Armed robbery in Australia : 2003 National Armed Robbery Monitoring Program annual report

Maria Borzycki, Yuka Sakurai and Jenny Mouzos
ISBN 0 642 53872 7 ; ISSN 1326-6004
Canberra: Australian Institute of Criminology: 2004
(Research and public policy series, no. 62)

Introduction

Development of the NARMP

The National armed robbery monitoring program (NARMP) evolved in response to a 1999 resolution of the chief law enforcement officers in Australia and New Zealand,¹ which directed that research should be undertaken 'to better understand the use of weapons in the commission of crime'. Following that resolution, the Australasian Police Ministers' Council recommended the establishment of a program to monitor the specific weapons offence of armed robbery.² Since then, the Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) has undertaken consultation with state and territory police services with the goal of developing a monitoring program. In furtherance of this goal, state and territory police services have provided data to the NARMP and analyses of these data permitted a closer examination of weapon use in armed robbery. The NARMP in its current form is the result of those endeavours. There are three overarching aims of the NARMP:

• to monitor trends in armed robbery, specifically trends in weapon use;
• to identify changes in trends; and
• to provide insight into the factors underpinning these trends.

This report summarises the findings to emerge from analysis of the first year of NARMP data (1 January 2003 to 31 December 2003). It is important to note that although the NARMP at present captures over 8,500 victims of armed robbery over a 12-month period, this is too short a timeframe to draw strong conclusions about long-term trends. This report is the first in a series of annual reports examining patterns in armed robbery in Australia. With each subsequent year, there will be a greater focus on the program's second aim, the identification of changes in trends.

Compiling the NARMP

The NARMP contains information describing all armed robberies reported to police. Statistical staff within each of the state and territory police services extract electronic information describing armed robberies from their respective operational databases. Information is extracted on a bi-annual basis, and incorporates all incidents occurring and/or reported during the specified six-monthly period (if extracted information contains all incidents reported during the specified period, it can potentially include armed robberies that occurred outside the period in question). Data have been provided on the following characteristics of armed robbery:

• incidents - location, date and time, weapon, property taken, and investigation outcome;
• offenders - gender, age, relationships to victim (if any), and disguises worn; and
• victims - gender, age, injury suffered, and resistance offered.

The data set is in a victim-based format in which every victim of armed robbery is treated as a separate case: a single robbery incident may involve multiple victims, and so would result in multiple victim cases. Consequently, armed robbery incidents may appear multiple times in the NARMP if there were multiple victims, and individual victims may be described in the NARMP on multiple occasions if they have been involved in more than one armed robbery. For the purposes of this report therefore, the terms 'armed robbery' and 'case' actually refer to a victim of armed robbery unless otherwise stated.

Another consequence of a victim-based format is that when there are multiple victims associated with a single robbery incident, some variables will be counted multiple times across the dataset. For instance, weapon variables relate to a feature of the actual robbery incident in which the victim was involved, rather than to the victim per se. If a single firearm was employed in a robbery involving six victims, and each victim has been recorded in the NARMP, that single firearm will appear six times in the NARMP (once for each victim). Any interpretation of analyses should therefore be made cognisant of the fact that weapon numbers and percentages refer to the number of victimisations by different types of weapons rather than the actual number of weapons employed in armed robberies. This multiple counting issue also effects location and offender gender and age information, so similar interpretations should be applied to analyses employing these variables.

Definition of armed robbery

In the NARMP, robbery offences were defined in a manner generally consistent with the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), as those which

...involve the unlawful taking of property, with intent to permanently deprive the owner of the property, from the immediate possession of a person, or an organisation, or control, custody or care of a person, accompanied by the use, and/or threatened use of immediate force or violence. Robbery victims can therefore be persons or organisations...Where a weapon was used in the committal of the offence, robbery is classified as armed otherwise it is classified as unarmed (ABS 2004, p. 40).³

Whilst there is consistency in what constitutes an armed robbery offence, there is no single set of characteristics that describe the typical armed robbery, although closer examination of this crime can reveal some commonalities. For example, earlier Australian research identified (at least) three armed robbery scenarios that differed in terms of offender method and choice of weapon, in general location, in victim injury, and in the financial gain accruing to robbers (Mouzos & Borzycki 2003). Scenarios include:

• opportunistic street muggings, which apparently involve little long-term planning, occur in public places, involve easily accessible weapons like knives or rocks, and tend to reap small rewards for perpetrators;
• amateur retail armed robberies, which take place in easily accessible retail settings, do not evidence extensive planning or hard-to-obtain weapons, and like above, result in small gains for offenders; and
• professional armed robberies, that show planning in the form of disguises, clear instructions to victims as to desired property, and less opportunistic weapons, such as firearms. This scenario usually takes place in retail locations and financial institutions, and can result in substantially higher offender takings compared to the other two scenarios.

Unfortunately, the information describing the armed robberies included in the NARMP is not as detailed as that contributing to the earlier research from which the scenarios emerged. However as noted, the NARMP does contain information relating to the armed robbery event, victim, and offender.⁴ The following analyses therefore examine these three aspects of armed robberies reported to police in Australia in 2003, in an effort to identify patterns in offending. The format of this report follows this same breakdown of the armed robbery situation, first discussing aspects of the robbery itself, then of the victims, and finally, of the offender(s).

Explaining armed robberies

Data currently held in NARMP seem to support an opportunity-based explanation of armed robbery, such as the routine activity approach, where an offence requires a likely offender and a suitable target to come together in the absence of a capable guardian (e.g. see Felson & Clarke 1998). Within this approach, a guardian need not be a police officer but can be anyone whose presence might deter a would-be offender. This type of approach acknowledges that crime opportunities are highly specific to aspects of the crime situation, such as offender(s), victims (or targets, which can be both individual persons or organisations and locations), and the temporal aspects of the crime. By acknowledging that even within different types of offences, crime situations will vary, this way of conceptualising crime accounts for the fact that not all potential targets are equally vulnerable to attack, nor are all offenders equally likely to target all potential victims. An opportunity-based account such as the routine activity approach is not incompatible with the notion of typical scenarios, because scenarios allow ways of summarising sets of factors that can come together to create crime opportunities. They also provide a starting point for developing ways of reducing armed robbery opportunities because differing armed robbery situations can be used to tailor appropriate and specific crime reduction responses.

• ¹ Senior Officers' Group resolution 7.6(D), 22 April 1999
• ² Australasian Police Ministers' Council meeting, 13 December 2000
• ³ Jurisdictional differences in offence descriptions mean that this definition captures victims of 'armed robbery', 'robbery with a firearm', and 'robbery with an offensive weapon'. If a case was annotated to show no weapon use, but was nonetheless classified as one of the robbery offences involving a weapon, it was retained in analyses. The definition also captured both 'aggravated robbery' and 'robbery not further defined' where weapon use was explicitly recorded. Cases of 'aggravated robbery' and 'robbery not further defined' annotated to show 'no weapon use' have been excluded, as were all victims of 'non aggravated robbery', because by definition this latter offence cannot include conditions of aggravation such as weapon use.
• ⁴ The term offender is used to describe the (alleged) perpetrator of an armed robbery offence, regardless of whether or not a conviction has been secured.