How I robbed a man of my things - Stab City

  Lijiang, China
Wednesday, August 22, 2007

I read recently that studies have shown that the more people who witness a crime, the less likely any of them is to stop and help the victim. Well, I've just had proof of that tonight, in a very practical, hands-on kinda way. Or should I say 'hands off'.

Tonight someone broke into my house, I caught them, got my things back and then tried to stop the perpetrator from escaping. Did anyone help me? Nope.

Why? Part of the reason might be because many of the witnesses were tourists, just passing through. Then there was the cultural and language barrier. And as I walked to the police station, my local friend told me another reason why everyone around was so passive. They were worried that the robber might come back and cause trouble for them.

So the result was that I chased and apprehended a thief, wrestled back my rather valuable possessions - a SLR camera, a laptop, a backup hard drive - and having fleeced the robber of his bounty, tried to stop him in his tracks. Despite 20 or so people being within 10m of us - it was a busy pedestrian street with shops and shoppers - no one helped me. Everyone just gawked.

I had closed my doors as night fell, to stop any small insects and larger humans from entering. I also had half a dozen local Naxi women as security guards on my step. They must have just left as it started to get dark. And the man happened to be walking by, and must have decided to do a grab and run at my place. First thing I heard were the bells rattling on my door, an advance warning of a visitor. Then a plastic chair was knocked over. I called out and came down the stairs from my office and noticed my computer cord was trailing out the door. Maybe someone had borrowed my computer to look at my photos I first thought - maybe a 75 year old Naxi woman.

I looked out the door, didn't see anything, looked back inside and realized the laptop was gone. I raced out again, looked both ways and saw one of my neighbours. "Where?" I asked. He pointed toward the temple, along a narrow, crooked lane. I followed it for 10 seconds, and where it divided I choose the left path. No one. I kept running, turning this way and that, along the thin cobblestone alleyway. As I rounded a corner I saw the figure of a man about to turn left into a busier pedestrian street. As he turned he pulled his hands over his chest, securing something under his jacket. I ran up to the corner and saw him walk along into the crowd. When I confronted him, he at first backed off. And I thought I'd made a mistake. He was just a tourist. With a camera. Then I saw he had something under his jacket. I pointed to it. He recoiled. I tried to prise open his jacket and he got upset. Eventually in the stand-off he opened his jacket and handed me the laptop. Then I got him to hand over the camera - it dropped onto the ground. I tried to restrain him, and gather up the camera at the same time. Then he reached into his pocket and for a split-second I thought 'oh no, here comes the knife'. Last year I'd heard several stories of peopled knifed in fights or hold-up. So many in fact that I told a friend Lijiang should be renamed Stab City.

Instead of a knife the guy handed over a computer hard drive. I wanted to know if he had more things on him. But he turned out his pockets and said 'mei you' - I don't have - in a part calm-part frenzied way that you might do if you are in trouble but don't want to bring attention to yourself. At this stage people were stopping to look. A few shopkeepers arose from their slumber or TV watching. Shoppers gathered to look at the spectacle. I tried to stop the guy from getting away. I looked around for someone to help. I even asked a foreign couple passing by to help me stop the man from getting away. But it was as if I was in a slow-motion dream, in a bubble where I was the main actor and everyone was playing non-singing roles. The guy started off down the street. I went after him, but with my laptop, camera and hard drive there was no way I would be able to apprehend him. He turned into a darker street and I let him go.

Maybe I should have chased him, and left my things with a shopkeeper. But also in the back of my mind was the fact that my door at home was now open and someone else could be robbing me. I ran home, only to find someone had shut my door. My buck-toothed neighbour - the same one who had alerted me to the director of the robber - had kindly closed my door and was keeping an eye on my place.

I rang the police, and asked them to come quickly. A few minutes later someone called me and spoke in English. They said for me to come to the police station to report a crime. I said, no I want you to come here now, to help get this guy.

Twenty minutes later, two guys arrived. Nonchalant, unfazed. They had some paper and wanted to accompany me to the police station to fill out some forms. I told them I wanted to catch the guy, and showed them along the lanes to where we had the altercation. Disinterested, they said let's go to the station. They appeared unfit, unenthusiastic. There were no torches or batons. They couldn't catch anything.

I phoned a local friend and got her to explain that I wanted them to catch the robber if he was still in the vicinity. She relayed the news that I should go to the local police station with them. Resigned to letting the guy get away, I walked up to the old town station, waited around in a smokey room with some bored police and then was ushered through to a room where a policewoman took notes and got me to write a statement, which was then translated into Chinese.

