Clumsy Crooks: Are They Just Plain Stupid or Are They Tempting Fate?

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.

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. 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.

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.”

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

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.