Interesting excerpt about a bank's approach to physical robberies:
"In July 2009 a teller at a Key Bank branch in Seattle pursued a would-be robber after a botched hold-up attempt (Seattle Times, Aug. 1, 2009). He leapt over the counter, chased the man for several blocks, knocked him down, and held him until the police arrived. Two days later Key Bank fired the teller. He had violated long-standing bank policy to cooperate in every way and never resist a robbery. The reason for this policy, we suggest, is that banks understand a very simple principle: fear is bad for business. It is far better to comply with the demand than to risk a brawl, or a gun fight in the bank lobby. No bank wants the perception that they valued money more than customer and employee safety. The $40 million that traditional bank robbers in the US steal per year (FBI Bank Crime Statistics) is entirely manageable."
This is true of a lot of stores. Last year a convenience store employee was fired for getting a gun from his truck to fend off a robber. If an employee gets shot "on the job", the store has to pay disability etc.
It's even simpler than that: no bank, and more importantly, no insurance company which carries banks as clients, wants to defend or settle a lawsuit alleging wrongful death through negligence of a would-be hero bank employee. The predicted loss of a bank robbery is high four figures. A wrongful death lawsuit would cost six or seven figures. This suggests a simple strategy which works fine: invest in the low-hanging fruit for physical security, comply with robbers, and pay for robberies out of the petty cash.
That works in places with relatively developed legal systems and enough police and prosecution to eventually catch most bank robbers. Otherwise, there's an endless stream of people coming in, grabbing $10k, and leaving.
In the third world, I've seen banks with military/police with automatic weapons set up outside banks, or private security at the same level. (also, in these places, liability in the event of wrongful death is lower (or, by outsourcing to the government, you get to take advantage of sovereign immunity), and there is more cash on-site)
Correct - if you have adequate response, you need less prevention.
In Central America, my house is fully encased in steel bars (in addition to a wall), so you'll need to spend a bit of time and noise getting in. And we have 24/7 armed guards on rotation, and the entire subdivision is walled off with ~15-20 foot gates.
A friend I know consulted on a few bank robbery cases and reviewed the security videos. The firepower the criminals would bring in was astounding. Big long machine gun (not rifle) type things. I believe I read reports of grenades/RPG or something, too.
Whereas in the states, none of the places I've lived would take much more than a pointed stick to get in.
I wonder if there's two equilibria here - at low levels of robbery, there's a Nash equilibrium (law enforcement and robbers as predator/prey). However, because there's a limit on how much police and prosecution resources can ultimately be increased, eventually the robberies overwhelm law enforcement and you reach an equilibrium at a high level of robbery limited only by the availability of potential robbers.
>The predicted loss of a bank robbery is high four figures.
Having worked as a bank teller, that figure is much, much lower. Often they'll only get away with a couple of hundred dollars.
Otherwise you're right. I think a lot of people still have the romantic picture of Bonnie & Clyde or Hollywood style movies like Heat. The reality is that bank robbers nowadays are idiots. They're high on crack or otherwise don't know what they're doing. They are dumb. All bank robberies are investigated by the FBI, and these guys get caught.
This isn't just fear for the customers or perception, it's a dangerous situation where the loss is really not that great. Meanwhile a teller that tries to act like a hero could get himself or others shot, over a couple of hundred dollars.
Having worked as a bank teller, that figure is much, much lower.
So this claim surprised me -- I'm always willing to be wrong, but didn't think I was here -- so I went bouncing around in my backfiles to find the statistic I had quoted off the cuff.
It turns out, after following a few citations in papers, that the FBI keeps fairly accessible info on this.
> They only identify (catch?) 50% - but incredibly 95% of robbers can have their race identified (doesn't anyone wear masks anymore?)
A ski mask or similar does not necessarily obscure all racially identifying characteristics (e.g. you can see skin color, eye color, eye shape and often pick up the gist of bone structure — as well as hear their voice if they speak).
I was going to say something about the median being fairly lower, but looking through those stats and seeing only 215 vault robberies versus 4,870 robberies at the counter, I'm less confident that it is significantly lower. I believe I stand corrected. It may have been just my region, or my supervisors may have simply been mistaken.
