RO rs in/ Ct.lO n r~ 00 co laRD T. WRIGHT P~ p ,._ ,oTT H. DeCKeR lal Behavior Advisor in Criminal ]ustice to Northeastern University Press Gil Geis I q~o83'7 Ro .e ' in hct on Stickups anO Street Culture RiCHaRD T. WRIGHT & SCOTT H. DeCKeR foreword by Neal Shover NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY PRESS.. BOSTON .~. PROPERTY OF National Criminal Justice Reference Service (NCJRS) Box 6000 Rockville, MD 20849-6000 NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY PRESS Copyright 1997 by Richard T. Wright and Scott H. Decker All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short p'assages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book maybe reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wright, Richard, 1951- Armed robbers in action : stickups and street culture / Richard T. Wright, Scott H. Decker p. cm. --(The Northeastern series in criminal behavior') Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-55553-324-8 (cloth : alk. paper). --ISBN a-55553-323-X (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Robbery-- United States. 2. Thieves-- United States. I. Decker, Scott H. II. Title. III. Series. HV6658.W75 1997 36/4.15'52'o973 -- dc21 97-14230 Designed by Christopher Kuntze Composed in Aldus by G&S Typesetters, Inc., in Austin, Texas. Printed and bound by Thomson-Shore, Inc'., in Dexter, Michigan. The paper is Glatfelter Supple Opaque Recycled, an acid-free stock. MANUFACTUREO IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA ol oo 99 98 97 5 4 3 2 1 To Nigel Walker and O. 1. West Contents Foreword ix Acknowledgments xiii Studying Active Armed Robbers 3 2 Deciding to Commit an Armed Robbery 32 3 Choosing the Target 6~ /4 Committing the Offense 95 5 Preventing Armed Robbery 13o Appendix I41 References 145 Index 151 Foreworr3 David Matza once noted that American criminologists histor- ically were "highly vague and short-winded about the phe- nomena they presume[d] to explain." He meant that those who profess expertise about crime had shown a remarkable reluctance either to get close to or to describe in detail their subject matter. Matza's comment, as it happened, preceded by only a few years an outpouring of ethnographic research on street offenders and their pursuits. A broad range of crimes and criminals have been sketched by investigators, but armed robbers, offenders who usually terrorize, frequently injure, and occasionally kill their victims have received little atten- tion. In this book, Richard Wright and Scott Decker give us what is thus far the most comprehensive description and interpretation of urban, predominantly African American, street robbers, and their daily lives and crimes. For Wright, it marks nearly fifteen years of attention to thieves that began with Trevor Bennett in the path breaking Burglars on Bur- glary (~984).Wright and Decker, in their earlier investigation of burglars (Burglars on the Job, 1994) and now in this exami- nation of the activities of robbers, work from a sample of ac- tive offenders that gives their analysis the unmistakable feel of the real thing. Much of the growing volume of ethnographic research on thieves and other street-level criminals was conducted on ix X FOREWORD offenders known to, referred by, or under the control of crimi- nal justice managers. Many research subjects, in fact, were imprisoned when they were studied. The picture that emerges from this corpus of research is of anything but highly skilled and specialized career criminals. The criminal calculus of street offenders includes utilities overlooked in derision-making mod- els and also employs a distinctive metric. There is longstand- ing concern, however, that this research may be biased and may have limited general application to street offenders. Thieves who manage to avoid ensnarement and the crimes they com- mit may be diffefent from the crimes and careers of their less fortunate criminalpeers. Against this backdrop, Armed Rob- bers in Action takes on considerable importance. The value of research conducted on captive samples inevitably will turn on how widely findings reported here diverge from what was learned in prison-based studies. Readers may consider whether the picture painted by Wright and Decker is cause for reas- surance or for heightened concern about data quality and the integrity of findings from earlier studies. The notion that criminals choose to commit crime has held the attention and constrained theprojects of academics and policymakers for nearly twenty-five years. This approach understandably highlights the theoretical and crime-control significance of offenders' decision making. Wrightand Decker provide a fascinating picture of decision making by their sub- j ects, one that shows the gap between the offenders' actions and crime-as-choice theory. Street-level robbers typically make decisions in contexts of hedonism and desperation in which the likely consequences of their