Robberies still happen. The banks and police just don't make it public. I worked for a bank around 2005-2010. There was an attempted robbery at least 3 times when I worked there. Nobody outside the bank really knew about it and it never made it to any news outlets.
However, the score is frequently minimal, where they just take what it is in the front cash registers. Random website [0]
> The vast majority of bank robberies are relatively unsuccessful affairs, having netted criminals just $7,500 in 2010 on average, according to the FBI.
Indeed, banks have a lot less money up front and on-site now. A lot of this is how much is done electronically nowadays compared to decades ago, but a lot of this was change in protocol after big hits in the 1990s became too commonplace.
Seems like an amount the banks would have no problem sweeping under the rug. 7.5k should be a no-issue. A bank's existence is based on trust after all and if the public hears of this, the loss of trust will cost them a lot more in revenue than that puny amount. They might not even report it to insurance, because in the long run that could also end up costing them more due to increased premiums.
What a silly, immature statement. Sounds like the typical reaction I hear to organized retail theft and the rioting and destruction of property back in 2020: "They have insurance."
As if the lack of consequences for perpetrators doesn't have consequences of its own. Insurance is not free money.
I am pretty sure they were responding to the "lack of trust" point raised by the parent, not the crime itself.
Their point was that they aren't worried / don't lose trust in the bank if it gets robbed. Rather, the money is guaranteed, so they retain confidence in the bank even if it loses a lot of many due to a particularly successful robbery. Because they'll still get their deposit back.
This is 100% what the FDIC and NCUA are about: ensuring continued consumer confidence in their banks.
Homes are somewhat different because it is a personal annoyance to replace what was lost, and there’s a sentimental value attached to most things which insurance wouldn’t cover. If I show up at the bank tomorrow and make a withdrawal and the money comes from insurance rather than the actual dollars I put in, who am I to care?
When you use your insurance, your rates tend to go up. When costs go up, the bank passes those on to the customer. Now you pay more for banking, or receive less interest, or get worse service, or however they cover that cost. Perhaps it doesn't effect you (an individual) directly, but they increase the cost for commercial customers and those companies pass the cost on to you.
Now, if you don't care about that kind of creeping cost increase, I have a cloud architecture to sell you.
That's being rather generous re: the average consumer. You can try to explain to people that their money is safe by law but it doesn't mean public trust doesn't somewhat erode. Grandma with her retirement savings doesn't want to hear that her bank got robbed.
Robbery has an under 25% clearance rate, but bank robbery has an over 60% clearance rate—the median bank robber gets prison (yes, 80% of stolen funds aren’t recovered, but how much of a prison term js getting away with $7,500 worth?)
Robbery is often committed by a single person. Bank robbery generally requires multiple, and often results in multiple charges per crime (which can skew clearance rates)
My brother is a detective. One of the early, surprising discoveries in career is that most criminals are dumb, fully driven by their Id. Basically, people driven by getting drugs or getting laid.
Because as should be obvious to the most casual observer, assuming rationality combined with financially-return-focused utility functions produces a model of human behavior that bears basically no relationship to reality. (Which is more an answer to why the prior underlying your question is silly than it is an answer to the question, but...)
bank robbery is automatically upgraded to the FBI and has (IIRC) a minimum sentence of 7 years, worse if you use a real weapon. I'm sure there are other ways to commit a petty offense or 2 that would net the same amount with less risk.
The statement should be that the media doesn't report on it anymore. Bank robbery hysteria was a fad from the 70s.
Read your local newspaper or the police department crime blotter; bank robberies still happen. The take is diminishing and the risks increasing though.
ROI is better on ATM theft. Clever thieves can subvert them with USB malware through hidden access panels. They still run crap like Windows CE (or whatever the Embedded version was).
I have an ex who worked for a bank. No, they do not. In fact, a lot of customers get pretty angry they can’t “just have their money” on a whim because bank offices are now extremely strict about knowing when, why, and for how long a given bank will have beyond a certain threshold of funds, and they generally work hard to keep it below that threshold.
Yeah, I wanted to pay a contractor in cash. The amount was under $1,000. The bank would not allow me to take that much out without calling them a day or two in advance.
(I did later find out that same branch had been robbed earlier that month)
I had no trouble last year walking in to my bank and getting $7,000 in cash to buy a car. They didn't have it in the drawer at the counter, but it took them just a few minutes to go the the back room/vault and get it.
