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SALT LAKE CITY — Only 10 minutes after receiving a call about a robbery at a credit union, officers from the Unified Police Department arrested 22-year-old Bobby Armijo.
Armijo allegedly robbed the Mountain America Credit Union at 5471 S. 4015 West in Taylorsville around 9:30 a.m. Monday. He wore a rubber mask and fled with an undisclosed amount of money after using a note to threaten a bank teller by telling them he had a gun and wasn’t afraid to use it, according to UPD Lt. Lex Bell.
However, Armijo didn’t make it far before an officer recognized the car he was driving in the Kearns area. With other recent arrests in the valley, Bell remarked that lately, alleged bank robbers haven’t been able to get away for long.
In fact, Bell said UPD solves close to 80 percent of its bank robberies.
“I even remember as a kid here, that’s one thing you don’t ever get away with: robbing a bank,” he said. “It is kind of true.”
You’ve seen them before: photos of people robbing a bank who police are hoping to identify. Bell credited tips about identity for a lot of the department’s success with arrests for bank robberies.
“It’s not always immediate — sometimes it takes a little while, even up to a couple of years on occasion — but they solve a great deal of those (bank robberies) and a lot of them have to do with us getting a tip on the identity of the individual at some point,” Bell said.
Overall, bank robberies represent a small percentage of the total robberies that occur in Utah. In 2014, only 111 out of 1,205 robberies took place at banks, according to the Crime in Utah Report that is released annually by the Utah Department of Public Safety. That represents 9.2 percent percent of all robberies in the state. The value stolen at banks during that period was listed as $318,026.
Those numbers mirror national trends. According to the FBI, bank robberies accounted for 1.8 percent of all robberies. In comparison, the most common location for robbery was a street or highway at 41 percent.
“(Bank robberies) are low on the scale of common events around here,” Bell said. “They come in spurts, like a lot of other things do it seems. We usually do see an uptick around the holiday season, oddly, from Thanksgiving to Christmas. I don’t know necessarily why that is, but a lot of it is driven by addiction we find nowadays, where in the past, it might have been just the trying-to-make-easy-money angle. A lot more of it now is people who have gotten too far involved with their addiction and see no other way.”
