ROBBERY VS. BURGLARY, WRITER’S INTRO TO GUNS, WORDS OF WISDOM - 040

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This week on the Writer's Detective Bureau, Steven Pressfield calls it the resistance. It's that, "I just don't want to," feeling. It's the negative words of self doubt. It's procrastination. It's imposter syndrome. It's laziness. It's a lack of mental discipline. It's being tapped out of willpower. It's a list of really convincing sounding excuses to let yourself off the hook. It sucks, and we all experience it.

The resistance is inside of us, and a lot of the time, it wins. It wins when we don't feel like showing up. If you follow me on Facebook, you may recall me posting about having two 18 hour work days this week that were punctuated by three whole hours of sleep. It wasn't the plan, but it's what happened. It kicked my ass, because I don't bounce back from a lack of sleep or all nighters like I used to.

School's also quickly approaching summer, and if you didn't know, I actually teach at a community college as well. This week, I get hit with 40 research papers to read and to grade. Here I sit, at about 11 o'clock at night, and ... Oh wow. Actually, it's already 1:30 AM on Saturday. Well, I've been putting this together, this week's podcast together since 11 o'clock. Time flies when you're under the gun.

But I've been putting it together on the evening it's supposed to be pushed out to you. Clearly, this wasn't part of the plan. I had to beg and search to find things to talk about for this episode. Normally, this podcast, it just feels a lot easier, but this, this is the test. Do I listen to the inner dialogue that says, "You can get this out tomorrow. It's already tomorrow. No one's going to care if this late. It's not a big deal. Do it tomorrow when you feel more motivated and you're more rested."

Does any of this sound familiar? How many of you listening right now are doing so knowing that you should be writing? "But I'm not at my computer. I don't have my hot tea. I need to clean my desk and my sock drawer and all the things before I can write. I just can't write right now." I get it, but to succeed, we need to show up. We need to show up consistently, whether that's 100 words every day or 20 minutes of talking into a mic every week. Whatever our schedule, we must show up. Showing up consistently beats down the resistance. Showing up consistently breeds confidence in ourselves. Showing up consistently brings results. Are you with me? Let's do this.

This week on the Writer's Detective Bureau: Robbery versus burglary, a writer's introduction to guns, and words of wisdom for investigators. I'm Adam Richardson, and this is the Writer's Detective Bureau.

This is Episode #40 of the Writer's Detective Bureau, the podcast dedicated to helping authors and screenwriters write professional quality crime-related fiction. I want to thank Gold Shield patron Debra Dunbar from debradunbar.com, and Gold Shield patron C.C. Jameson from ccjameson.com, and all of my loyal Coffee Club patrons for supporting me month after month. Find links to all of these author's websites in the Show Notes at writersdetective.com/40.

And you've heard it before: If you have your own author business, please consider joining Patreon. It's free for you, and it allows your readers to support you financially through monthly micro-payments. Give your fans a chance to show their support by creating their on Patreon account right now. To learn more, visit writersdetective.com/patreon.

Chris Moody, @chrisamoody, asked, "What's the difference between a robbery and a burglary?" "My house got robbed," is one sentence that will make every cop cringe. We hear it all the time, usually from a distraught homeowner that came home to discover their house was burglarized, but why do we cringe? Well, we're writers too, you know? And we know that houses never get robbed. Technically, banks are never robbed either. Bank tellers are robbed. Robbery's the crime of using force or fear to commit theft from a person. Section 2.11 of the California Penal Code defines robbery as, "Robbery is the felonious taking of personal property in the possession of another from his person or immediate presence and against his will, accomplished by means of force or fear."

Burglary, on the other hand, is "Every person who enters any house, room, apartment, tenement, shop, warehouse, store, mill, barn, stable, outhouse or other building, tent vessel, floating home, railroad car, locked or sealed cargo container, whether or not mounted on a vehicle, trailer coach, any house car, inhabited camper vehicle as defined by the vehicle code when the doors are locked, aircraft, or mine or any underground portion thereof, with intent to commit grand or petty larceny, or any felony, is guilty of burglary."

