ROBBER: Give me your money
TELLER: Say hello to my l'il fren.
Posted on 02/03/2004 2:26:34 PM PST by GulliverSwift
Here in the Law and Order city, club kids can no longer smoke in bars, cabbies can't hold cell phones while driving, and Park Avenue ladies aren't allowed to let toy poodles off the leash.
On the other hand, it's still pretty easy to knock over a bank.
Bank robberies in Gotham have tripled in three years. You don't even need a gun. Most of the increase is in unarmed robberies. Just write a note asking for money and hand it to the teller - correct spelling not required.
That's what a 40-ish man did last week, when he slipped a note demanding cash to a teller at a Fourth Federal Savings Bank in Manhattan. He got the money and fled. Police are investigating.
Darryl Alexander, 42, of Brooklyn found bank robbery such a convenient way to raise cash that he hit the same Washington Mutual Bank branch three times in seven months last year. His total haul: more than $5,000 and a guilty plea two weeks ago to grand larceny.
Then there was the day in December when five banks were robbed in less than 90 minutes. In October, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly was testifying before the City Council about the need for better bank security. His pager flashed the news that a bank robbery was underway on 144th Street. And in April, Kelly was meeting with bank officials about security when he learned that the bank across the street from City Hall had just been robbed.
Police blame the banks. Lax security and new customer-friendly banks without bulletproof plexiglass encourage robbers, they say. The robberies aren't concentrated in one neighborhood, police say, but most banks that have been hit are close to the city's No. 1 getaway vehicle: the subway.
In 2003, banks were hit 408 times, or almost once for every three of the 1,290 branches in the city. That's far fewer than in the late 1980s, when there were more than 1,000 bank jobs a year. Three a day was not uncommon.
"The word got out in the criminal community that banks are easy to rob," Kelly says. The police commissioner is so annoyed about the problem that he crashed the grand opening of a Commerce Bank branch last year to complain about the lack of plexiglass "bandit barriers" for tellers.
Security suggestions
In May, police and the city bankers' association adopted a 15-point list of security practices. They include bandit barriers, personnel to greet each customer, better-maintained video cameras and dye packs, which are slipped into bags of cash and later explode, marking the money as stolen.
Banks have begun implementing some of the recommendations, says Mike Smith, president of the New York Bankers Association. "The bankers' response was that bank security was the top priority for the banks, and it has been and remains the safety of their customers and their employees," he says.
FBI (news - web sites) spokesman Jim Margolin says, "Sometimes it's as simple as making sure the cameras work and are pointed in the right direction." A joint task force of the FBI and New York police investigates armed bank robberies.
Police say Commerce Bank, a New Jersey-based bank that recently opened branches in New York City, has the highest ratio of robberies to branches in the city. Other banks with high ratios last year were North Fork Bank, Fleet Bank, Banco Popular, Chase and Washington Mutual, according to police rankings.
Lawrence Sherman, a University of Pennsylvania criminologist and consultant to Commerce Bank, says it is unclear whether bulletproof barriers reduce robberies. He says Commerce Bank will not install them because "their whole business model is to be friendly and responsive to customers."
Sherman says Commerce branches have more transactions than other banks because they are open longer hours and on weekends - another part of the bank's customer-friendly marketing plan. The more transactions, the greater the risk of a robbery, he says. "That does not necessarily mean any greater risk for the customer."
The cash in a teller's drawer that a robber could take isn't a significant loss to banks. And upgrading security costs money. Three years ago, Atlantic Bank spent more than $40,000 per branch to improve alarms and replace film cameras with digital ones, says Paul DeStefano, the bank's security director.
Many bank security measures are designed to make would-be robbers reconsider. But if they go ahead with a robbery, the bank's goal is to get through it without anyone getting hurt.
Deterring robbers
"The common denominator with all of these (robbers) is that they're desperate and sometimes dangerous - but for sure scared," DeStefano says. Atlantic has 12 branches in the city and has not been robbed in at least three years.
He says anything that makes a potential robber feel more nervous is a deterrent: visible security cameras, bulletproof barriers, tellers far from the entrance. Some banks aren't so cautious. "There are some other banks that basically have set themselves up like perfume parlors," he says. "You know, we handle money."
Armed bank robberies increased last year, from 41 in 2002 to 66 in 2003. "Because armed robbers tend to commit more than one job, and because we tend to catch the vast majority of bank robbers, we'll probably catch a couple of these crews that are responsible for those robberies and the numbers will go down again," says the FBI's Margolin.
But police are tired of bank robbers, sometimes armed only with pencils, ruining the city's otherwise rosy crime statistics. "We don't want to be the bank robbery capital of the world," Kelly says.
As a result of the spike in bank robberies, communication between banks' private alarm companies and the police is being improved. Police will videotape the aftermath of each bank robbery to better determine what happened. And police officers have been assigned to guard branches in Midtown Manhattan. Which really makes Kelly mad.
"For us to take cops who are otherwise assigned to counterterrorism duty and put them in front of banks to deter robberies is to me a redirection of resources that could be much better used," he says.
He says he is considering "outing" banks that haven't undertaken security measures the police recommend: "It's not brain surgery to figure out there's a risk of robbery."
They should outlaw bank robbery. That should do the trick. But the law has to take up as much paper as possible in order to be effective.
They have rent control and gun control, so why not robbery control? Social justice for all.
ROBBER: Give me your money
TELLER: Say hello to my l'il fren.
We had a local nimrod who got tracked down because he wrote the hold-up note on his own deposit slip. Not the brightest bulb, LOL!
Ha, I love that movie!
Yesarooty, that's my bank. They now have aggressive welcomers who practically spit in your face saying, "Good morning!!! How are you today???" I guess to find out whether you are a nervous bank robber or a mistakenly relaxed customer. How 'bout a little profiling, folks?
Oh well, the price is right.
So you think that this robber was a great king and a mighty hunter. Do you worship this hold-up guy?
Should've said "Some guards don't even have bullets ...."
Source: Curtis Sliva / Ron Kuby radio show a couple of weeks ago.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.