KING of the UNITED STATES

I love it on “CSI”, or “Law and Order”, when they have some grainy security cam footage shot from across a parking lot, and they tap their buddy on the shoulder and say, “can you zoom in on that?” Suddenly, you’re looking at a Richard Avedon photo. I mean, I leave plenty of room for the artistic license and the audience capacity for suspension of disbelief — but come on…

At the other extreme, I can go down this afternoon to sharper image and for $100 get a disguised nanny cam that will secretly film the maid beating the snot out of Junior. OK, the maid and Junior don’t exist, but the camera does!

In this day and age, any business owner can spend a small “insurance” outlay to equip their place of business with a multi-camera, wired/wireless/zooming/nightvision/full-audio/optionless/option-rich video recording system. Walgreens has been selling a $19 digital video camera for years. There are no tapes, no discs, no cartridges. You enjoy random-access, date stamping, easy editing, and many other modern traits in this very modern state of videotaping technology. And you don’t even have to spend a lot of money any more to have it.

But — then there are the banks. Have you noticed? Whenever we see on the news or the tabloid shows footage of a bank robber, we are shown something so grainy and lacking in fluid motion, that not only do we not know if it’s a man, or a woman; we’re not even sure that what we’re looking at isn’t a guerrilla. There’s no audio, the pixilation is severe; the only appropriate word for the footage is “shitty”. I guess that’s not so bizarre, it’s probably pretty hard to come up with money when you’re a bank. They can’t afford state-of-the-art equipment. Yeah, that’s it.

And don’t anyone get moronic on me and suggest that, “in fact bank robbery is pretty rare stuff in this day and age”. If that were true, maybe it might begin to create the smallest possible crack of logic for banks not to have superior surveillance systems. But banks are getting robbed like never before, OK?

Chicago is such a fine example for so many things these days. Just recently, Chicago’s statistics on violence and murder make many portions of Iraq look like a Middle East time-share resort. Here’s a little article from CBS for illumination on that lively comparison: LOTS O’ MURDER . (I’m repeatedly fascinated that Illinois is Barak Obama’s résumé. It’s not a very good résumé). But I digress; we were talking about bank robberies — and in Chicago in particular.

In 1993, Chicago saw a record 71 bank robberies in the city. In 1995 the figure doubled to 142. A few years later, in 2005 that number doubled to 240. (On Sept. 25, a downtown bank was hit twice). 2006 exceeded that with a record 284 robberies. In 2007 the numbers dipped only slightly, but are on pace for about 283 robberies in 2008.

It could be worse. You could be in Los Angeles, where in 1991, the FBI recorded 2,355 bank robberies in its Los Angeles Regional Office. On July 29, 1992, five Bank of America branches were robbed in a single hour. Oh, small potatoes! That’s just a lil’ portion of the total robberies for the United States in that year; 9,388.

So banks are getting robbed, a lot. We’re just having a devilish’ hard time identifying the perpetrators, it seems. “Can we see that picture of the robber again? And that is a guy? Oh, it’s NOT a guy? But he’s bald. Oh, he’s NOT?”

So if your business revolves around storing extraordinary amounts of cash, while having doors open to the public, and enjoying the clear and frequent status as target; why would you install the 1970s-BetaMax-highschool-AV-cam-system found at that weird neighbor’s garage sale? When a bank is robbed, we should be able to tell from surveillance footage whether or not the robber flosses their teeth with the recommended regularity. Or is that just too obvious? On “CSI” they could tell us what brand of watch he’s wearing and if the second hand works!

I can only conclude, that for some reason, banks are not really all that troubled by frequent robbery. Is there some way whereby banks actually come out financially AHEAD as a result of robberies? …Hmmmm, now we just need to uncover the smoking gun.