All right, let me explain that again, but this time a little bit slower, and in English. Simply put, anyone entering a building, a locked vehicle, or pretty much any structure with four walls and a roof, with the intent to commit petty theft or any felony is guilty of burglary, which itself is a felony. The reason why I picked Chris's question is to revisit the concept of corpus delicti, the elements of a crime. And I think we talked about it actually in episode five of this podcast.

The corpus delicti, the elements of a crime, are the elements your detective needs to prove. If you're writing about a liquor store robbery, your detective needs to prove, number one, the item stolen was in someone's personal possession. You know, was the money in the cashier's register as he stood behind the counter, and it's in his immediate vicinity? Or was the clerk in the back room when the money was taken? And number two, was it against the victim's will? And number three, was there any force or fear used?

This is what your detective is going to be asking the victim and asking any witnesses, questions that answer these elements of the crime: "Where was the money when it was taken? How far away were you? Did he take it or did you give it to him? Why did you give it to him? What made you feel scared? Did he have a weapon? Did he threaten you? Did he use any force against you?" If you've ever been a victim or a witness to a robbery, you may have wondered why the police were asking some seemingly obvious questions of you, questions like, "Were you in fear?"

"Hell yeah, I was in fear. The guy kept pointing a gun at me." That's a pretty important statement when it comes time to proving this was an armed robbery as opposed to a shoplifting. Similarly, when you're investigating a burglary, you not only need to prove that the suspect entered the building, locked vehicle, or whatever, and committed a petty theft, that's misdemeanor theft, or any felony, but you have to prove that the person intended to commit the theft or felony when they entered that building or locked vehicle.

This is called a specific intent crime. If I decided to steal something after I went inside, it isn't a burglary. Only if I entered with the intent to commit a theft or felony is it a burglary. Robbery, on the other hand, is a general intent crime. If you used force or fear to take the personal property of another, you're guilty of robbery. It doesn't matter what your intention was. The action itself is a felony.

If you're writing about a homicide, homicide being the killing of a human being by another human being, your detective is looking at the corpus delicti, the elements of the crime, and trying to determine whether the facts that they are learning prove the specific intent crime of murder, or whether it's a manslaughter. What we're talking about is whether there was malice of forethought. Did they already have this intention beforehand? Can we prove this homicide was planned? If you can't, then you're looking at the general intent crime of manslaughter.

Go look at the elements of the crime that you're writing about. Look it up in the state criminal section or penal code or whatever it is for your state, and see exactly what your detective protagonist needs to prove. This is important, because it is how you will come up with your dialogue. It's how you will know what questions your detective protagonist is going to be asking, and what kind of argument the defense attorney will use to fight the charges at trial.

Oh, and while we're talking about burglary, here's a quick trivia question: Do you know the definition of looting? It's the crime of burglary, but during a disaster. So why is it a separate crime? Because during a disaster, that building, structure, or vehicle may no longer meet the legal definition required in a burglary. It used to be a house, but now it's a pile of rubble, with part of one wall. It prevents the legal loophole of, "Well, it's not technically a house anymore." Because stealing from what used to be a house during a disaster is a felony, just as if the house was still standing before the disaster. Thanks again for the question, Chris. You can find his work at chrisamoody.com.

I normally don't talk too much about guns as a topic here. There are thousands of more highly qualified experts than me to cover this topic, but the topic of guns came up in the Facebook group this week, and I realize there might be a pretty sizeable information gap between all the research you can do on the internet or at a gun store, if you have gun stores in your country. And if you don't, then obviously here's that information gap, but there's a gap there between all that research that's out there and the very basics about guns, that a writer, especially a writer that has never held a gun, might want to learn about.

I want to cover some of the very basic concepts about guns that many of you might be reluctant to ask, or didn't even know what to ask or how to ask it. Let's start with ammunition. For the most part, guns are loaded with ... Now, don't say bullets. They're loaded with cartridges. The more common term that we use for a cartridge is a round, so a round or a cartridge consists usually of four parts, and they are: the case or casing, the primer, the propellant or powder, and the bullet. The bullet is the tip of the cartridge that, when fired, is propelled down the barrel of the gun and, in the case of a shooting, it's the thing that ends up tearing holes in someone or something.

