“From 90 bank robberies in 1997 to 62 in 1998, to 50 in 1999, to 41 last year. As of right now we’ve had 21. This time last year we had 30. We’re down another 30 percent right now.”In a recent AP article Scott Nowinski, an FBI representative said that bank robberies in the state of Tennessee are on the rise in comparison to 2000. Here in Memphis, where two separate fatalities have occurred in the last year during bank robberies, those statistics seem true.
According to Steve Anthony, the FBI supervisory special agent for violent crimes in the West Tennessee area and member of a special multi-county and city violent crime task force, those statistics are not the case in Memphis.
“In the Memphis Metropolitan area, actually since 1997, we have had a steady decrease in bank robberies,” says Anthony. “From 90 bank robberies in 1997 to 62 in 1998, to 50 in 1999, to 41 last year. As of right now we’ve had 21. This time last year we had 30. We’re down another 30 percent right now.”
Anthony attributes the drop to a number of factors. “First and foremost is the community involvement,” he says. “That receives the most credit, in particular the Crimestoppers unit. Especially with the violent robberies, people are not going to stand and let others be victim to these kinds of senseless acts.”
Also, Anthony and his group works closely with area banks “The banking community has been very cooperative. We train some with them and we discuss security matters and such.” However, Anthony does emphasize that while the FBI can make suggestions to be banks, “they are a business. All we can do is to recommend to make sure they have good cameras, good quality video if that is what they are going to do, preferably 35 millimeters. We ask that they have alarms and other security devices such as dye packs. All we can do is meet regularly and suggest.”
Anthony also attributes the lowering robbery rate to his group. “In some small way, we give credit to the agency and the task force that had foresight in 1997, when the robberies hit a peak,” Anthony says. “The heads of the Memphis police department and the Shelby County sheriff’s department, and now the Collierville police department came up with a unified front. One group of investigators that work together day in and day out that can handle the leads. The credit goes around.”
The most salient affect of the task force is in catching the criminals. Anthony says that its efforts led to the quick capture of the most recent robbers, William O. Maxwell, Terrance Johnson, Jr., and Aaron Haynes, who during their July 23 robbery of a local Union Planters left bank guard James Earl Jones with a bullet wound in the face and bank customer Sheryl White dead. “It is a terrible incident,” Anthony says. “It rallied our task force, it rallied the community. It pushed us forward to say that we’re not going to let this happen. I have been doing this for many years and whenever you hear over your radio that shots have been fired and someone has been injured. It’s hard to describe. It’s a tragic thing. You’re pumped up inside. In the last case, the task force literally worked 24 hours a day until that was solved in two days. We’re going to continue to respond like that and we’re going to do our best not to rest until the people responsible are put behind bars.”
Still, Anthony acknowledges that such high profile crimes scare customers and bank personnel alike. He says “When you have an instant when on September 18 of last year a 79 year old lady is murdered senselessly and when you have this past July 23 when a guard is shot in the face and a customer is killed, it does come to the forefront that bank robbery, by its very essence, is a violent crime. Bad things tend to happen when a robbery has been committed.”
And despite Memphis’ lower than average robbery statistics, “We are, unfortunately, the only city where a customer have been killed in a bank for the last two years. We’re not happy with that at all. When you have an instant like that it raises the concern for safety and what we are doing to catch these people and hopefully help prevent the robberies.”
