Whipped Cream Difficulties

This is a little old, but it came across Hacker News Twitter this morning, and I hadn’t seen it previously. From the “CrimeReads” website: “The Rise and Fall of the Bank Robbery Capital of the World“.

Between 1985 and 1995 the approximately 3,500 retail bank branches in the region were hit 17,106 times. 1992, the worst year of all, there was an almost unimaginable 2,641 heists, one every 45 minutes of each banking day. On a particularly bad day for the FBI that year, bandits committed 28 bank licks. There were years during that stretch when the L.A. field office of the FBI, which covers the seven counties in the Los Angeles metro region, handled more cases than the next four regions combined.

The article is by Peter Houlahan, who also wrote Norco ’80: The True Story of the Most Spectacular Bank Robbery in American History (previously mentioned in this space).

Summary: why was LA the bank robbery capital of the world? Answer: banks, cars, freeways, and cocaine.

Why did LA stop being the bank robbery capital of the world? Answer: the banks tightened up security (they couldn’t care less about the money that was being taken at gunpoint, but when staff started quitting and filing worker’s comp claims for PTSD, and when customers started suing, that got their attention), and the virtual abolition of parole in the Federal system.

The new guidelines allowed for much longer sentences for simple robbery, with stiff “enhancements” for those involving weapons. More importantly, it mandated a minimum of 85% of a sentence be served before eligibility for parole. The customary sentence for bank robbery immediate jumped to 20 years with a minimum of 17 served. Use a gun and you were not going to see the light of day for five more on top of that.