Bank Robberies Drop in Valley and Southland

Bank robberies hit a decade low in Southern California last year, but despite the improvement, Los Angeles retained its dubious distinction as the bank robbery capital of the nation, with bandits more prone to violence in committing their crimes.

“We always lead the nation in the number of bank robberies,” said FBI spokeswoman Laura Bosley. “Nobody even comes close to us.”

The 1,122 robberies committed throughout Southern California last year represented a 7% decline from the previous year, FBI spokesman John Hoos said. Takeover robberies--in which armed thieves hold a bank’s customers and employees hostage as opposed to confronting a lone teller--dropped by 10% to 185.

The San Fernando Valley, which has historically attracted a wealth of thieves due in part to its easy freeway access, also experienced a slight dip, with 133 robberies, 26 of which were takeovers. In 1994, there were 137 robberies, 31 takeovers among them.

Despite the decline, the level of violence used to carry out the robberies rose, with more gunshots fired inside the banks and more customers and employees assaulted or robbed.

Still, 1995 was the third consecutive year in which robberies decreased throughout the FBI’s Southern California Region, which includes Los Angeles, Orange, Ventura, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara counties.

“Hopefully, they’ll keep going down,” Hoos said. “But if the new year is any sort of indication, we started off Jan. 2 with 10 robberies.”

The bulk of the region’s bank robberies were carried out in Los Angeles County, where there were 761, better than one-third more than the 544 reported by the FBI’s entire San Francisco region.

The Southland’s high robbery rate is attributed to several factors, including a massive branch banking system--roughly 3,500 banks in a 40,000-square-mile area--and sprawling freeways that make getaways easy.

The crimes produce quick cash to pay for drugs and gambling, among other things.

“Roughly 80% of the robberies are drug-related,” the FBI’s Bosley said.

But in recent years, police and bankers have addressed such problems with increasing success. They credit the continued decline in robberies to more effective security measures and improved partnerships between financial institutions and local law enforcement.

The changes came after the problem hit a decade high in 1992, when 2,641 banks were robbed in the region. Perhaps not coincidentally, investigators noted that 1992 was also the year of the historic Los Angeles riots, during which gun and pawn shops were looted, making weapons more accessible to criminals.

“As a result, we saw gangs graduating from robbing 7-Eleven stores to hitting banks,” Bosley said.

To counter the tide of violence, police began sharing their information on gangs with bankers, who in turn began sharing robbery information with authorities and each other.

The new lines of communication helped police infiltrate local gangs and make key arrests. At the same time, the banks stepped up security by hiring more guards and installing bulletproof teller shields and state-of-the-art surveillance cameras.

But making banks more difficult to rob may have come at the expense of armored car guards’ security, particularly in the San Fernando Valley, where five were shot outside banks in 1995. Another guard was killed in front of a Long Beach bank.

The shootings include:

*A Feb. 16 robbery in which Mynor Godinez, a Brink’s guard, was shot in the face during a holdup outside a North Hollywood bank.

*Four months later, Herman Cook, 52, another Brink’s guard, was shot and killed and his partner seriously injured in an ambush outside a Bank of America branch in Winnetka.

*Another Brink’s guard was seriously wounded and a robber was fatally shot when two men used a wheelchair as a distraction and unsuccessfully tried to rob an armored truck in August in front of a Sylmar bank.

*An Armored Transport guard was shot in the wrist and leg during an ambush attack as he emerged from an Encino bank in November.

*Fernando Hererra, a 24-year-old Brink’s guard, was shot and killed during a robbery attempt last month outside a Long Beach bank.

Though no formal statistics on the number of armored car guard robberies are tallied by the FBI or the California Bankers Assn., the Los Angeles Police Department estimates that there were at least seven last year in the city of Los Angeles.