> "The reality is that bank robbers nowadays are idiots"
Once when I was getting off the bus, a police car pulled up right in front of us, 3 more police cars pulled in behind the bus, and even more were approaching. The police pulled a guy off the bus and took a roll of cash out of his pocket and put it into an evidence bag. I found out later from the girl who'd been sitting next to him that the police asked him if he'd just robbed a bank and he confessed right there on the bus.
One of my bus driver friends told me it's common enough that they have a procedure for bank robberies -- their dispatch phone rings, they listen to a description of the bank robber, and if he's on their bus they call back with some sort of code word. Of course, the robbers think they're being oh-so-clever getting onto a city bus, because nobody would ever guess that's your getaway car.
This policy is just common sense - it applies to bank tellers, the gal minding the till at a coffee shop, the checkout grocer, the gas station attendant, etc. When someone attempts to physically steal from your business do not escalate. The risk of death or bodily injury is too great. Business assets can be insured against loss; human life can not.
What's the typesetting rule that causes a column every now and then to stray over the typical right-hand margin? (Like the last non-footnote line on the first page.) Or is it just a problem with my PDF reader?
It's not your PDF reader. It looks like this PDF has been generated with LaTex. It's quite common for the typesetting to overhang a word into the margin like that, I guess it's just to maintain the justification. If you can be bothered you can add hints into the LaTex markup to force breaks and hyphenation at certain points to alleviate it.
Yeah, it’s called an “overfull h-box” and occurs when TeX can’t find an acceptable way to justify the paragraph without stretching or shrinking the “glue” between words more than an acceptable amount. This happens more often in shorter lines, e.g. in narrow columns, because linebreaks are more frequent and there’s less glue to play with. Sometimes you can fix it by telling it how to hyphenate words it doesn’t know how to hyphenate by default. The rules are kind of complicated; one important consideration is that you need to be able to figure out how the part of the word before the hyphenation break is pronounced before reading the second part. I think “financially” could probably have been hyphenated on the first page to eliminate the overfull h-box, but it’s already part of a hyphenated word pair, so there’s probably a rule against that.
Minor rearrangement / rephrasing of the sentence is another common way to fix the problem. E.g. in this case, changing "it is" to "it's" on the previous line may have been enough to pull "stating" up a line, solving the immediate issue. Of course, this may cause a number of other overfull h-boxes later on.
While I understand why the problem exists, it really is one of the most perplexing issues with LaTeX, since it completely breaks through that layer of encapsulation that's supposed to be provided for you (i.e. you now care about specifics of the layout, which was supposed to be handled for you by the system).
i guess this is hoping too much, but does anyone know if there is an equivalent regulation here in chile that limits liability when money is taken from an account through fraud? banks aggressively sell "insurance" and i frequently argue with my account manager, saying the bank is legally responsible anyway, but i don't have any actual factual basis for that...
What surprised me is at the end - that "hacking" (for want of a better term) is less destructive socially when it is aimed at financial gain.
It is why society can handle bank robbers more easily than terrorists, and worryingly gives an attack vector - buy 100,000 credentials (if they exist) and just randomly move money around using scripts. The whole consumer banking system would be DDOSd as they reversed transactions, sorted out fraud and stopped people taking all their money out.
My favorite quote: "Thus, using what might be consid-
ered the lower bound in terms of security, US banks offer
the upper bound in protection: zero liability." I love that passwords are just flat out considered about the minimal you can do regarding security in such a quick sentence. Love it.
27 comments
[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 80.4 ms ] thread"In July 2009 a teller at a Key Bank branch in Seattle pursued a would-be robber after a botched hold-up attempt (Seattle Times, Aug. 1, 2009). He leapt over the counter, chased the man for several blocks, knocked him down, and held him until the police arrived. Two days later Key Bank fired the teller. He had violated long-standing bank policy to cooperate in every way and never resist a robbery. The reason for this policy, we suggest, is that banks understand a very simple principle: fear is bad for business. It is far better to comply with the demand than to risk a brawl, or a gun fight in the bank lobby. No bank wants the perception that they valued money more than customer and employee safety. The $40 million that traditional bank robbers in the US steal per year (FBI Bank Crime Statistics) is entirely manageable."
