Armed Robbers In Action: Stickups and Street Culture

Foreword

Foreword David Matza once noted that American criminologists historically were "highly vague and short-winded about the phenomena 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 attention . 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 Burglary (1984). Wright and Decker, in their earlier investigation of burglars (Burglars on the Job, 1994) and now in this examination of the activities of robbers, work from a sample of active 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 criminal 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 decision-making models and also employs a distinctive metric. There is longstanding 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 commit may be different from the crimes and careers of their less fortunate criminal peers. Against this backdrop, Armed Robbers 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 reassurance 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 the projects of academics and policymakers for nearly twenty-five years. This approach understandably highlights the theoretical and crime-control significance of offenders' decision making. Wright and Decker provide a fascinating picture of decision making by their subjects , 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 carefully nor taken seriously. When offenders describe their crimes, they employ a rhetoric of utilitarianism that contrasts markedly with the fanciful attributions of motives and meanings sometimes suggested by interpreters who lack the first-hand knowledge gained by Wright and Decker. Anyone today who dared echo Matza's indictment of criminological 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 criminology, paradoxically , has been matched generally by widening experiential 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 criminal careers developed and promoted without regard for findings from ethnographic studies. The picture of armed robbers and their pursuits sketched by Wright and Decker is an important corrective to interpretations of offending that are uninformed by grounded knowledge of crime. The criminal career paradigm that took shape with the ascendance of crime-as-choice theory incorporated a measure 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, robbery , and other street crimes have only the vaguest notion of how many crimes they committed in the preceding...