The case, or casing or shell casing, is that cylindrical piece behind the bullet. It's usually made from brass or stainless steel, and this is the part that's ejected onto the ground, where the CSI folks will mark them with the yellow placards as evidence. Or if the shooter was using a revolver, the case stays inside the cylinder of the revolver, which we'll get to here in just a minute. Anyway, the back of the case of that cartridge holds a small explosive called a primer. Then, that cylindrical section of the casing is filled with some form of smokeless gunpowder. And then the case is capped with the bullet that we just talked about.

The bullet itself may be made of lead or a combination of lead and copper. If we're talking about a handgun cartridge, the bullet may be solid and rounded in shape, which we call ball ammo, or it may have a hollow point. If we're talking about a rifle cartridge, the bullet may have a pointed tip. How does that bullet get propelled? Well, it's the magic of chemistry. When the trigger is pulled on the gun, the gun's firing pin or striker slams forward, striking the primer on the back of that cartridge. The explosive property of the primer than ignites the powder in the case, and then the rapid expansion of gasses caused by this tiny little explosion and the exothermic reaction pushed the bullet down the barrel of the gun.

Now, this description is, quite admittedly, way oversimplified, and I'm sure I'll get some heat from the gun enthusiasts, but hey, it's a start, okay? Now that we know how the bullet exits the gun, let's talk about the most important aspect to firearm accuracy, and that is the concept of rifling. Before we get into this, I want you to close your eyes if you can, as long as you're not driving, and I want you to think back to the beginning of every James Bond movie you've ever seen.

And I'm not talking about the music or the silhouettes of scantily clad girls floating across the screen. I'm talking about the part where Bond walks in to the center of the screen, and he pivots to face the camera with his gun drawn. What happens to the screen as he makes that pivot? It collapses down into a circle around bond, right? Like the Porky Pig, "That's all folks," sign-off thing, right? But it's more than just a circle around Bond. There's this thin spiral all around that black space that leads right up to the edge of that circle, where we can still see Bond in the middle.

What you're seeing, or what they're trying to convey, is the view down a rifled barrel. Those spirals are the lands and grooves that run down the length of a gun barrel. And those lands and grooves cause the bullet to spin in flight. It's just like an American football quarterback throwing a spiral. That spiraling affect is what gives the bullet accuracy, and the longer the barrel, the more of a spiral is given to that bullet, and the more accurate the shot.

All right, so enough about ammunition. Let's get into the guns themselves. The two most common handguns encountered in the modern world are revolvers and semi-automatics. Revolvers were issued to police officers until somewhere in the 1980s. If you remember Dirty Harry wielding his famous .44 Magnum while asking people if they're feeling lucky, or if you're familiar with the concept of Russian roulette, then you undoubtedly have a mental image of what a revolver looks like already.

The center of the revolver is called the cylinder, and that will typically hold five or six handgun rounds. As you begin to squeeze the trigger, the cylinder rotates to align the next round between the hammer's firing pin and the barrel. And then, to load or unload the revolver, the shooter then pivots that cylinder out of the gun, off to the side. It's still mounted into the gun, but it slides out to the side on either the left or right side, usually to the left. The more modern handguns you see police carry now are semi-automatics. Now, with these, ammunition is pre-loaded into a removable spring loaded magazine, and this is important, writers, it is not a clip. Despite what our 1980s Schwarzenegger action films all taught us to call them, it's called a magazine. The magazine is inserted into the bottom of the gun's hand grip and locks into place.

The top half of the gun is called the slide, and then the bottom half, where that hand grip and the trigger are located, that's called the frame. The slide has a large spring located usually under the barrel, and when the gun is fired, as the bullet travels down the barrel, the gas from the ammo forces the slide to wrack backward. And as it does so, tooling inside the slide called the extractor and the ejector pull that spent casing from the barrel, and eject it out of the opening, which is called the breach, to make way for a new cartridge being spring loaded into place from the magazine below.