It's even simpler than that: no bank, and more importantly, no insurance company which carries banks as clients, wants to defend or settle a lawsuit alleging wrongful death through negligence of a would-be hero bank employee. The predicted loss of a bank robbery is high four figures. A wrongful death lawsuit would cost six or seven figures. This suggests a simple strategy which works fine: invest in the low-hanging fruit for physical security, comply with robbers, and pay for robberies out of the petty cash.
In the third world, I've seen banks with military/police with automatic weapons set up outside banks, or private security at the same level. (also, in these places, liability in the event of wrongful death is lower (or, by outsourcing to the government, you get to take advantage of sovereign immunity), and there is more cash on-site)
Not all countries have that./
In Central America, my house is fully encased in steel bars (in addition to a wall), so you'll need to spend a bit of time and noise getting in. And we have 24/7 armed guards on rotation, and the entire subdivision is walled off with ~15-20 foot gates.
A friend I know consulted on a few bank robbery cases and reviewed the security videos. The firepower the criminals would bring in was astounding. Big long machine gun (not rifle) type things. I believe I read reports of grenades/RPG or something, too.
Whereas in the states, none of the places I've lived would take much more than a pointed stick to get in.
Having worked as a bank teller, that figure is much, much lower. Often they'll only get away with a couple of hundred dollars.
Otherwise you're right. I think a lot of people still have the romantic picture of Bonnie & Clyde or Hollywood style movies like Heat. The reality is that bank robbers nowadays are idiots. They're high on crack or otherwise don't know what they're doing. They are dumb. All bank robberies are investigated by the FBI, and these guys get caught.
This isn't just fear for the customers or perception, it's a dangerous situation where the loss is really not that great. Meanwhile a teller that tries to act like a hero could get himself or others shot, over a couple of hundred dollars.
So this claim surprised me -- I'm always willing to be wrong, but didn't think I was here -- so I went bouncing around in my backfiles to find the statistic I had quoted off the cuff.
It turns out, after following a few citations in papers, that the FBI keeps fairly accessible info on this.
http://www.fbi.gov/stats-services/publications/bank-crime-st...
$7.5k per incident, give or take.
* No-one gets up early on a Monday to rob a bank,
* 1 in 10 bank robberies leave without a penny - one in ten !
* Perps die a lot more than anyone else.
* They only identify (catch?) 50% - but incredibly 95% of robbers can have their race identified (doesn't anyone wear masks anymore?)
* There is a high number (78% of those caught) of first time bank robbers. (Then again that might be obvious)
Well they can all go on my list of things I did not know yesterday.
A ski mask or similar does not necessarily obscure all racially identifying characteristics (e.g. you can see skin color, eye color, eye shape and often pick up the gist of bone structure — as well as hear their voice if they speak).
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/white-bank-robber-chang...
Interesting that even with those precautions he was still caught.
Once when I was getting off the bus, a police car pulled up right in front of us, 3 more police cars pulled in behind the bus, and even more were approaching. The police pulled a guy off the bus and took a roll of cash out of his pocket and put it into an evidence bag. I found out later from the girl who'd been sitting next to him that the police asked him if he'd just robbed a bank and he confessed right there on the bus.
One of my bus driver friends told me it's common enough that they have a procedure for bank robberies -- their dispatch phone rings, they listen to a description of the bank robber, and if he's on their bus they call back with some sort of code word. Of course, the robbers think they're being oh-so-clever getting onto a city bus, because nobody would ever guess that's your getaway car.
While I understand why the problem exists, it really is one of the most perplexing issues with LaTeX, since it completely breaks through that layer of encapsulation that's supposed to be provided for you (i.e. you now care about specifics of the layout, which was supposed to be handled for you by the system).
I saw on TVN some months ago the news of a couple doing this credit card fraud and the bank was returning the money, perhaps due to the public outcry.
What surprised me is at the end - that "hacking" (for want of a better term) is less destructive socially when it is aimed at financial gain.
It is why society can handle bank robbers more easily than terrorists, and worryingly gives an attack vector - buy 100,000 credentials (if they exist) and just randomly move money around using scripts. The whole consumer banking system would be DDOSd as they reversed transactions, sorted out fraud and stopped people taking all their money out.