3 Victim Selection Procedures Among Economic Criminals: The Rational Choice Perspective

There are three chapters dealing with robbery in this volume, and we are now beginning to know almost as much about this crime as about burglary. In this chapter Dermot Walsh performs two important tasks: First, he contrasts the decision-making activities of commercial burglars and robbers, and second, he paints a vivid picture of the nature of the criminal's sources of information and the way in which this is handled during the processes of assessment and planning which precede the criminal event. His starting point is the distinction between normative and bounded rationality, which is a persistent theme throughout this volume. Walsh goes on to report on the results of his retrospective interviews with imprisoned burglars and robbers about their techniques of victim/target selection and rejection. Although his data indicate differences in decision making both within burglary and robbery as broad crime categories, and between burglars and robbers—results that bear out the need for crime-specific analyses—some of his most interesting findings relate to characteristics common to both. He provides a fascinating sketch of the subterranean "knowledge market" where "leakmen " and "knowledge brokers " peddle information about likely opportunities to supplement that already gathered by the criminal through personal observation during his or her daily routine and via the social networks of family, work, or leisure. Walsh's description of the stages of assessment and planning—the emergence of potential schemes and the exploration of their viability through negative thinking and flaw hunting—have much in common with the methods adopted by Carroll and Weaver's expert shoplifters to discount situational deterrents by immediately itemizing facilitators. More generally, these techniques suggest the operation of information-processing strategies (the "editing" activities of prospect theory; contingent processing; "satisficing") dis-cussed in part 2 of this volume. The discussion of attitudes to risk, the importance of previous experience, and the roles of luck and fatalism provide pointers to how sudden hazards during commission of the crime (and prior anxieties about these possibilities) may be handled. Similar proportions of Walsh's samples of commercial burglars and robber