acts are neither weighed care- fully nor taken seriously. When offenders describe their crimes, they employ a rhetoric of utilitarianism that con- trasts markedly with ~he fanciful attributionsof motives and meanings sometimes suggested by interpreters who lack the first-hand knowledge gained by Wright arid Decker. Anyone today who dared echo Matza's indictment of crim- inological scholarship for its shallow empirical base would be quickly dismissed as uninformed. And yet the growth of a FOREWORD xi strong ethnographic research tradition in criminologyl para- doxically, has been matched generally by widening experien- tial distance between criminological subject matter and the worlds and lives of analysts. Although the potential payoff from comprehending crime through the eyes of offenders is taken for granted, growing numbers of criminologists know crime and criminals only as lines in electronic data files. This is apparent, for example, in ad hoc conceptual models of crimi- nal careers developed and promoted without regard for find- ings from ethnographic studies. The picture of armed robbers and.their pursuits sketched by Wright and Decker is an im- portant corrective to interpretations of offending that are un- informed by grounded knowledge of crime. The criminal career paradigm that took shape with the as- cendance of crime-as-choice theory incorporated a measure 2.., of criminal intensity. This individual-level offending rate, symbolized by the construct "lambda," is measured using data from offenders' self-reported offense history. It is clear, however, that a great many men Who commit burglary, rob- bery, and other street crimes have only the vaguest notion of how many crimes they committed in the preceding, say, two years. At some point--and it is a point that is reached rather early in offenders' history of law breaking--they all run together. Assumptions about and measures of criminal intensity based on offenders' numeric recall seem of dubious value. Here and elsewhere Wright and Decker contribute to a better-informed picture of street criminals. Their use of free- ranging armed robbers and the light their findings shed on offenders make Armed Robbers in Action captivating read- ing. The authors' extremely rich and detailed understanding of offenders' daily lives, routines, and decisions coupled with their thoughtful observations on crime control merit the attention of all who want to understand and limit the harm caused by armed robbery. Neal Shover University of Tennessee ~cknowledgments Authors, like armed robbers, do not contemplate and com- plete their projects in a sociocultural vacuum. Their work in- evitably is influenced and shaped by those around them. It is our good fortune to be surrounded by bright and tolerant col- leagues, each of whom possesses an uncanny ability to be critical without being cruel. Bruce Jacobs, Janet Lauritsen, and Rick Rosenfeld gave freely of their time thoughout the entire research process. We probably imposed on them too often, but our project is much the better for their collective wisdom. Dietrich Smith, fieldworker extraordinaire, took on the daunting challenge of finding active armed robbers and con- vincing them to talk to us. It is a tribute to his skill and dar- ing that we more than doubled our most optimistic initial estimate of the final sample size. Eric Baumer, Rosale e Cope- land, and Theresa Bosslet stepped in as emergency interview- ers whenever the flow of willing subjects threatened to ex- ceed the project's capacity to absorb them. Laurie Mitchell transcribed all of the taped interviews with blinding speed and pinpoint accuracy. Although a child of the suburbs, her ear for urban street talk is unrivaled. Michael Stein carried out much of the secondary qualita- tive data analysis for our project--a task that required him to read and reread hundreds of pages of interview transcripts. xiii xiv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This is difficult, painstaking work, and Michael did it with en- thusiasm and good cheer. For helping us to dig ourselves out from under a mountain of data, we owe him a special debt of gratitude. Perhaps the most challenging aspect of any field-based re- search project involves reducing what one has seen, heard, and felt "out there" to written form. Here too we were lucky to be able to fall back on the counsel of wise and patient friends. Linda Jeffery read the entire manuscript,, making many helpful editorial suggestions along the way. Trevor Bennett, Gil Geis, Cheryl Maxson, .and Neal Shover also read and commented on much of what we wrote; the book is 20 per- cent shorter and 80 percent clearer for their efforts. Others who provided us with helpful advice as the writing progressed include Bob Bursik, Dave Curry, Dick Hobbs, Kimberly Leonard, Cathy McNeal, Jody Miller, and A1 Wagner. Our project was funded jointly by the Harry Frank Gug- genheim Foundation and the U.S.