{"id":90950,"date":"2023-03-19T14:57:35","date_gmt":"2023-03-19T19:57:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=90950"},"modified":"2023-03-19T14:58:29","modified_gmt":"2023-03-19T19:58:29","slug":"90950","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=90950","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

On Targets: Muggers Share Criminal Insight<\/a><\/p>\n

This is Part 1 of a three-part series in <\/i>Concealed Carry Magazine\u00a0analyzing what muggers look for when targeting victims and what you can do to avoid becoming one.<\/i><\/p>\n

It had been a normal day for Lee Michaels as he drove from pickup league hockey to his townhome in Brooklyn Park,\u00a0Minnesota<\/a>. The time was approximately 11:35 p.m. as he piloted his \u201999 Cadillac STS into the parking lot. As he neared the detached garage in front of his unit, he noticed a man riding a bike. Michaels briefly stopped to watch the man ride past him.\u00a0<\/span>He\u2019s got a blue jacket with red sleeves,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd he kind of rides on. So I circle the parking lot once just to make sure he cleared and, you know, keep an eye on things.\u201d<\/p>\n

Apart from taking these simple precautions, Michaels didn\u2019t worry about the man too much. Brooklyn Park is a bucolic place in the fall. Named by settlers after their hometown in\u00a0Michigan<\/a>, the city on the west bank of the Mississippi is a desirable bedroom community of Minneapolis and St. Paul. In 2020, the city was one of 111 Minnesota communities to earn the \u201cTree City USA\u201d award. Professional-wrestler-turned-politician Jesse Ventura had served as its mayor in the early 1990s.<\/span><\/p>\n

Michaels, at the time a 38-year-old production director for Clear Channel Radio, opened his garage door and pulled in. He put the car in reverse to light things up and closed it with his car still running.\u00a0<\/span>\u201cI\u2019m always thinking that if anybody jumps in behind me, I\u2019m taking off,\u201d he said.\u00a0Ten minutes went by as Michaels finished what he was listening to on the radio, downed what was left of his water and put away his hockey equipment. Only then did he step out of the garage through a side door.<\/span><\/p>\n

As he stepped out, he noticed a man coming around the corner maybe 30 feet away. As he closed the distance on Michaels, he swung wide on the sidewalk and asked for change. It was then that Michaels realized it was the same man who had biked past his car.\u00a0<\/span>\u201cSo I immediately glanced behind me because there\u2019s about four more garage stalls behind me,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd I\u2019m thinking, \u2018<\/span>Is there somebody behind me?\u2019 And there wasn\u2019t.\u201d\u00a0<\/span>Michaels turned back around and told the man that he had just come home from hockey and that he didn\u2019t have anything to give him. At that moment, another man stepped from around the same corner and aimed a semi-automatic handgun at Michaels.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWell you\u2019re going to give me something,\u201d he said menacingly.<\/span><\/p>\n

Immediately reaching into his pocket for his keys and wallet, Michaels laughed nervously as he handed over his valuables.\u00a0<\/span>\u201cYou got me, man,\u201d he said. \u201cHere you go. Have a good night.\u201d\u00a0The contents of his wallet included a $20 bill and one card for a free Chipotle burrito. Disgusted, the gunman pushed the wallet back at Michaels and told him that he had to have more than that.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cDude, it\u2019s right here,\u201d he stated. \u201cYou can see I\u2019ve got nothing else. I just came from hockey.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The gunman told Michaels that he was going to give more than that. He demanded that he get on his knees.\u00a0<\/span>This is not going to be good<\/i>, Michaels thought as he complied with the order. He looked up at the bedroom windows of his townhouse and was dismayed to see that his wife had gone to bed before he\u2019d come home. The man pushed the gun to his head and became irate.\u00a0<\/span>\u201cI\u2019m going to have to do you right now,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m going to f******* do you right now.\u201d\u00a0<\/span>The first thought to go through Michaels\u2019 mind was that his wife was going to find him, hours later, face down on the sidewalk, dead.<\/p>\n

Gosh, this is not a good situation<\/i>, he told himself.<\/span><\/p>\n

A Daunting Assignment<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

Like countless Americans before him, Michaels was the victim of a mugging, which is a form of robbery \u2014 itself legally defined as theft by way of threatened or actual force. Muggings are different from other forms of robbery in that their perpetrators target people (as opposed to banks or stores) and attack in public (as opposed to home invasions).<\/span><\/p>\n

Because it is not recorded as a separate crime, it\u2019s difficult to pin down how many muggings are committed in the U.S. in a given year. But according to FBI crime statistics, there were 81.6 robberies per 100,000 people in 2019, the most recent year for which data is available. This is significantly down from 133.1 robberies per 100,000 people 10 years prior in 2009.1<\/sup><\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Despite the downward trend, muggings are still a pernicious problem \u2014 mainly in urban areas. Even our political elites are not immune. Former U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer was recently walking the streets of Oakland,\u00a0California<\/a>, when she was shoved in the back and relieved of an expensive iPhone. \u201cWhy would you do this to a grandmother?\u201d she shouted at the fleeing assailants according to a news story published by\u00a0<\/span>The Independent<\/i>.2<\/sup><\/b><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