What did he look like? 'Chinese all look the same' I joked, then drew a picture of the man. And wrote down what I remembered: 40-ish, dark-tanned skin, didn't look local, wearing a black jacket, white flat-sole shoes.

identikit picture of my robber

Annoyed at the inaction of the police, I told my translator friend to tell the policewoman that if they didn't catch this guy he could be robbing other people, including their homes, right now. She was not impressed.

My statement, translated into Chinese, was read out to me, and I had to sign many times, and add my fingerprint. While doing this, I felt like a criminal myself, and wondered how easy it must be to get a confession under duress from an illiterate person.

Formalities over, I went via a friend's bar to tell him of the night's adventures. He'd recently had a laptop stolen and the other week had his camera taken from the bar. He said yesterday he saw a policeman taking photos outside his bar, and when he looked again, he saw a man being photographed. That man was in handcuffs. And it turned out that man had been caught and accused of stealing the laptop from the bar.

I wonder about his fate. You hear these stories that to deter criminals the Chinese use the 'kill the rooster to scare the chickens' approach. Catch someone and give them a high penalty - such as execution - and others will thing twice before engaging in criminal activity.
Anyway, at least my story has a happy ending. I got robbed, but I also got my things back. While the camera can be replaced, and the laptop too, for me the most valuable things they contain is information. Knowledge is power. And those contacts, those files and documents, they are more valuable than the laptop - which has seen better days.

So what am I going to do now? Looks like I will have be more guarded, and lock the house securely even when I am inside. This annoys me because I like having my doors open and being part of the community outside my door - kids playing, people stopping for a chat on their way to and from market, old grannies cackling away on my doorstep.

An 1989 article in Time magazine talked about this passivity of crime witnesses. Here's what it said:

Why do people fail to help their fellow man? Fear, apathy and indifference are not quite the answer. Instead, the scientists' experiments show that the average citizen's instinctive concern for his fellow human beings is too often restrained by a taut, subtle web of social pressures. Particularly in groups and crowds, write John M. Darley of Prince ton and Bibb Latane of Ohio State in a recent and already classic report, "un til someone acts, no one acts."
. . .
Smoke seeping from a building may mean a fire or a broken steam pipe; a man sprawling in a doorway may be having a heart attack, or may be just sleeping off a bender. In trying to decide whether a situation is critical, the researchers say, "a person often looks at those around him to see how he should react himself. In general, it is considered embarrassing to look overly concerned, to seem flustered, to 'lose your cool.' A crowd can thus force inaction on its members by implying, through its passivity and apparent indifference, that an event is not an emergency."

In one experiment conducted by Latane and another colleague, college students in a waiting room heard a tape recording that simulated the sounds of a woman climbing onto a chair to reach a stack of papers. She fell, injured her ankle, and began to moan, "Oh my God -my foot! I . . . can't get this thing off me." Seventy percent of the people who were waiting by themselves offered help; with another person in the waiting room, only 20% showed their concern.

Even without group pressure, notes Stanford Psychologist Philip Zimbardo, people will rarely intervene in an interfamily situation for fear of violating a social code. Husbands and wives can literally beat each other to death before most outsiders will step in; recent studies of the estimated more than 30,000 "battered children" injured by parental abuse every year indicate that as many as 4,000,000 people were familiar with at least one such case of family violence and that most of them did nothing.

Helping others is not encouraged by law, as many people are aware. In most states, good Samaritans who intervene can be sued for their trouble and must bear the cost of any injuries they may suffer. Helpers weighing the possible risks of intervening are also concerned about losing their freedom, says University of Wisconsin Psychologist Leonard Berkowitz. When one person helps another, says Berkowitz, the helper almost inevitably feels that he has come under the sway of the person whom he is assisting.

So tonight I am feeling a little annoyed. Mainly at the inaction of the bystanders and the laziness of the police. Maybe I should lock my door at all times. And take out insurance for my precious items. Perhaps I should get a barking dog. And a sign on my door, as every week or so, someone will barge into my house unannounced, look around as if I am invisible and then leave.

Ironically it feels safer on the streets here in China than in my hometown and most other Western places I have visited. I learnt today the reality that my friend told me this week: Chinese men aren't very masculine. Sure, this is stereotyping, but many locals and Chinese visitors are unfit and seem to be always in the mode of conserving energy. Not that I was wanting a lynch mob to get the guy and then beat him to death - just within an inch of his life would be just recompense. What do you think?