The first armed robbery attempt was in October, on a residential Bronx block near an elevated train stop. The victim fought back. He was shot in the leg. The next came a month later and roughly a mile away. Once again, the victim resisted and was shot.
After the third robbery attempt, in February, two distinct patterns became apparent. The police suspected a single group was to blame, a group that cruised in cars and attacked lone men at night. But a more unusual pattern was seen among the three victims: when faced with a gun and a straightforward proposition— your money or your life— they had opted to take their chances with their lives.
“Being held at gunpoint, for some people, is not that scary,” said Brian Melford, 21, a Bronx youth activist and student at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “Around here, people think they’re strong. They just say: ‘I’m not going to give it up’.”
Criminologists have for decades studied the responses of victims to violent crime. Robberies in particular became a topic of scholarly research in the 1980s and 1990s, as random street crime spread through urban areas, with those studies mostly confirming the obvious: if you resist a robber, you are more likely to get hurt or, possibly, killed.
“From any perspective of rationality, the thing to do with a robber is to cooperate politely,” said Franklin E. Zimring, a criminologist at Berkeley Law School. But, he added, both robbers and recalcitrant victims have never been the most rational actors.
“You don’t have much money on you; it’s nuts for the victim to refuse,” he said. “Here’s the second layer of nuts: you’ve got a rational robber. If the victim refuses, why doesn’t he just find somebody else?”
National victim surveys in more recent years suggest little change in the number of people standing up to their muggers, or even a slight decrease. But, with a decade-long decline in crime, some scholars have noted a change in the nature of robberies. A 2009 study of national victim surveys taken since 1993 found that, not only were robberies becoming less frequent over time, they were also becoming more violent, in part because of what the authors describe as “victim hardening”.
“Softer victims take precautions,” said Rajiv Sethi, a Barnard College economist and one of the study’s authors. In addition, he said, many people who may have become robbers in the past may instead have gotten jobs as urban economies improved, leaving the more-hardened criminals to encounter more-hardened victims on the streets of certain neighborhoods. “You get more resistance in high-crime areas than low-crime areas,” he said. “People who would not resist have left the areas. Those who stay can’t afford to leave, or to give up the little property that they have in their possession.”
The general perception of bad guys may have changed as well. Decades ago, many harbored an understandable fear that a gun-wielding assailant, fueled by drugs or desperation, would shoot at the smallest provocation. But a spreading sense of safety in many areas of the city, fostered by the falling murder rate, may lead some to doubt that a gunman these days will pull the trigger. “It does sound plausible that when you have less of a climate of fear, you have more resistance,” said Sethi, though he cautioned that research has not been conducted in this area.
In the Bronx, ballistics tests last month matched a nine-millimeter handgun from the first two botched robberies to the one in February, also on a deserted residential street in the middle of the night. In that case, too, the 31-year-old victim held on to his valuables— and was shot in the leg. Another attempted armed robbery, in December, involved a different weapon but the same behavior by the assailants. It was not certain that the same men were responsible for that shooting, said Paul J. Browne, the NYPD’s chief spokesman, but the reaction of the 28-year-old victim matched the others: “Tough guys who said: No, I’m not giving up my stuff.”
None of the attempted robberies resulted in any property being taken, Browne said. “They’re batting a thousand in their lack of success,” he said.
The first mugging, on 15 October, involved a 42-year-old man, singled out as he returned home shortly after 11 pm. The police said at least four men in two cars— a dark-colored Toyota Land Cruiser and a two-door Honda Civic with custom rims— pulled up alongside the victim before a passenger in each car got out and confronted him. With the gun visible, the men demanded money from the man. They fired a single shot when he refused, then climbed back into the cars empty-handed and drove away. The next month, the same group fired a bullet into the leg of an eighteen-year-old.
Around the neighborhood, many offered theories for why four of their neighbors, when confronted with a gun, had decided to put up a fight. “You figure he worked hard for his money and it’s rightfully his,” said Margaret, sixty, who declined to give her last name because the site of the first shooting, on Light Street and Harper Avenue (photo), is only steps from her home. “It’s not fair.”
A crumpled police poster describing the crimes, and offering a $12,000 reward, hung low on a nearby pole. Several doors down, Maureen Peddler, 49, described how her husband had been held at gunpoint in the fall at the gate of their single-family home, where she also operates a day care center. “I heard the commotion, and came to the door and he ran away,” she said, adding that her husband and the man had been locked in a violent struggle but that no shots were fired. “He was grabbing the chain off my husband’s neck.”
Browne said that the police have seen fewer crimes in the north Bronx than in some areas of the city. “It’s not the 7-5,” he said, referring to the precinct in East New York, Brooklyn. But, he added, it is among the higher-crime areas of the Bronx. The 47th Precinct has recorded at least 118 felony assaults and 107 robberies this year. Over the weekend, the precinct had its first murder of the year, the shooting death of a 34-year-old man; the police said it did not appear to have occurred in the course of a robbery.
“We are not under siege by the vigilantes and the criminals that come out at night,” said Andy King, a city councilman whose district includes the area. He offered his own theory as to why some in the community resisted armed robbers. “The pride, the respect factor” takes hold, he said. “It’s a violation, and some people are at a stage in our communities that they will stand up for certain beliefs.”
Leaning in the doorway of a home on Paulding Avenue, Gareth Wilson, a thirty-year-old graphic designer, said he could understand why some of his neighbors might put up a fight. “Sometimes people catch you in the wrong mood,” he said. “There’s times when you’re not going to do it. Even with a gun.”
Others expressed shock that anyone would think to tangle with an armed robber in defense of a little bit of pocket lucre. “You only live once,” said Omar Dailey, 35, while cutting the hair of a local tailor at a Bronxwood Avenue barbershop near the site of one of the shootings. “I’m giving up everything. What you want?”
Rico says he's all for this, but would prefer it if he had his concealed-carry gub with him at the time... (But a Honda Civic with custom rims? How stereotypical.)
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