Other favorites include The Dark Knight’s opening, and as far as escaping a bank robbery goes, Baby Driver’s opening chase was 10/10 (even though a Subaru couldn’t do what he was doing but I’m willing to let that go).
The Town and the original Point Break have great ones as well.
One of my favorite movies. Mann recently wrote a novelized sequel, "Heat 2", and has said it's his next film project. I read the book and am, let's say, not optimistic about the prospects for the film version.
The real-life showdown in North Hollywood was even better. Two bank robbers shot it out with the LAPD for over an hour and dumped over a thousand rounds onto the street before they finally went down, after half the department and SWAT all showed up. It was one of the events that sparked police militarization to take off because the police were so badly outgunned. Dudes had full body armor and fully-automatic rifles and the handguns and shotguns the cops were using didn't even slow them down. I and half the city probably watched it happen live, too, thanks to news helicopters being on scene the entire time.
Make sure to check out Michael Mann's Thief too. It doesn't have bank robbing per se, but it has some very memorable safe-cracking scenes. Great movie all around.
Fans of "Heat" may also be interested in Mann's 1981 film "Thief". I saw it after hearing it had a lot of thematic overlap with "Heat". It stars James Caan and Willie Nelson, which I took as a selling point.
It's been awhile since I saw it but I remember not hating it.
The local branch of my bank changed to having no tellers, ATM-only. There's a couple people inside to talk loans and such, but they have no cash. I wonder if this is one of the reasons (besides cost savings having less employees).
The only a reason a bank as a building even needs to exist is because cash is a thing.
With electronic databases keeping track of funds and movement of funds, the banks’ purpose is reduced to being a lender, which requires much, much less infrastructure.
If we had a constitutional right to an electronic funds account with an inalienable right to receive and send money, there would be zero need for banks. Their remaining purpose would be to be an underwriter or lender, at which point you would just describe them as an underwriter or lender instead of a bank.
That is lending/investment banking that is lucrative, not the “banking” that most people associate with a typical bank with tellers.
Technically, there is no reason why the Fed has to give the banks 5.25% interest, and then the bank gives the general public 20 basis points less. They could just give it directly to the public.
The extra layers of abstraction and buy-in from private banks is how we keep politics from completely dominating the value of money. The politics isn’t absent, but it is much more difficult to coerce the value of money in one direction or another without participation from the market.
I don’t know what that means. The value of money has moved in one direction, for a very, very long time. It is basically government policy, to target 2% reduction every year.
No, it is Federal Reserve policy, which is very different from government policy, and the way they achieve it is by taking action in the market rather than putting a pen to paper and willing it so (like Congress does) so that you can rest easy that the value of your dollars are (through market forces, once all information has been consolidated down to a price) of reasonable value to the market and not something to be avoided. Other currencies haven't always had it so easy because maintaining a currency's value with only a slight year-over-year increase in inflation (and inflation has not been slight for a bit now) is not easy.
It's also a policy that has buy-in from private banks, given that they are literally bought in to the Federal Reserve.
Suppose you do separate the Federal Reserve from the US federal government, what role does a bank serve? Surely the federal reserve should be able to maintain the same database of accounts that Chase and BoA and Wells Fargo maintain.
Although, I would argue the federal government and the federal reserve have the same mandate, which is maintaining a steady increase in asset prices. They might say they have other priorities, but their first will always be maintaining the social order, and politically, that requires sacrificing the currency’s purchasing power to maintain a minimum ROI.
Could? Yes. Do we want it to? Not really. We already have private banks, and a lot of them with which to choose to take our business who are all bought into ensuring the stability of the Federal Reserve system through their ownership of the 12 system banks. Undermining either the Federal Government or the private banks would undermine the entire system.
What does undermine mean? I still do not understand the purpose or utility of the bank for electronic funds transfers.
And the federal government is explicitly the one guaranteeing that the numbers in your account at a private bank mean something, so how could the federal government be undermined? Surely my money being at Chase account # x or US government account # y is the same thing for me, except with Chase, there's a middleman in play who is taking a cut of interest from the Federal Reserve.
> No, it is Federal Reserve policy, which is very different from government policy
The Federal Reserve Board of Governors, the things that sets the policy in question, is an executive branch agency, situated similarly to ones like the FCC.