This spring loaded magazine pushing the next round into place, and then the slide rocking back forward, seating that next round into the breach for firing is where the term semi-automatic comes from. It's important to understand that, if the shooter pulls the trigger, fires a round, and then holds his finger down after firing that first round, the next round is not going to fire. That's what happens with a fully automatic weapon, like a machine gun, but not with a semi-automatic handgun. The trigger must be released and then reengaged in order to fire the next round. You don't have to let it go all of the way for it to work, for it to fire off the next round, but you do have to let it go. You can't just hold your finger in one place and have it fire. That's the definition of an automatic weapon.

Now, some semi-automatic handguns, like the .45 caliber 1911, requires the hammer to be cocked back in order to fire the gun. This is called a single action handgun. Now, a modern hammer equipped semi-auto handgun can fire with the hammer cocked back like the 1911, but they'll also fire simply by pulling the trigger. These are called double action handguns, so if the hammer is down and resting forward and not cocked back, and you pull that trigger, it's going to pull that hammer back nice and slow, and then when it gets to the firing position, it will slam back forward, and the firing pin will engage the back of that round.

Finally, the last iteration of police-issued handguns do not have external hammers. Rather, they have an internal striker built into the mechanics of the slide, and these are called striker fire handguns. Glocks are one of the most well known striker fire guns. All right, so now that we've covered all of that, the next thing a good crime fiction writer will want to know is how all of this can be used to solve crimes. There are a variety of ways, but one of the most key ones is, when a bullet is recovered as evidence, it will be subjected to scientific firearm and tool mark examination.

Under a microscope, a firearm and tool mark comparison expert at the crime lab will be looking at the marks on the bullet. And speaking of firearm and tool mark comparison experts, don't refer to this as ballistics. I still call it that, and I still get corrected, and they really hate that. Anyway, remember the rifling we talked about with James Bond? Those rifling lands and grooves leave marks on the bullet, and they're called striations. S-T-R-I-A-T-I-O-N-S. Those striations are those marks that are left on the bullet itself, and at the microscopic level, no two barrels will produce the same striation patterns.

And while it's great that we can link bullets to the gun that fired them, it's only really useful if we actually find the gun to test it against, right? Bullet striations can actually tell us more than just which individual gun fired it. The lands and grooves, and modern polygonal rifling in some cases, can sometimes tell a ... I'm going to say ballistics, I can't help it. Tell a ballistics expert what kind of gun fired the bullet. For instance, Colt, the manufacturer of guns since 100s of years, has used a left hand twist, meaning a counterclockwise spiral pattern, for almost all of their guns for ages.

Where most other manufacturers use a right hand twist or a clockwise spiral pattern for their rifling. That means, if you're seeing a left hand twist in the bullet you recover, you know you're looking for a Colt. Some of the more modern guns like Glock have gone to what they're calling polygonal rifling, which is different than the lands and grooves of a typical rifling pattern, but the interesting thing is that Glock introduced the Enhanced Bullet Identification System, which is where essentially each barrel creates its own unique barcode-like pattern in the bullet as it passes through the barrel, which uniquely matches the bullet to that gun barrel.

Ballistics experts, or firearms tool mark comparison experts, can actually see that it came from a Glock, and can identify which Glock it is based off of a database using that EBIS, the Enhanced Bullet Identification System. Similar to all of the bullet stuff, the firearm and took mark comparison experts can look at the tool markings on the recovered shell casings as well for microscopic comparison against a specific gun's interior parts, like where the casing fed into the breach face.

We could obviously do an entire podcast, not just an episode, on firearms and how it relates to crime, but I think this is a good start for at least one of our questions this week. Next week, I will continue with this. I will talk about calibers, the difference between a .45 caliber or a 9 mm. And then I'll also explain the differences between an assault rifle, a machine gun, and a submachine gun.

And finally this week, Siobhan Pope, one of my Coffee Club patrons, wrote me and she said, "I'm curious about some of the mantras or sayings detectives might learn in the Academy or while on the job that guide their investigations. Not so much personal philosophies, but the sayings that capture good investigative practice. Never make the facts fit your theory. The ABC of murder: Assume nothing, believe nothing, check everything. Or listening costs nothing. Have you got any gems?"

