Comment Re:It's only stuff (Score 2) 170
Interesting, thank you.
I particularly find your assertion that violence is likely even if you surrender your property to the robber. Over here, generally people would assume the opposite, as far as I am aware. That is, that complying with the robber's demand will almost surely result in an end to the confrontation unless it happens to be a genuine sociopath and not just a common criminal following the path of least resistance.
If I had to speculate, I would assume that criminals know it's actually less risky to leave the victim alone afterwards. If they're caught for robbery, they'll do a few years in jail, if they get caught for murdering a robbery victim, they're looking at a 20 year or a life sentence. Plus, the authorities are more serious about investigating more violent crimes.
I can not exactly find a statistic like the one you quote from the FBI, but I did find statistics for 2011 about crimes registered by section of the criminal code (link only useful to Latvian speakers so mostly for my own future reference - http://data.opendata.lv/lindaaustere/kriminala-statistika/kriminala-statistika-2011-gads). In those stats, I see 91 homicide in the country in 2011 (that is combined number for murder, aggravated murder and especially aggravated murder, to roughly translate). Out of those, there is only 1 that falls under "murder related to a robbery". Can not say if it was an instance of street crime or breaking into some place.
Looking at robberies in that data, there's 1061 total, of them 66 fall under the most serious category, meaning that someone was seriously harmed or that the criminals were armed with firearms. AFAIK, so much as firing a shot in the air gets the robbery classified under that category, so it should be less than 66 cases where people actually got seriously harmed.