In Fall 2020, the editors of\u00a0<\/span>Concealed Carry Magazine<\/i>\u00a0asked me to report and write a series of articles on muggings. Largely based on the results of a survey I was to administer to muggers currently incarcerated at prisons throughout the U.S., I was to analyze the data, look for trends and try to find meaningful insights into how readers can\u00a0avoid becoming victims themselves<\/a>.\u00a0<\/span>It was a tall order, especially given that prison officials are famously reluctant to deal with the press. Despite these initial misgivings, I said \u201cyes\u201d to the assignment and immediately got to work.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

One of the first things I did was to open a P.O. Box in the City of Chico, California, which is several miles away from my small town in the Sierra Foothills. This was a safety precaution so as to not reveal my home address to any inmates with whom I would correspond via mail.\u00a0<\/span>The next order of business was to reach out to the departments of corrections for all 50 states, trying to obtain information on who was incarcerated for robbery. Most emails and calls went unanswered, while a representative from the\u00a0Idaho<\/a>\u00a0Department of Corrections flat out said he \u201cdidn\u2019t have the time\u201d to deal with my request. And so it went for the next few months.<\/p>\n

Breakthrough in Oregon<\/h3>\n

My first breakthrough came the following spring when I got in touch with Nickie Basinger, a cheerful communications coordinator for\u00a0Oregon<\/a>\u2019s Department of Corrections. After a brief email exchange, I had my hands on an Excel spreadsheet containing the names of more than 1,600 Oregon inmates convicted of robbery.\u00a0<\/span>Now knowing better what to ask for, I obtained similar lists from\u00a0Arizona<\/a>,\u00a0Pennsylvania<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Florida<\/a>. I then used a\u00a0Montana<\/a>-based printing service to mail 3,200 surveys to inmates in various prisons in all four of those states.<\/p>\n

Shortly after, I was informed by Executive Editor Kevin Michalowski that my Arizona surveys were being tossed in the garbage. He had been in touch with a sergeant for mail and property at the Arizona State Prison Complex Tucson, who told him the survey was deemed contraband. Only a handful of the 800 surveys sent to inmates in prisons in the Grand Canyon State had slipped through the cracks.<\/span><\/p>\n

Similarly, most of the 800 surveys sent to inmates in prisons in the State of Florida had disappeared into the void without explanation. Only three completed Florida surveys made it back to my P.O. Box. After I sent out another batch of 800 surveys to shore up my results, I was left with 142 completed surveys by late summer \u2014 the vast majority coming from Oregon and Pennsylvania. The response rate was just over 3.5%.<\/span><\/p>\n

This was not altogether horrible, considering that an untold number of surveys were sent to incarcerated robbers who hadn\u2019t committed a mugging \u2014 robbery was as far as I could narrow it down \u2014 that the survey was on paper (not online) and unincentivized, and that prisoners had to pay for their own stamps and writing materials.<\/span><\/p>\n

As the results came in, I fed the survey data into an Excel spreadsheet. I was struck by how many of the inmates had scribbled notes in the margins or had included detailed, hand-written letters explaining their situations and how they came to be incarcerated. One even supplied a photo. There was only one crank who wrote, \u201cF*** You Brood Bitch\u201d and \u201cWe Hate Snitches!\u201d across his uncompleted survey. The vast majority of respondents took the enterprise seriously.<\/span><\/p>\n

Although I was initially skeptical that 142 responses would be enough, my wife Carroll \u2014 an assistant professor at California State University, Chico \u2014 assured me this wasn\u2019t the case. With a Ph.D. in agricultural and resource economics, she was used to working with large data sets. And she said the number of responses was more than adequate for the \u201claw of large numbers\u201d to kick in, tamping down statistical noise and allowing for meaningful results to come from the data.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAnd so with that number,\u201d she said, \u201cassuming that we got a decent random sampling \u2014 so that these aren\u2019t somehow all concentrated in a specific group of people with some unusual characteristics \u2014 we have enough people that it\u2019s most likely representative of the larger\u00a0<\/span>group of prisoners.\u201d\u00a0<\/span>She tested this hypothesis by using a program called \u201cStata\u201d \u2014 used for analyzing data sets \u2014 to isolate the results from Pennsylvania and Oregon (the two states that comprised the majority of the responses). While there were some differences between the states, none of those differences were statistically significant.\u00a0\u201cThat boosts your expectation that your survey responses are valid,\u201d she indicated, \u201cand that your sample is large enough to have something that<\/span>\u2019s perhaps representative of other states and other populations of prisoners.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The Results<\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n

The survey itself was a simple, one-page affair, with questions on the front and instructions and a space for inmates to write down their contact information on the back.<\/span><\/p>\n

Question No. 1 asked, \u201cWhich of the following behaviors or attributes would make you more likely to target a victim?\u201d and then lists 23 specific behaviors \u2014 ranging from \u201cwearing earbud headphones\u201d to \u201cwalking with a cane.\u201d<\/span><\/h4>\n

The four behaviors or attributes marked by more than 50% of respondents seem to indicate an appealing target and the right opportunity:<\/span><\/p>\n