
• 5% were female
• 4 %, were both male and female
• 51% were ‘Black’
• 36% were ‘White’
• 4%  were ‘other’
• 4% were  “team of ‘mixed race’ offenders”
• Nearly 10% more arrested robbers were Black than were robbers identified in victimization surveys.

The portrait we received from the FBI’s figures on arrest and the characteristics as identified in victimization surveys, is that, relative to their numbers in the population, robbers tend to be young, Black, male, and typically urban.

Explanations of robbery which focus on the offender must make use of two factors: daring and poverty.

Daring

• Robbery is not a crime for the fainthearted; it entails a great deal of risk, both to the victim and to the perpetrator. Robbers, therefore tend to be (unrealistically) confident that they won’t be injured or caught. Such misplaced confidence is more characteristic of males than females, the young than the old.
• Jack Katz: Crime of passion?  Fantasy of moral superiority, victim as "chump."

Poverty

• The ‘race’ of robbery offenders is probably largely a function of a combination of the economic position of Blacks in the United States and the fact that African Americans live in large cities (50-60%).
• Black family income is roughly 60% of that of whites, and Black unemployment is twice as high. (2000)
• In addition, since 1973, the poor have been getting poorer and the rich have been getting richer; hence over the past two decades or more, the economic situation of the  “underclass”, of whom a disproportion are inner-city minority members, is not only stagnating, but deteriorating.
• Nearly 3 out of 10 ‘Whites’ live in a rural area compared to only 15% of ‘Blacks’

• Rational, learned, group
• Daytime activity (victim shopping or at work)
• Bag of tricks--techniques to insure safety and impede detection
• Quick cash versus deterrence
• Decker and Wright (1994): "pressing need for cash:
  • Solving immediate problems
  • Food, yes, but also "high living."
    • "Keeping the party going"
    • Drugs, alcohol, sex
  • Values of "street culture."
    • openiness to iliicit activity
    • "Status" items
    • Legitimate work not viable solution
      • immediacy
      • pay scale

• $8 billion (total for all property crimes: $14 billion)
• Model Code
• Pro-"booster" 10% of all
• "Snitch": All type and kinds, neutralize, females (see also, Katz)
• Routine (1 of 10)
• Box/Walmarts--leads to rise
• Protection==>fast growing field
• Group support: amusement, adjunct to other activities
• Sociability, conventionality, materialism, hedonism
• Reporting: value of item, nature of goods (resale), older studies-gender, race.
• 1/4 report staged event, 10% detected by employees dealt with, few prosecuted.
• Deterrence?

• More respectable
• Rarely considered problematic-Victim?
• Costly: double cost of other theft. or more--2% of sales--$120 billion (Buss, 1993- in Thio 1998)
• Easy to rationalize and justify
• Employee morale booster-unofficial reward, controlled larceny: Compensates for low wages, retards change, losses recovered-insurance, customer price, tool of control over employee.
  • Union-management conflict
  • Large and impersonal corporations

URL: http://www.umsl.edu/~keelr/200/econcrim.html
Owner: Robert O. Keel rok@umsl.edu
References and Credits for this Page of Notes
Last Updated: Wednesday, March 26, 2008 2:22 PM