The Federal Bureau of Investigation has approximately 30,000 computerized robbery case files that banks use to get details about crimes and arrests. But due to scant resources and limitations on technology, much of the data in the system falls woefully short of what the banking industry needs.
In some cases, the information is incomplete or outdated because local law enforcement officials are slow in reporting robberies to the FBI. And the antiquated system makes it difficult to analyze the data for emerging trends.
"Some information that's important for us is not in the current reporting," says Stephanie Clarke, the Tacoma, Wash.-based national manager for physical security services at KeyBank in Cleveland. "Things like, what contributed to an arrest, how was that person arrested, and was it from security measures we had in place?"
So Clarke and other security officials at major banks are spearheading a project with the American Bankers Association to develop a more modern robbery database. Two years in the making, the system, called BanCAPture, allows banks to submit robbery details directly to the FBI, rather than through local law enforcement agencies, so that the bureau can more quickly analyze the data and help banks improve their security. Just as importantly, the database will also allow banks to share crime information with each other, oftentimes leading to more immediate alerts to potential threats in banks' geographic areas.
"It gives us a much better means to clearly identify and analyze trends that are occurring, and to quickly recognize where we're having an increase in robberies," says Terry Huskey, a Charlotte, N.C.-based senior vice president and physical security director for Wells Fargo. "It also offers us an opportunity to join forces and tackle the problem together as opposed to try to adjust it individually."
Though BanCAPture is technically still in a test phase, several large banks are already using it-enough so that data can come in from 40 percent of the nation's branches.
The ABA says the database will be made available to all banks, thrifts and credit unions this summer. The cost of maintaining the database will be covered by annual subscription fees.
According to the president and CEO of the data management vendor behind BanCAPture, the system allows users to easily submit information about robberies that occur in their branches and to order custom reports analyzing robberies across the country. "The real value comes in two places," says Kevin McMenimen of Enabl-U Technologies of Plainview, N.Y. "I know events are happening in my area, so I can protect my people and my brand. The other one is on resource allocation. Now I can look at this information, what's working and what's not."
The BanCAPture dashboard system is meant to be used by designated security officials at participating banks. When doing research, they get a hodge-podge of choices on how to break down data. Robbery statistics can be parsed by time, geography, monetary losses, event resolution, and other factors. "If users want to know the number of robberies over the last month committed with a weapon or those where the stickup men used only a note to the teller, they can pull those up," says McMenimen.
Maps can be color-coded to show when and where robberies have been reported more frequently—indicating serial robber activity—and can display satellite photography so users can study the outline of a bank where a robbery took place. "If you're reading about what happened and want to figure out why they went out the northeast entrance, well, you could see it happens to be next to a highway."
McMenimen says the system took so long to roll out because of managing the legal and compliance concerns of participating large banks. Many of them are not eager to create easily aggregated statistics showing, for example, which of their branches were being victimized.
But Enabl-U and another partner organization in BanCAPture—security risk analysis firm CAP Index of Exton, Pa.—brought pilot banks onto the platform with assurances that the data had limited availability (only with select security officials at each institution).
The reluctant bankers also came to realize that, of course, robbery information is public anyway. "It happened. It's on the news," says McMenimen. "I can find the same information on Google. It just takes a bit longer."
Bank security experts like Clarke say that having such robbery data at hand is valuable.
She argues it will help in spotting robbery trends and identifying when and where ATM skimming—a fast-rising problem—is likely to bloom, so preventative steps can be taken.
KeyBank also can use the database to identify any trouble spots for new branch expansion. "If we're going into another area," she says, "what the other financial institutions in the area have come across as far crime goes" is useful to know.
But Deborah Lamm Weisel, the director of police research in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at North Carolina State University, questions if the BanCAPture system can help banks implement better prevention strategies, since research shows bank robberies are too random and unpredictable. Even at branches in similar neighborhoods with equal security measures in place, she says, banks may find inexplicable differences in robbery attempts. In one study she did of an area with 12 very similar branches, "three or four of them were never robbed in over a decade," Weisel says. "Police and bankers tend to look at and study the robbed locations, but right next door is a branch that's identical and didn't get robbed."
Still, Shawn Swartout, the vice president and security director at Sterling Savings Bank in Spokane, Wash., considers BanCAPture a critically useful tool in helping gather robbery data for branches in rural markets. Those are places, he says, where local police respond and information is slow to get to crime data resources like state banking associations and the FBI.
"To the extent where the FBI isn't notified, we are challenged in not having that information," says Swartout.
The FBI is just a bystander in the initiative for now, but it is expected to become a full participant and add its own robbery statistics to the database. The shared arrangement gives the FBI a new crime-fighting tool at a time when the bureau is shifting much of its resources to national security and counterterrorism issues, says ABA risk management policy vice president Doug Johnson.
One example of BanCAPture's potential use for law enforcement investigation was with an attempted robbery incident in November 2009 at a KeyBank branch in Stamford, Conn. According to Clarke, Stamford police apprehended a suspect wanted for two other robberies as he was about to enter a KeyBank branch for a holdup. He was caught in a sting operation that police and KeyBank set up, thanks in part to data from BanCAPture.
A security consultant for the bank had determined that a suspicious visitor to the branch a few days earlier appeared to be an at-large suspect in a Bank of America branch robbery that occurred a month earlier. At both banks, the suspect was wearing sunglasses and a ball cap, and the robber's methods in both incidents involved casing out a branch a few days prior to the robbery attempt, according to reports.
"We knew the suspect had entered our branch, so we had a feeling we were being targeted," says Clarke. "Both Bank of America and [the KeyBank consultant] worked together and set it up with police."
North Carolina State's Weisel says the database could prove most useful in cutting down serial robberies, one of the chronic problems involving brazen criminals who knock off multiple branches in a single outing. What law enforcement and banks need more of are immediate arrests, and that requires real-time information like that available through the BanCAPture system. "It will be very useful in getting a quick clearance and preventing a serial offender from continuing on with their offenses."