Fed policy is not "very different from government policy", it is government policy.
There is a very good reason why this is not done. In a financial crisis the fed would be safer than any other investment, which would have catastrophic consequences.
What consequences? What is the purpose of an intermediary (the bank) if money in a bank account is guaranteed by the federal government anyways?
See the recent bank failures of SVB and the couple others. How did having the money at a bank help, rather than say an electronic money account in a ledger operated by the federal government?
The consequence is, in the financial system nowhere you can put your money is safer than US government debt.
If you can deposit your money directly with the FED then that IS safer than government debt.
During a financial crisis such as 2008 money would go straight to the FED for safety forgoing everything else. This causes interest rates to spike everywhere including gov debt at precisely the time the government needs to borrow heavily to fix whatever went wrong.
That is why there will never ever be direct deposit with the FED because it circumvents one of the most important safety features in the modern economy, which is in the event of a crisis the government can borrow cheaply to fix things.
What is depositing money if it is all electronic? And why would numbers in a database at the Fed be more safe than numbers in a database at some other US federal government organization? With electronic funds, all you are doing is subtracting it from one legal entity’s database entry and adding it to another’s.
If people want to invest their money in US federal government debt, then the government has to pay interest. I do not see where thesafety” factor comes from, surely that is ensured by a functioning court system that ensures the numbers in the database cannot be altered.
The legal owners of the databases have vastly different business models, legal powers and levels of dysfunction. So they are in no way equivalent.
The government can default on its debt, that's why the debt has a credit rating. As unlikely as it is to ever happen it could happen with enough political dysfunction because political opponents are playing chicken with each other.
A direct deposit with the FED can't, the FED does nothing with that money and can literally just print it back into existence, which the government cannot do.
I have not heard of the Fed being able to “literally just print” money. As far as I know, that is solely done by the US Treasury and Mint.
Also, why does money in an account have to be debt? For a physical bank dealing with lots of staff and physical cash, they have expenses they need to recoup. But with instant communications and electronic database, why can the government simply not operate a database where the money (a number that someone had the legal power to spend) simple exists?
My credit union did this several years ago - marketing them as "Cyber Branches". They're basically ATMs with video conferencing added.
There are advantages, like increased employee & customer safety and lower costs. But I like to use uncirculated bills as gifts and now there is no one there to get them for me.
I'm always a bit surprised by just how much prime downtown real estate sizable bank branches take up. I can't imagine I'm that atypical in rarely using an ATM much less other local banking services. Presumably small businesses deal with banks much more frequently but banks still seem to take up a big physical footprint for the amount that most people use them.
Those businesses that still take cash often have to go to the bank once a day, especially if they don’t have a safe. So I can see the branches existing for that reason alone.
ATM -> retailer -> back to the bank in the evening.
I once made a calculation of whether it is possible to track all banknotes by serial number. There are only 20bn EU banknotes! Fits snuggly in a Postgres DB.
With that, you could detect patterns: Does these guys always withdraws from this ATM and the money is cashed in that other neighborhood? Drug deal. A banknotes suddenly reappears after years? Black money stored in bulk, let’s see who withdrew it. Etc.
I thought about this too several years back before privacy erosion really got noticed. If you scanned all sn's, a db could keep track of roughly where the cash was located. if you counterfeited, you'd have to use a valid sn, clone a bunch, or pick random ones. you could have a semi-accurate signal on whether to double-check a bill if it was registered in X location but appeared in Y, and if the treasury participated, it could flag a bill immediately as counterfeit. If a criminal cloned a large number of the same sn, once one is flagged as counterfeit you could catch a _lot_ more with no effort. while it would increase friction substantially for counterfeiters, the cost would be privacy.
Hmmm…Blockchain could be printed right on the bill, and they could just immediate transfer the value to their account and burn the paper…no need for money to go back to the bank anymore, and use as a disease vector is limited.
My idea for blockchain is to encrypt emails with the password stored on the chain. The mail receive client will reject messages that are unencrypted, and in order to access the key, the sender will need to send a micropayment, say $0.05, of a for-real, redeemable to fiat, coin. As the funds are claimed by the recipient, the key is revealed and the message is decrypted. After some configurable timeout after reading the message, the micropayment goes back to the sender. Unless the recipient clicks "this is spam". In that case the money is kept. This could potentially end spam as we know it, because suddenly if you want to send a million messages, now you need to put up $50,000.
