Banking Without Security : Robbery: Suburban financial institutions are groping for a strategy to confront the record pace of hold-ups.

If Los Angeles is the nation’s bank robbery capital, the San Fernando Valley and surrounding areas are its hub of activity.

Spurred by gangs that are finding easier targets in suburbia, bank heists in the Valley and Ventura County are occurring at a record pace this year--more than 470 so far. The upsurge has forced Wells Fargo and First Interstate to put up a wall of bullet-resistant shields in front of teller windows at some Valley branches, and experts say there are more guards posted at Los Angeles-area banks than ever before.

But such extra security steps are rare. With the average Los Angeles robber walking out with $2,500, and banks and S & Ls more concerned with bad real estate loans and internal problems--embezzlement and check fraud are 10 times more costly than robberies to financial institutions--bankers have little incentive to make big changes.

“When banks relax their guard, it doesn’t take long for people on the street to realize it,” said Dennis Dalton, a former security director at Continental Bank of Chicago and now a consultant in Fremont. California banks have cut security budgets in recent years, according to Dalton, “in an effort to get lean and mean.”

Bank of A. Levy has been robbed a dozen times this year, compared to one robbery all last year. Despite that, “our security budget is pretty nominal, and it hasn’t increased,” said David Emery, vice president of audit and security at Bank of A. Levy, Ventura County’s largest bank, with 20 branches.

Emery believes “an increased security budget wouldn’t make much difference. If somebody wants to rob a bank, he’ll just pick a place and rob it--and there isn’t too much anybody can do.”

Although the FBI says more than 80% of Los Angeles-area bank robbers are eventually arrested, some analysts contend that banks and S & Ls aren’t spending enough for security, thus contributing to the rise in robberies. Greater Los Angeles had 2,355 bank holdups last year, more than any other urban area in the nation. Through last weekend, 2,327 bank robberies had taken place this year.

Bankers attribute the surge in robberies mostly to the economy, not anything they have or haven’t done. “Robberies have picked up as the economy’s come down,” said John Marquis, senior vice president of Sherman Oaks-based TransWorld Bank, which has nine Valley branches.

But some bankers say there is more the industry can do.

“There are too many banks and branches in the Valley without guards,” said Frank Ures, president of American Pacific State Bank, also in Sherman Oaks. If it’s because they’re trying to cut costs, he said, “they’re being penny-wise and pound-foolish.”

Ures has a uniformed guard at each of American Pacific’s five branches. Some of them are armed. He says the bank hasn’t been robbed in five years.

Ures, 51, doesn’t find it easy to talk about bank robberies--he doesn’t want to reveal too much about security for fear of aiding a robber.

There’s another reason Ures is uncomfortable with the subject. “Have you had a damn gun pointed to your head?” he begins, his voice rising with emotion. Back in 1975, one morning at 10:15, Ures recalled, four guys stormed into his bank in Sun Valley.

“They sprayed the cameras with black paint. They cut all the telephone lines and jumped over the counter. One put a gun over my head. They got us to open the vault and took $53,000. It was a terrible experience. My secretary was shaking so hard, I had to grab her trembling hands.”

Today, Ures takes extra precautions. “I try to take different routes home, I constantly look at my rear-view mirror.”

Through early November, there were 386 bank robberies this year in the Valley--7% more than all of last year, and more than double the total in 1990. And in Ventura County, the 86 robberies so far this year is double last year’s pace.

“It was pretty quiet there for a long time,” observed Lt. Ken Lady, head of the Los Angeles Police Department’s bank robbery section. “But crooks are just more mobile, and they’ve found the Valley.”

The numerous heists in Los Angeles have been attributed to the area’s many branches--about 3,500 in greater Los Angeles--extended banking hours, vast spaces and multiple freeways. But the FBI points to another reason that robberies are spreading to the Valley, Orange County and other outlying areas.

