Robbery: The Tipping Point Between Theft and Violence

This book brings together research on personal robbery from psychology, criminology, group dynamics, and youth justice, to provide a comprehensive resource on this crime type. Although robbery is a pressing issue affecting a very high volume of people, it has been under-researched in recent years. This book explores the motivations of offenders, methods of committing personal robbery and the group dynamics involved. The author discusses behavioural crime linkage as a method to help police forces identify serial offences, as well as how profiling has been used in robbery cases. The author concludes by summarising the policing tactics used to prevent and detect robbery, to show how understanding robbery can help in creating workable initiatives around this crime type.

Dr. Amy Burrell has been researching in crime and policing for over 15 years. She graduated from University of Durham with a degree in Applied Psychology in 2002 before going onto complete an MSc in Forensic Behavioural Science at University of Liverpool the following year. After 4 years working as a Research Fellow for the Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science she returned to education to complete a PhD (part time) in Forensic Psychology at the University of Leicester. Her PhD was on behavioural crime linkage (i.e. a method for identifying whether you can identify series of offences committed by the same person based on their crime scene actions) in personal robbery. After completing her PhD in 2013, Amy moved to the University of Birmingham to become the Network Facilitator for the Crime Linkage International Network (C-LINK) (www.crimelinkage.org). She then moved to teaching roles for 6 years - Lecturer in Forensic Psychology at Birmingham City University and Lecturer/Assistant Professor in Forensic Psychology at Coventry University - before returning to research in January 2021. She continues to guest lecture alongside her research role. Amy’s research interests include property crime - in particular personal robbery, behavioural crime linkage, group offending, group decision-making, and violent crime.