Checking Out Whether More Robberies Are Turning into Murders
One bit of good news about robbery is often over- looked: Most victims are not injured, and of those who are, most don’t need medical attention in an emergency room. And yet, because robbery is such a potentially devastating crime, a troubling question ought to arise: How often do robberies escalate into murders? In other words, what are the chances of being killed by a robber? Robbers may wound their victims (and perhaps inadvertently kill them) to quell resistance or to prevent them from calling for help and reporting the crime or to intimidate them from pressing charges and testify- ing in court.
On occasion, claims are made that robbers these days are more viciously violent than ever before. The impression that robbers kill more readily “these days” than in the past is part of a
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gloomy larger perception that American society is falling apart, that civilization is collapsing, and that predators today are more depraved than ever before. In the aftermath of a particularly gruesome slaying, journalists sometimes play up this theme. But this is nothing new.
For example, during the “good old days” of the 1940s and 1950s, when street crime was not a major issue in electoral campaigns because it wasn’t per- ceived to be a pressing problem, some people feared robbers would kill them even if they surrendered without a fight and cooperated. A reporter at the time (Whitman, 1951, p. 5) wrote: “The hoodlum will bash in your head with a brick for a dollar and ninety-eight cents. The police records of our cities are spotted with cases of ‘murder for peanuts’ in which the victims, both men and women, have been slugged, stabbed, hit with iron pipes, hammers, or axes, and in a few cases kicked to death—the loot being no more than the carfare a woman carried in her purse or the small change in a man’s pocket.”
Several decades later, a newsmagazine’s cover story (Press et al., 1981, p. 48) titled “The Plague of Violent Crime” observed: “Another frightening difference in the crime picture is that life is now pitifully cheap. Law enforcement officials think they have witnessed a shift toward gratuitous slaughter. ‘It used to be Your money or your life,’says a Bronx assistant district attorney.… ‘Now it’s Your money and your life.’”
So a journalist had the impression at the start of the 1950s that robbers were becoming more vicious. The same assertion was made by a journalist at the start of the 1980s. Were these fright- ening media images based on facts? Is it true, as some people fear, that more and more robberies are esca- lating into murders (see Cook, 1985, 1987)? Researchers must undertake a fine grained analysis. Victimologists can combine UCR statistics on mur- ders and NCVS findings about robberies to shed some light on this grisly question (see the data assem- bled in Table 4.3 inside Box 4.2).