Bringing a knife to a gun fight is never a wise thing.
I generally try to avoid being the interloper in such circumstances unless I am invited.
I knew a homeless young man who was smarter and more organized than the typical. At a coffee shop he complained that the two young homeless women he knew were very nice when sober, but turned into violent animals when drunk.
I had a solution for him in my car and offered it to him, a handful of high test nylon zip restraints. He was very grateful, and later said they provided great entertainment.
Typically, you would put one on each wrist and one between them as handcuffs, but he improved on the idea. One on each wrist as before, but the right wrist of one girl attached to the left wrist of the other, and the same on the other side. So the two girls were restrained back to back.
He said they kicked up quite a cloud of dust, but as long as you stayed out of kicking range you were okay. As he said, it was quite entertaining, and nobody got hurt.
(As an epilogue, I eventually browbeat him into taking his SAT, and his score was good enough to get him a scholarship to Stanford.)
In my experience, robberies should be conducted in as expeditious a manner as possible. Ideally; they should be executed in a matter of minutes, if not seconds. As a rule, slow motion robberies that extend to hours, days, or longer spans are best left to governmental bodies equipped for extended larceny. This gentleman got in over his head and queered the deal in both temporal and spatial terms.