welsh
Junkmaster
Could this be a gun thread in disguise?
Hmmmm.....
Anyway, we discussed briefly before about the rise in crime in Britian. This is something of a follow up. Brits, Euros, care to respond?
Oh charts are interesting so check the web page. Text is included with this post-
http://www.economist.com/world/europe/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=2313262
Gun crime
You're history
Dec 30th 2003
From The Economist print edition
The Americanisation of armed robbery
NEWS that police in Leeds are looking for an American in their search for the man who murdered one of their colleagues on Boxing Day fits with the way that gun crime has changed over the past decade. The pattern of offences involving firearms looks more and more like that in America: random, careless shootings have replaced the carefully-planned bank robberies of old.
“Standards are down,” asserts Terry Smith, who carried out a string of security van robberies in 1980s London. “Most robbers now get caught up in drugs, and they don't plan properly. The professionalism has gone.”
Old crooks nearly always resent upstarts, but those who used to make a living out of armed robbery have particular reason to be bitter. Tracking devices, hidden cameras and improvements in forensic science have hardened banks, vans and other traditionally lucrative targets so much that pulling on a balaclava scarcely seems worthwhile. This year, England and Wales saw just 250 bank and building society heists—down from 1,400 in 1991. These days, most armed robberies take place on the street (where stick-ups have more than doubled in the past four years) and in shops (up 26% in 2003).
In this new environment, old tools and techniques are of little use. Sawn-off shotguns are handy for robbing banks, mostly for reasons of presentation: they make a terrific noise when fired at the ceiling or floor, and are menacing enough to project a threat through bullet-proof glass. They are less useful for robbing today's “soft” targets, though, so they have mostly been discarded. Sawn-off shotguns were used in just 201 robberies last year—a third the figure of a decade ago—while almost 3,841 jobs were done with handguns.
Roger Matthews, professor of criminology at Middlesex University, says that armed robbery is becoming Americanised, both in the sense that Britain is moving towards late-night convenience store robberies, and also in the sense that anyone can do it. The rise of unskilled robbery—junkies with guns and no previous experience—is bad news for shop workers, who are less well trained in dealing with guns than are bank tellers; it is also bad for the police, who tend to find ill-thought-out crimes harder to solve than planned ones.
For the most part, old dogs disdain the new tricks, which they regard as the preserve of drug-addled thugs. Officers in the Flying Squad—the arm of the London Metropolitan Police that deals with armed robbery—say that professional stick-up men tend to follow defined tracks. Betting shop specialists will rarely rob post offices, for example. Mr Smith claims, with a touch of pride, that he never robbed a shop, nor even a building society.
With their chosen targets now out of reach, most of the men who terrorised Britain's cities in the 1980s have simply left the business. But not all have gone clean. To paraphrase Willie Sutton, a legendary American robber, people used to hold up banks because that's where the money was. These days it is in the international drugs trade. That is where many of the old-timers have gone.
Hmmmm.....
Anyway, we discussed briefly before about the rise in crime in Britian. This is something of a follow up. Brits, Euros, care to respond?
Oh charts are interesting so check the web page. Text is included with this post-
http://www.economist.com/world/europe/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=2313262
Gun crime
You're history
Dec 30th 2003
From The Economist print edition
The Americanisation of armed robbery
NEWS that police in Leeds are looking for an American in their search for the man who murdered one of their colleagues on Boxing Day fits with the way that gun crime has changed over the past decade. The pattern of offences involving firearms looks more and more like that in America: random, careless shootings have replaced the carefully-planned bank robberies of old.
“Standards are down,” asserts Terry Smith, who carried out a string of security van robberies in 1980s London. “Most robbers now get caught up in drugs, and they don't plan properly. The professionalism has gone.”
Old crooks nearly always resent upstarts, but those who used to make a living out of armed robbery have particular reason to be bitter. Tracking devices, hidden cameras and improvements in forensic science have hardened banks, vans and other traditionally lucrative targets so much that pulling on a balaclava scarcely seems worthwhile. This year, England and Wales saw just 250 bank and building society heists—down from 1,400 in 1991. These days, most armed robberies take place on the street (where stick-ups have more than doubled in the past four years) and in shops (up 26% in 2003).
In this new environment, old tools and techniques are of little use. Sawn-off shotguns are handy for robbing banks, mostly for reasons of presentation: they make a terrific noise when fired at the ceiling or floor, and are menacing enough to project a threat through bullet-proof glass. They are less useful for robbing today's “soft” targets, though, so they have mostly been discarded. Sawn-off shotguns were used in just 201 robberies last year—a third the figure of a decade ago—while almost 3,841 jobs were done with handguns.
Roger Matthews, professor of criminology at Middlesex University, says that armed robbery is becoming Americanised, both in the sense that Britain is moving towards late-night convenience store robberies, and also in the sense that anyone can do it. The rise of unskilled robbery—junkies with guns and no previous experience—is bad news for shop workers, who are less well trained in dealing with guns than are bank tellers; it is also bad for the police, who tend to find ill-thought-out crimes harder to solve than planned ones.
For the most part, old dogs disdain the new tricks, which they regard as the preserve of drug-addled thugs. Officers in the Flying Squad—the arm of the London Metropolitan Police that deals with armed robbery—say that professional stick-up men tend to follow defined tracks. Betting shop specialists will rarely rob post offices, for example. Mr Smith claims, with a touch of pride, that he never robbed a shop, nor even a building society.
With their chosen targets now out of reach, most of the men who terrorised Britain's cities in the 1980s have simply left the business. But not all have gone clean. To paraphrase Willie Sutton, a legendary American robber, people used to hold up banks because that's where the money was. These days it is in the international drugs trade. That is where many of the old-timers have gone.
