Bank Holdups Nearly Doubled in 1992 : Crime: The FBI says 75 of the year’s 97 robberies were solved. Oxnard and Ventura had 63% of the heists.

Ventura County bank robberies nearly doubled in 1992 as thieves pulled a record 97 holdups and a regional trend toward more heists finally caught up with local communities, the FBI reported Wednesday.

Bank robberies here increased from 52 in 1991 to 97 this year--a rate of one every four days, said Gary Auer, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Ventura office.

That compares with the county’s previous record of 76 robberies in 1989.

Despite the sharp increase, Ventura County’s rate of bank robberies per resident remains well below the average rate for the FBI’s Los Angeles region.

Furthermore, two-thirds of Ventura County’s robberies this year occurred before July, and the robbery rate has dropped back to normal levels since then, Auer said.

He said the county also had high bank-robbery rates in 1986 and 1989, then fell back to lower levels.

“When you have only 97 robberies, it’s really tough to draw a conclusion about trends,” Auer said. “I can’t read the future.”

In 1992, a handful of thieves who each robbed several banks were apprehended by midyear, including one robber who held up 13 banks, Auer said. Six serial robbers who accounted for 40 holdups were caught after surveillance-camera photographs of them fleeing banks were published in local newspapers, he said.

“There are still a lot of people robbing banks,” Auer said. “But they’re being caught more quickly--either by us, local police or through the cooperation of the news media.”

Seventy-five of the year’s 97 robberies have already been solved, he said. That approaches the county’s solution rate of 80% over the previous six years.

And while local bank robberies have jumped since 1991, the violent trend toward takeover robberies that has marked the year in Los Angeles County has not been repeated here, Auer said. In such robberies, bank customers and employees are frequently terrorized and sometimes injured.

No people were harmed in any Ventura County bank robbery this year, and no shots were fired during the crimes, Auer said.

“That’s typical for Ventura County banks,” he said.

As in past years, the bulk of the 1992 robberies occurred in the western section of the county, where residents of Oxnard and Ventura held up banks near their residences, Auer said.

Of the 97 robberies this year, 63% were in Oxnard and Ventura and another 23% in nearby Port Hueneme and Camarillo, the FBI reported.

Auer said typical Ventura County robbers live near the banks they rob, are between 20 and 30 years of age and have drug problems.

About 85% of convicted robbers in Southern California committed the crime to support a drug habit, he said.

“It’s fair to characterize the typical bank robber as brain-dead,” he said, “because they get little money, their chances of getting caught are high and once they’re caught the sentences are very stiff.”

The median take in a local bank robbery was $910 over the past year, while sentences of 17 robbers convicted in 1992 ranged from 2 1/2 years to 9 1/2 years, he said. The average sentence was nearly six years.

“At least for a bank robber, crime just doesn’t pay,” Auer said.

This year’s jump in such holdups changed the county’s bank-robbery rate from one per 12,900 people to one per 6,900, contrasted with a rate of one per 5,800 in the region.

Ventura County’s robberies represented 2.2% of the region’s total last year, but increased to 3.7% this year, according to FBI statistics.

The FBI’s seven-county Los Angeles region, which stretches form San Luis Obispo to San Clemente, is the nation’s bank-robbery capital.

With 2,355 offenses in 1991, the region had more robberies than the next seven highest-ranking urban areas combined.