ATM Crime Rate is Low Compared to Anguish Level

You are more likely to be struck by lightning than to be held up at an automated teller machine. But in these nerve-racking times, it has come to this: Tony Johnson never goes to an ATM at night anymore without a gun.

And he’s not the only one who is hip these days to the cost-benefit ratio of this most cherished of modern banking conveniences. Malisa Robles won’t visit a bank machine after dark unless it’s in a grocery store, and R. Rex Parris won’t use the infernal things at all.

On Tuesday, in the wake of third murder in three months at a Los Angeles County automated teller machine, customers like Johnson, Robles and Parris--none of whom has ever been attacked at an ATM--were again repressing the urge to murmur, “I told you so.” As rewards totaling $35,000 were proffered for the person who killed Gerald J. Anderson at 3:15 a.m. Sunday at a Crenshaw district bank machine, public concern again focused on the security of ATMs.

In Los Angeles, where scores of ATMs in high-crime areas already are shut down after dark, City Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas proposed that the curfew apply to bank machines citywide. Meanwhile, police and bank officials warned for the umpteenth time that customers need to be street-smart about the convenience of the self-service machines.

Beyond the anguish and frustration, interviews with bankers, customers and security experts indicated that a more subtle reality has taken hold: Rare as they are, ATM holdups--like carjackings and airplane bombs--have settled into the public consciousness as one more lethal given in modern life.

“There have been attempts to control this, and it just doesn’t seem to abate,” said John Kennish, a Connecticut-based security consultant who specializes in financial institutions.

“There have been administrative controls, customer education efforts, facility design changes, application of guards,” Kennish said. “The problem is the commodity being transacted is cash, and that creates an instant target for criminals.”

Statistically, police and bank officials say, the rate of ATM crime is very small--so small, in fact, that Los Angeles police, who are among the few agencies that track it, had to do a special computer run on Tuesday when asked for the current figures, and could not produce them by the end of the day.

But a 1992 survey by the California Bankers Assn. found that 499 ATM crimes occurred statewide out of 599 million transactions at 6,677 machines, or one crime per 1.2 million transactions. LAPD figures for the following year logged an average of about 20 ATM robberies and assaults per month citywide.

Since then, security measures undertaken by banks and police, including the installation of ATMs in police stations, supermarkets and convenience stores, have whittled ATM crime to “minuscule” levels, said Det. Robert Johansen of the West Valley Division.

Nevertheless, a recent survey by the Chicago-based Bank Administration Institute found that 55% of the bank customers who avoid ATMs do so because they’re scared.

R. Rex Parris, a Lancaster attorney who has represented victims of ATM violence in civil suits against banks, said customers correctly suspect that banks too often put profit before safety in installing ATMs and are seldom held accountable in court.

Parris said that in one of his recent cases, involving a man gunned down at a Lancaster ATM, a bank official testified that “they knew there would be robberies, but it was cheaper to put the machine where they put it . . . in the back of the bank where there was no exposure to the street.”

Such knowledge, he said, has soured him on ATMs. “Nobody in my family has an ATM card. They’re dangerous,” he said.

Bill Wipprecht, past chairman of the California Bankers Assn. security committee, vehemently disagrees with Parris’ characterizations. The problem, he said, is street crime in general, adding that banks have gone to great lengths to curb it at ATMs.

But as senior vice president and director of security for Wells Fargo Bank, Wipprecht said, he has had varying degrees of success. Over the past decade, he said, he has posted guards at some of Wells Fargo’s 2,338 ATMs, installed panic buttons and video cameras and enclosed the machines in locked vestibules accessible only with key cards.

He has experimented with closed-circuit TV monitors that give customers a live-action view of the people in line behind them, and hooked up automatic spotlights that come on when a customer approaches the machines.

But no single device has been without its downside, he said, and some have been downright flops. The panic buttons, which were tried in Oakland, yielded a bumper crop of false alarms, he said. The thick glass vestibules, erected in San Francisco, proved a magnet for street people, who would slip in behind customers, prop open the doors and bunk down inside for the night.

Of all the measures, he said, there was only one silver bullet: A decision two years ago to shut down the machines at about 20 branches in high-crime neighborhoods across the state after dark.

Customers were unhappy about the loss of convenience, but “it was the old 80-20 rule,” Wipprecht said. “Most of the ATM robberies were being committed at a very few machines.”

Like most bank security employees, Wipprecht would not disclose precisely how many crimes occur annually at his bank’s ATMs, except to say that the number of robberies, attempted robberies and petty thefts at Wells Fargo ATMs statewide dropped about 35% after the shutdowns in problem areas.

Even so, Wells Fargo was unable to prevent the July 17 slaying of 23-year-old Corey Stanfield at its drive-up ATM on San Bernardino Road in Covina. A devout Christian, Stanfield had stopped by the bank on his way home from church about 10:30 p.m. and was shot as he leaned out to get some cash.

It was Stanfield’s death, captured by a bank security camera, that cemented the decision by Malisa Robles, 27, a San Dimas office manager who attended his church, to limit her nighttime bank transactions to ATMs in grocery stores.

“I’m a lot more cautious now,” she said.

Ditto for Tony Johnson, 41, who gestured toward a pack slung over his shoulder when he was asked how safe he felt at the Baldwin Hills-area ATM where he was standing about 9:20 Monday night.

A school police officer, Johnson said he never goes to ATMs alone at night without his pack and the gun it holds. Nonetheless, he added, he--like most Americans--wouldn’t dream of doing without his neighborhood bank machine.

Times correspondent Maki Becker contributed to this story