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)

Summary

The major findings to emerge from the NARMP show that Australian armed robberies in 2003:

• occurred mostly in retail settings or in other public spaces (of which the majority took place on the street or footpath);
• involved mostly threats with knives (which were around half of all the weapons used), followed by 'other weapons' (nearly one-quarter of weapons), then firearms (a little over one-fifth of weapons), and finally, by syringes (less than one in twenty listed weapons);
• took place mostly in the evening and early morning (over half between 6pm and 3am), although the spread of robberies over the day varied slightly as a function of weekends as opposed to weekdays, and with the seasons;
• netted robbers different types of property, although cash was the type of item most commonly taken (just over one-quarter of all property types listed);
• resulted in large variation in the value of offender takings, ranging from $0 to $550,000, which seems a function of unique robbery situational factors, such as weapon and location;
• were mostly perpetrated against organisations, and boys and men aged between fifteen and thirty-four years; and
• were slightly different in form depending on whether victims were individual persons or organisations (e.g. different patterns of weapon use).

Some variables within the NARMP are unreliable and of less than optimal validity, yet analyses of these have pointed to some possible trends that should be monitored as better quality information and more cases accumulate in the data set. For instance:

• young men and boys constitute the majority of offenders, although it seems that choice of weapon may vary with offender age, suggesting a possible professionalisation of offenders as they grow older;
• offenders operating in pairs, trios or gangs target slightly different locations to offenders operating alone, although there appears to be different forms of multiple offender robbery, differentiated by the types of locations targeted and the weapons used; and
• offenders and victims rarely know each other prior to a robbery event, although robberies in residential premises appear to be an exception to this pattern.

Analyses of offenders, victims and aspects of the robbery, such as location and weapon, suggest that the three robbery scenarios developed in earlier research can still usefully describe some armed robberies that occurred in 2003. Data suggest that recent victimisations do range between:

• unplanned opportunistic, low yield robberies in the street and certain retail sites, by individuals using weapons that are easily accessible; and
• those involving hard-to-obtain weapons against hardened targets, resulting in higher value losses by victims.

It is possible that an additional factor differentiating scenarios is offender age, with older offenders linked to seemingly better planned, less opportunistic armed robbery. A further type of robbery scenario has also been suggested: that occurring in a residential location, with the offender known to the victim, although the small number of cases has prevented any detailed exploration or extrapolation of other characteristics.

Findings were discussed within a framework that considers aspects of the crime situation, namely the routine activity approach, which requires an offender and target to come together in the absence of a guardian before an opportunistic crime like armed robbery can occur. Good data are available in the NARMP to evaluate individual targets, although current information regarding non-person targets, such as detailed location information, lacks the specificity needed for in-depth analysis. No information is currently available regarding 'guardianship', although detailed location knowledge would allow educated speculation regarding both formal security and the less formal aspects of certain locations that might tend to guard against crime. The level of detail contained in weapon descriptions also ranges from highly informative to quite general. Ideally, this variable will too contain specific information for all future cases, allowing a detailed exploration of weapons beyond the four major weapon classes currently employed in analyses.

Similarly, more in-depth analyses would be possible with more cases containing valid and detailed information regarding offenders and their disguises, victim injury and resistance, and property taken from those victims. The number of cases contained in the NARMP will increase over time, but in order to the conduct complex analyses that allow robbery situations to be modelled and that allow strong conclusions based on statistical testing to be drawn, valid, reliable and more detailed information within those cases will need to be accumulated.