“In the high-crime areas in the central city, the banks went to bulletproof barriers and armed guards a long time ago,” said FBI Special Agent William J. Rehder, who has investigated bank robberies for 25 years and coordinates those investigations in Los Angeles. “That pushed the bank robber into areas that are less protected and more open.”

First Interstate’s branch in Valencia provides a prime example. Situated on a major street very close to the Golden State Freeway, the branch has been robbed three times this year. Workers say there is no guard posted there, and others say it doesn’t help that the branch has two open entrances and relatively few customers.

After the second robbery, the branch posted “Wanted” pictures of the heavy-set, mustachioed suspect on its doors and the sandy-colored columns inside. Today, bank officials are more likely to ask a suspicious-looking visitor for identification.

Don Tokunaga, First Interstate’s director of security, won’t say whether that branch will install a “bandit barrier,” the industry vernacular for the two-inch-thick, bullet-resistant plexiglass that encloses a teller area, usually from the counter to the ceiling with only a slit for banking transactions. But Tokunaga said his bank planned to put up half a dozen barriers at branches in and around the Valley.

“You’re going to see about a doubling of bandit barriers in Southern California,” he said.

Tim Smith, the West Coast agent for Michigan-based Insulgard, which makes the bandit barrier, sold his first one at a branch in downtown Los Angeles in 1979. But until the last couple of years, “banks weren’t interested,” he said. “Today, business is brisk.”

But bandit barriers can run up to as much as $100,000 per branch. So only about 100 offices in the Los Angeles area have them, according to Bill Wipprecht, head of security for Wells Fargo.

“The idea of the barrier is that the robber will find it an obstacle and go elsewhere,” said Wipprecht, adding that to date, only two of the 70 Wells Fargo branches in California with such shields have been robbed.

Wells branches were robbed 99 times last year. Like most big banks, Wells isn’t insured for robbery. With a couple of thousand dollars per incident, and increasing expenses for therapy for shaken employees and workers’ compensation, the losses can add up for a large bank. And every now and then there is a big loss, as when crooks made off with $430,000 from a Wells Fargo branch in Tarzana a year ago.

Most of the dozen banks interviewed wouldn’t discuss which security devices they use, although they all said they conform to standards set by the federal Bank Protection Act, which lays down broad guidelines for the use of surveillance cameras, vault sizes and other procedures.

Yet many banks concede that they don’t have a full-time security director or a specific plan of attack. Too often, security analysts say, banks take a quick-fix approach, stationing a guard, for example, at a branch shortly after a robbery has taken place there.

For many, the extra security expense is a major consideration, especially as California banks struggle with mounting real estate losses and a poor economy. Experts say some banks may be wondering whether it’s feasible to invest $5,000 on a dye-pack system--a device hidden in a stack of bills stored in drawers--that a teller activates to explode indelible red ink over stolen money.

Another possibility is a new microchip transmitter that some area banks are using to track stolen money.

That device costs about $2,400 a year to lease and operate.

Bank of A. Levy, for example, doesn’t post armed guards because officials believe that guards increase the chance of violence during robberies. And other banks are reluctant to install bandit barriers because, they say, the shields detract from a friendly environment.

“It’s pretty tough to be personal behind two inches of plexiglass,” said Marquis of TransWorld Bank. “The customer feels isolated and cut off.”

Others worry that a bandit barrier, while protecting tellers behind the shields, might increase the risk to other employees and customers should a frustrated robber decide to take a hostage.

“It’s one of the downsides of the barriers,” said a bank spokesman. “Only half the branch is protected.”

Bank Robberies

Bank robberies in the Valley and Ventura County areas are occurring in record numbers this year.

CITY OF SAN FERNANDO VENTURA YEAR LOS ANGELES VALLEY COUNTY 1992* 764 386 86 1991 810 361 52 1990 509 164 43

* Through Nov. 7.

Sources: FBI and Los Angeles Police Department