What did the average U.K. bank robber take home annually? Criminals themselves may not know because Rickman says there's "no data on the criminals" associated with the heists—not even how many exist or the average number of heist attempts each year.

Yet economic models assume that criminals act rationally if they perceive the rewards outweigh the risks of their actions. To that end the authors did a back-of-the-envelope calculation to roughly quantify what amount might convince a robber to give up his or her life of crime. Factoring in the per-heist, per-robber haul amount, failure rate and capture rate, that number, called the expected net benefit, ended up being £33,545.40 ($52,100)—roughly 125 percent of the average U.K. journalist's annual salary.

"Bank robbers [are] not living in mansions popping champagne—or most of them are not, anyway," Rickman says.

Robbed of data
But not all bank robbers are created equal. A select few methodically plan their work whereas the majority give little thought to minimizing their risks and upping their hauls, says economist Giovanni Mastrobuoni at the University of Turin's College of Carlo Alberto in Italy.

Mastrobuoni specifically took issue with the article's lack of attention to professional bank robbers, who presumably raked in most of the £7.4 million ($11.5 million) robbed from U.K. banks between 2005 and 2008. "The article suggests, for example, that fast-rising security screens mean less money for robbers," Mastrobuoni says, referring to one of the authors' conclusions that the presence of fast-rising security screens—expensive bulletproof screens that rapidly rise up between a lobby and a teller window at the push of a button—reduced a robbery's success by one third. "But I'd argue that the dumb robbers target banks with fast screens while professional ones scope out the place thoroughly before robbing," Mastrobuoni says. "Since they are better in all dimensions, they get more money."

But the researchers' access to the data, although unprecedented, didn't come without catches. "One condition of access to the data was that we did not analyze different banks themselves," Rickman says. Such limitation bars more meaningful analyses, yet smart bank robbers could use them, for example, to find prime targets for their next heist.

Another problem in examining the professionals is a lack of information about them. "That requires two sets of pretty sensitive data to be collected and matched: banks and criminals," Rickman says. With the BBA having a lock on the bank data and the police a hold on criminal data, he notes, his "hunch is that there is no easy way to match these in the U.K."

Economist Hedayeh Samavati of Indiana University–Purdue University Fort Wayne, who studies U.S. bank robbery economics, says the new work underscores the need for more and better data on the matter. She notes that the enterprise is worth the risks because, ultimately, taxpayers and bank customers "end up paying the bills" for bank robbers' actions in public services, bank fees and more.

"This is a sensitive issue for banks, so there isn't much usable data or data sufficient for people to investigate this issue. It's a major problem," Samavati says. "But I think it's worth the costs, both social and otherwise."

5 Comments

1. 1. bongobimbo 04:29 PM 6/19/12

   ROB a bank? Everyone knows it's a million times more lucrative to be the CEO of a bank "too big to fail"! Then you can rob everyone.

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2. 2. Will180576 09:31 PM 6/19/12

   In my experience (working in drug and alcohol) many people who commit these crimes are desperate drug addicts, economic analysis is probably not valid as they are certainly not acting rationally! I would be interested in seeing any studies of what percentage of bank robbers were drug addicts and what percentage were 'professional' criminals.
   

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3. 3. trimonde 08:25 AM 6/21/12

   Yeah, not so different to the bastards that cook drugs in some dessert hut and live in poor misery anyways. But I got news for you America. Looking for who to blame for the ills of our society and culture to punish or even kill them through the gargantuan huge judicial system institutions that are consuming monstrously the countries time, resources, energy and power does not pay either. Obviously! In case you haven't been paying attention to the world these last three thousand years!
   Something better has got to come take the place of this infantile, own foot shooting defeatist mentality of "bad people vs good people" which perhaps starts understanding and caring how our own civilization affects the unsuspecting, pure and innocent (originally) path of our minds development; resulting in people who though clearly are no longer innocent, manage to cleverly stay out of the way of punishing judgment.

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4. 4. jgrosay 03:28 PM 6/21/12

   Georges Brassens sung: "Si le vol est l'art que tu preferes, c'est ta seule vocation, ton unique talent, prends donc pignon sur rue, mets-toi dans les affaires, et tu aura les flics meme comme chalands". (If thieving is your preferred art, your only vocation, your unique ability, go ahead, enter business, and you'll have the cops even as domestics". Really, Europe is different to the USA, do you remember what happened to the song "I shot the sheriff"?. For most, policemen do protect everybody from criminals of any species, for some modernists, cops are the foremen of abusing capitalists. What a fuck!

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5. 5. rowlandw 06:53 PM 6/23/12

   You can't necessarily say crime doesn't pay if you don't add the value of a roof, 3 meals a day and medical care (in prison) to the robber's economic equation. Some people just can't function that well on "the outside" especially in the Great Recession.

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