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Analyzing Bank Robbery in Italy

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Organized Crime, Corruption and Crime Prevention

Abstract

Even though recent data show a decrease in the number of attacks and in the incidence of crimes committed by professional offenders, bank robbery is still a relevant issue in most American and European cities. Still, very few recent studies analyze this topic and most of them overlook the spatial and temporal patterns of this crime. This chapter analyzes the main characteristics of bank robberies occurred between 2005 and 2010 in Italy, which is the European country constantly recording the highest number of bank robberies. In particular, it focuses on the analysis of repeat victimization and its peculiarities since previous studies demonstrate the relevance of this phenomenon for bank robbery. Moreover, a further in-depth analysis investigates the victimization patterns in the Italian city of Milan from a spatio-temporal perspective. The general aim of this chapter is to update the knowledge about this type of crime considering its recent evolutions in connection with the innovations in the banking systems.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Italian Banking Association—Associazione Bancaria Italiana (ABI). This association includes the majority of the banks groups active in Italy .

  2. 2.

    Due to missing or misspelled information, the name of the bank group and the address of the robbed branch have been obtained for almost 74% of the recorded crime events. This percentage rises to 85% if considering only the city on Milan .

  3. 3.

    The incidence rate expresses the average number of robberies suffered by each branch of the bank group in the considered timeframe.

  4. 4.

    For considering these robberies as “first” ones, this research assumed that the bank branches did not suffer any victimization before January 2005.

  5. 5.

    In this case a bandwidth of 500 m has been used.

  6. 6.

    Other values of the parameters and combinations were tested and all of them return results comparable or less significant than the presented one. These analysis were carried out using the near repeat calculator (Ratcliffe 2009).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Transcrime, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore di Milano, Largo Gemelli 1, 20123, Milan, Italy

    Marco Dugato

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  1. Marco Dugato
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Correspondence to Marco Dugato .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. TRANSCRIME, U. Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy

    Stefano Caneppele

  2. TRANSCRIME, U. Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milano, Italy

    Francesco Calderoni

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Dugato, M. (2014). Analyzing Bank Robbery in Italy. In: Caneppele, S., Calderoni, F. (eds) Organized Crime, Corruption and Crime Prevention. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01839-3_14

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