Yeah, many of us that grew up in SoCal recall the heist that led to the so called 'assault weapon' ban, it was completely legal to have a long barrel rifle with 30 round magazines in CA prior to that--they could be open-carried if not loaded back then if I recall correctly, too.<p>This was around the time of the LA riots in the 90s, too... which in my mind all happened at the same time as I recall being a kid sat in front of the TV not far from it all and being shocked at the level of wanton destruction.<p>California was always a wild place since its inception and before it was ever a part of the US--many who live here don't even realize that California (both alta and baja) pre-dates the existence of the US and British colonialism by a significant margin.<p>LA in the 80s was also Ground Zero for Gang warfare in the US, so us multi-generationals lived through that and adapted and we are am entirely different breed to the transplants and the rest of the US as fires and earthquakes were also taking place alongside those events, as those didn't stop either.<p>And while I personally have no desire to live in CA anytime soon, except the occasional visit, I'm glad so many decided to leave since COVID. In a decade or two it may look like and feel as it did when I was a kid in the 90s and I may be tempted to go back.
When pundits --on either side of the pollical spectrum--talk about how bad America is or how things are on the verge of collapse societally, show them stats such as this. By almost every metric, as bad as things may seem, they were objectively worse decades ago. Yeah, it feels like people are angrier than ever, especially online, but Twitter is not real life.<p>A combination of increased tech surveillance, longer prison sentences, and bank tellers holding very little cash--all of these factors make bank robbery much less lucrative than it was in the past.
It’s interesting as an older person to realize that Americans born in the 90s and later have no real concept of the amount of crime and violence that was widespread in US.
Whenever the high crime rates in the 70s-90s is brought up I like to remind folks this was likely an aberration with a specific environmental cause (lead), rather than representative of human nature.<p>This [1] is an eye-opening roundup of ~25 major studies that support the lead-crime hypothesis, including comparisons across countries & cultures. The evidence is pretty overwhelming and certainly changed my perspective on human nature, which for me had previously been influenced by both growing up around the violence in CA in the 80s-90s and the media culture that depicted and sensationalized it.<p>If you walk away from this thinking 'oh, humans are a lot less violent than I thought they were', you might find other beliefs built on top of that assumption also follow. These types of perspective shifts in life are rare, and very powerful.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/02/an-updated-lead-crime-roundup-for-2018/" rel="nofollow">https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/02/an-updated-le...</a>
It does remind me of <i>Point Break</i>:<p><pre><code> HARP
This is us. Bank Robbery. And
you're in the bank-robbery capital
of the world--
UTAH
1322 last year in LA county. Up 26
percent from the year before.
HARP
That's right. And we nailed over a
thousand of them. We did it by
crunching data. Good crime-scene
work, good lab work, and most importantly
good data-base analysis. Special agent Utah.
Are you receiving my signal?
UTAH
Zero distortion, sir.</code></pre>
Not that it drastically improves the statement, but the tagline for the article<p>> a bank was robbed every hour of every day.<p>But the article itself clarifies they mean "each banking day" and the worst year had about seven robberies a day. Still a shocking amount, but not the 24 a day implied.
The 80s were a crime paradise.--drug gangs, mafia, wall st white collar crime, informercial scams, televangelist and cult scams --you name it, it all thrived in the 80s.
> In 1980s Los Angeles, a bank was robbed every hour of every day.<p>> 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<p>these are not the same statement. 'average ~1 per hour while banks are open' isn't the same as 'minimum 1 per hour', nor is it the same as 'every hour of every day'
I grew up (in the 80s) by a bank that was routinely robbed. It was conveniently located by a freeway on ramp and had a drive thru.<p>Over time they closed the drive thru and eventually removed direct street access to the bank to try to discourage robbers.<p>Ah the good old days.
In present day Los Angeles people that work in banks take their computers off their desks and lock them away because they know they'll be broken in to. I did support for some of them.
With the massive unemployment and SBA fraud these days [1,2,3], the "banks" are being robbed every minute just in a quieter way.<p>[1] <a href="https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/05/u-s-secret-service-massive-fraud-against-state-unemployment-insurance-programs/" rel="nofollow">https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/05/u-s-secret-service-massi...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-10-29/small-business-administration-10-000-grant-fraud-went-viral-hurting-program" rel="nofollow">https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-10-29/small-bus...</a><p>[3] <a href="https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-12-21/california-precautions-ignored-employment-development-department" rel="nofollow">https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-12-21/californ...</a>
I'm in the middle of the book Days of Rage, which is about some of the violent protest movements in the 70s. Really amazing how many bombings there were back then too. Thousands per year in some cases IIRC. Most were small and did not do much damage or kill anyone however.
> By 2013, the number was down to 212, one tenth of what it had been in its worst year. For the first time since the early 1960s, L.A. officially lost its title to the San Francisco Bay Area.<p>The real interesting tidbit was at the end I found... I wonder why SF?
> 1992, the worst year of all, there was an almost unimaginable 2,641 heists, one every 45 minutes of each banking day.<p>Point Break came out in 1991. I wonder if that inspired some people.<p>For those that don't know, the plot is that a bunch of LA surfers knock off banks so they can spend the rest of their time surfing, and get away with it for a long time.
I think this aspect is also worth considering:
<a href="https://www.thebillfold.com/2012/05/only-an-idiot-would-rob-a-bank-how-inflation-deflated-the-stick-up/" rel="nofollow">https://www.thebillfold.com/2012/05/only-an-idiot-would-rob-...</a>