The challenge here would be keeping the transaction costs as low as possible and using a stable coin. It would cost everyone a couple bucks to send messages, which is a nuisance, and some people might be tempted to steal nickels for various reasons. The crypto would be there to prove there is no way the recipient can possibly receive your message without putting up cash. Perhaps some very popular people could set their threshold higher to reduce noise. But even $0.01 would be highly effective.
I think that’s great, I don’t know what’s taking so long. ATM that dispense money have been around for decades, why isn’t the other way around the default by now? Using the ATM literally saves the bank money.
ATMs have taken deposits since forever? Deposits without envelopes where the machine images checks and counts bills is very common in my experience, and it started long enough ago that I can't remember when it was. Sometime in 2010s, I think.
toast0 might be very young if 2010 is "forever" ago.
I remember depositing banknotes in ATMs in Britain in the early 2000s. It was only a single ATM at the bank branch. You had to put the notes in an envelope and feed that into the machine. They would check the amount later in the day.
At some point the machine would take the notes one at a time, and I've seen these in Britain and Denmark, but I deposit cash less than once a year in any case.
I was discussing two different time frames. Envelopeless deposits are circa 2010. Deposits in envelopes go back as far as I recognize ATMs (which is back when BofA was calling them 'versatellers', but I'd rather not date myself specifically)
That is a pretty popular development, I have encountered banks where cash withdrawals are ATM-only for nearly a decade. What sucks, however, is if the bank imposes a fee after X number of ATM transactions (sometimes as little as two withdrawals). Then, with a maximum ATM withdrawal of 300€ or so, withdrawing a couple of thousand is going to incur a larger amount of fees than with the old cash from the teller system. Of course, with the world moving away from cash, fewer and fewer people will be affected by this.
It's interesting to see the debate going on in Seattle regarding crime right now. What I can say is that, while crime rates may not be scary compared to, say, the early 90s, what is different is that in the 90s you had to go to bad areas to experience it. Now the crime comes to you. It is much more widespread in areas 'normal' people frequent. Part of that has to do with the revitalization of downtowns that occurred then(when millennials and gays began cleaning them up?), I think. Back in the 80s and early 90s, you didn't go to downtowns unless you worked there.
this post opened my eyes to important context about 80s and 90s action movies. Watching them 10-20 years later, I often thought, how are there so many darn banks getting robbed? Turns out, ‘Heat’ is more realistic than I understood (at least in this one respect).
Spike Lee’s ‘Inside Man’ is kind of a throw back to that era’s preoccupations.
Though it must be said the percentage of armed customers increases the more rural you go.
Due to local laws, it's a fairly safe bet in Los Angeles that few if anyone has a weapon more dangerous than a pocket knife. In small town Texas or Alabama, there will be a much higher percentage of armed customers, and a non-zero number will have a hero complex.
It's not necessarily about the bank - some people think that living in a civilized society is nice and from their point of view every violent crime, be it against a bank or anything else, is a step away from that.
Vietnam had 50k KIA, and taught a generation of young conscripts how to stick with their buddies, and how to dish out organized violence. Many of them returned to become normal businessmen, labourers, lawyers, and doctors. Some others bounced off normal society. They enjoyed their new lifestyle and found ways to apply their new talents (guns, fighting, and running drugs). Motorcycle gangs were the archetype. WW2 and Vietnam vets formed the backbone of several outlaw motorcycle gangs.
Russia is just starting to relive the joys of young men returning from an ugly war with ugly new skills. Their last round was Afghanistan, and that was a kids' party in comparison.
Yeah, sure. But I was confused about its relation to bank robberies specifically, and if this was a well studied thing or something. It's plausible sure, but is there data showing that a significant portion of the robbers were former military?
> With more than six million vehicles and more than 1,000 miles of freeway upon which to roam, Los Angeles has created a landscape ideal for bank robberies.
This entire article is anti-freeway anti-freedom-of-movement propaganda. In the future the only thing that will have freedom of movement is capital, not humans.
Entire article? Did you read it all? That was brought up early on, but the rest of the article focused on other reasons why bank robberies spiked (e.g. cocaine) and why they declined again (e.g. less coke usage, harsher sentencing).
I wonder how common it still is.