Section V: special reports

Uniform Crime Reports: Crime in the United States, Annual, 2002

Special Report

Bank Robbery in the United States

Introduction

According to the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program, robbery is the taking or attempting to take anything of value from the care, custody, or control of a person or persons by force or threat of force or violence and/or by putting the victim in fear. The focus of this study, bank robbery, is a subtype of robbery targeted at banks. Because of this element of force or the threat of force, bank robbery is highly feared among the population. (1)

Some view robbery in the context of violence; others maintain that robbery offenders come from a subculture of theft. (2) Sometimes it is difficult to separate the two. The UCR Program classifies robbery as a crime against property and includes robbery in its violent crime total.

A bank robbery is indicated when the crime is robbery and the location is a financial institution. UCR-National Instant-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) standards state that the victims in a robbery can be either persons or entities, i.e., businesses, financial institutions, etc., or both. (3) In a bank robbery, the primary victim is the bank itself, but the teller being threatened or injured is also a victim.

A computation of UCR Summary data showed that a bank robbery occurred just under every 52 minutes in 2001, accounting for 2.4 percent of all robbery in the United States. (4) This represented a total loss of approximately $70 million. While this seems like a large amount of money taken, the average amount of money taken in a bank robbery over the period 1996 through 2000, according to NIBRS data is less than $5,000.

The crime of robbery showed a clearance rate of only 24.9 percent in 2001. The clearance for bank robbery was 57.7 percent in 2001. (5) This is a relatively high clearance rate when compared with that of other Part I crimes. * Only murder, at 62.4 percent, has a higher percentage of crimes cleared by arrest.

Even with such a high clearance rate, bank robbery remains prevalent. Bank robbery has been the subject of many studies. (6) Because of the number of incidents, the amount of money taken, and the fear engendered in the public, bank robbery is a serious problem in the United States. Dr. Yoshio Akiyama of the FBI addressed this question in 1983 in the Crime Indicators System, Fourth Semiannual Briefing on Crime. That study used a 10-year time series to show the prevalence and characteristics of bank robbery incidents, a profile of offenders, and an analysis of the length of time from the incident until clearance.

The present study will update and extend parts of that earlier study.

Objectives

The general objective of this study is to examine three different criminal justice databases maintained by the FBI. Their similarities and differences are pointed out and discussed with the purpose of producing a fuller picture of bank robbery than that created when using only one of these databases. A further and no less important objective is to provide some assessment of the NIBRS bank robbery data by comparing it with the Bank Crime Statistics database, even though the collection methods, the scope, and content of these databases are different.

To address these objectives, a time series from the Bank Crime Statistics (BCS), collected by the Violent Crimes/Fugitive Unit of the FBI, covering the period 1973 to 2001 was generated and compared to the time series for Summary UCR data and to NIBRS data. NIBRS data on bank robbery incidents used for this analysis is for 1996-2000. Although Summary data have been collected by the FBI since 1930, its comprehensiveness concerning bank robbery is limited. Therefore, only the crime counts and estimates from 1990 through 2001 were examined for comparison to BCS data from the same period. ([dagger])

The study questions in this analysis are designed to compare and contrast the databases on the subject of bank robbery as it is reported to the FBI and are divided into two areas, characteristics of the incident and characteristics of the offender(s).

Further, this study will discuss the general compatibility of the Summary UCR data, the historical BCS database, and bank robbery incidents identified in the NIBRS. By using data from all three of these databases it will be possible to present a fuller picture of the crime of bank robbery in the United States and how it is reported.

Study Question 1--Characteristics of the Incident

The level of analysis here is the incident itself. Variables that describe the incident, such as the number of bank robbery incidents per year, the state, the region, the time of day and day of the week, the violence--deaths, injuries, hostages taken--and the type of weapons used are addressed in question 1.

Study Question 2--Offenders

Question 2 concerns the offender characteristics. What is the age, sex, and race of the offender (or offenders)? What is the average number of offenders per incident? What is the previous bank robbery experience of offenders?

Data and Methodology

Data for the study come from three sources.