Stupidity Often Foils Criminals : Many Tripped Up by Their Own Ineptness

A lesson from Residential Burglary 101: Don’t carry your loot in a pillowcase, especially not in broad daylight.

A Los Angeles transient must have skipped that class. A private security guard recently saw him toting a bulging pillowcase down Willowcrest Avenue in Studio City and summoned police. Officer Don Taylor, who arrested the man March 4, was amused but not surprised.

“They often use pillowcases,” he said. “It’s so obvious.”

Indeed, some criminals never learn the basics of crime and have a knack for the obvious, the inept or the just plain dumb.

Sometimes their goofs lead to their capture or conviction, and police stations everywhere have stories about robbers who leave behind their driver’s licenses or burglars who take their own pictures with stolen cameras and forget to remove the incriminating film before resale.

“Quite a few of them have been caught once the film is developed,” a criminologist said.

“They just don’t think,” a veteran lawman said.

Bad Luck or Ineptitude

Entertainment value aside, the stupid mistakes of criminals--and their likely causes--explain a little about how common thieves operate and what’s going on in their minds during a crime, criminologists say. These experts say the mistakes reflect not only a criminal’s ineptitude or bad luck, but his bravado, nervousness and impulsiveness.

Consider, for example, the wanted criminal who brazenly walks into a police station to bail out a buddy in jail but ends up getting nabbed himself. Police say such arrests by the station’s front desk happen with surprising frequency. Lt. William Gaida of the Los Angeles Police Department said many wanted felons are arrested while trying to get their cars out of impound.

Said Lt. Hank Carrillo of the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department: “They just don’t think they will get caught.”

But Marcus Felson, a criminologist and senior research associate with the Social Science Research Institute at USC, offered a deeper explanation. He said many criminals are “short-term hedonists” who get a thrill out of tempting fate by walking into the lion’s den.

Dr. Martin Reiser, director of Behavioral Sciences Services for the Los Angeles Police Department, agreed.

Reiser added that some criminals insist on doing things the hard way because they need to demonstrate their control over a situation. Some burglars, for example, will climb up the side of a building to a second- or third-story apartment rather than break into a convenient first-floor unit.

Some Are Stupid

Then again, Reiser had a simpler explanation for felons walking into police stations: “Most of these folks are not rocket scientists in terms of intellect.”

Stupidity also may explain the incredible actions of an armed robber who Los Angeles police Detective Chris Biller recalls with some fondness. The incident happened in Van Nuys about 10 years ago, and as Biller tells it--with snippets of dialogue included--the event went like this:

A man rushed into a liquor store on Victory Boulevard waving a gun with his right hand while his left hand was pressed against his face, apparently to hide the fact he had neglected to bring a mask.

The frightened clerk emptied the cash register and placed the money on the counter. The robber, both hands occupied, ordered the clerk to stuff the money into his gun hand. The clerk turned obstinate and refused.

Finally, the frustrated robber set the gun on the counter and grabbed the money. The clerk, meanwhile, grabbed the gun.

“Give me my gun back!” the robber yelled, his hand still covering his face.

“Give me my money!”

The clerk, who wasn’t too smart himself, threw the gun out the open door. The would-be robber dropped the money, ran for his gun and never came back.

The failed liquor store robbery may underscore what Felson calls the spontaneous element of street crime. Many common criminals are young men with little experience or education and do not plan their actions.

“A lot of what they do is by accident,” Felson said. “It’s opportunistic. They see things and they grab it.”

Moreover, criminals are often nervous and have little time to analyze a situation, Felson said. “You’ve got to remember that the average offense takes 10 to 20 seconds. Offenders are very quick and not very thorough,” he said.

Take, for example, the prisoner who escaped the Peter J. Pitchess Honor Rancho in Saugus last July. The man broke into a cabin near Lake Castaic and changed into stolen street clothes.

He also left his uniform clearly stamped “L.A. County Jail” sitting beside a ransacked closet. A police dog named Rocky traced his scent and found the inmate a short time later.

Yet for every criminal who makes a dumb mistake, there are plenty more who plan their exploits with professionalism, criminologists and police agreed. “There are a whole lot of crooks out there so smart we don’t even know they’re there,” said Lt. Jay Farrand of the Burbank Police Department.

But if nothing else, clumsy crooks provide police with a few good stories. Some examples:

Last November two men armed with a knife and gun tried to enter a home on South Brighton Street in Burbank by posing as police officers serving a warrant. The resident did not believe the ploy, called police and shouted through the closed front door that the real officers were on their way.

The two men, who had a Camaro parked at the curb, decided to run and were caught five blocks away. “If they had been smart, they would have run to their car,” Lt. Joe Valento said.

Many burglars have taken their own pictures with stolen cameras, but the thieves who broke into the Kirk o’ the Valley Presbyterian Church in Reseda last October were more thorough. Detective Biller said the two men used a stolen videotape camera to record themselves fixing and eating dinner.

While the video was not what led to their arrest, Biller said, it certainly helped prosecutors make a convincing case in court.

Lt. Robert Klanser of the Simi Valley Police Department recalled the time a man robbed a 7-Eleven and led police on a hectic foot chase through a residential neighborhood. The robber hopped over a fence, ran up to a man standing by a parked car and said: “Help me! The cops are after me. Give me a ride.”

The man happened to be Klanser. “We did give him a ride,” he said.