Robbed at Gunpoint, Some Gamble With Their Lives
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 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 decade-long declines 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.”
full: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/29/nyregion/robbed-at-gunpoint-some-bronx-victims-resist.html?pagewanted=all
For some people in the Bronx, lose your money=lose your next meal. But isn't it generally safer to just surrender your belongings if you get mugged?
= new reply since forum marked as read
when all your arguments are placed side by side, you end up contradicting yourself.
Heaven forbid we should upset some criminal.