Well, I think you shared a few gems yourself there, Siobhan. The thing is, a lot of these sayings come from TV and movies, the ones that I've heard. But even then, they can be useful to remember. One of my favorites came from the character Detective Lester Freamon on HBO's The Wire, and his quote was, "All the pieces matter." Most of the mantras that we learn in the Academy are actually about officer survival, things like, "Watch the hands. Eyes may be the windows to the soul, but it's the hands that will kill you." Or another one that you may have heard of, which is, "Treat everyone you meet with dignity and respect, but always have a plan on how to kill them." That quote is definitely grim.

But it's the reality of balancing our duties with our survival because, and here comes another one, "Failing to plan is planning to fail." Another one that talks about survival is the plus one rule, so just remember the plus one rule. That's all that I have to remember, but the concept behind it is that, if there's one bad guy, look for one more. If you don't see a gun, look for one more. When you find the gun, look for one more. Plus one, plus one, the lesson being that you never assume you've found everything without looking for it first.

"Look sharp, act sharp, be sharp." That's a favorite field training officer saying, but I also heard it on the TV show Southland, and I know that they took it from FTOs at the LAPD. Personally, I think that sounds a lot more professional than, "Fake it until you make it." My personal mantra, for detective work especially, "Beware confirmation bias." My own mantra during interrogations is, "Remember when to shut up." One of the key differences between an interview and an interrogation is how much the detective is doing the talking.

An interrogation is where the detective is applying the pressure, keeping it going, even getting uncomfortably close if we have to, to keep the pressure up, to get them to talk. When you're in that mode of being direct and bold and talkative, which for me is a learned act, because that is not my natural way of communicating, we often end up talking over the suspect when he wants to speak.

Nothing I'm saying in that interrogation room is going to prove anything to a jury, and if my loud mouth just talked over the one split second where the suspect said, "I did it," I completely blew it. All of that work, all of the hours of interviewing and interrogating and trying to get him to that point, all of that was wasted. It was all for nothing. Sure, I could try to get him to repeat it, but it usually won't work. I needed to be listening and poised to respond to that admission or confession.

Interrogations are a fast-paced game of mental chess, and you need to know when to shut the F up and be able to do so in an instant. Even outside of the interrogation room, knowing when to shut up is a hugely impactful life skill, especially at the start of an investigation. It's part of that, "Beware of confirmation bias," thing I just mentioned. If we state our theory early on on how we think something went down, we are far more likely to hold on to that theory, despite any new evidence to the contrary. That is dangerous, and it goes against everything we're trying to do, which is find the truth, not just arrest someone.

And one investigation mantra I remember hearing before I was a cop was, "M-O-M, means, opportunity, and motive." But what's funny about this, and the reason why it sticks in my head, is around the same time that I heard that, and now we're talking mid to late 1980s, while I was still in junior high and high school, but the actor Robert Guillaume, who played the title character Benson on the sitcom of the same name, had a commercial for M-O-M. And he said M-O-M, only it stood for Milk-of-Magnesia, so every time I think of, "Means, opportunity, and motive," I picture Benson saying it to me. Ah, the games our minds will play on us.

Let's see, what else? A friend of mine at the Department of Justice Crime Lab has a personal motto, and that is, "Solve no crime before overtime." Not exactly the right sentiment to send, but I really found it funny nonetheless. For creators of any kind, this was a sign that was in my art class in high school: "If you don't have the time to do it right, when will you find the time to do it over?" I can't tell you how many times that thought has actually gone into my head, whether that's podcasting or whether it's typing a report. It's definitely true. And then, finally, when we are beating ourselves up for doing something stupid, because we all do that no matter what, this is the best quote I have to offer you just for life in general: "Wise decisions come from experience. Experience comes from poor decisions."

Thanks for sticking with me this week. If you listened this long, you should probably hit that Subscribe button. That way, next week's episode will be queued up and ready to go as soon as it's available. And it will be on Friday, not in the middle of Saturday morning like we're dealing with right now. Anyway, it will be queued up just like magic. Oh, and thank you so much for answering last week's call for leaving reviews. I really appreciate you. And I want to get to know you better, so right now, go to writersdetective.com/podcast, and I want you to tell me who was your favorite TV cop of all time.

Thanks so much for listening. Have a great week, and write well.

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Writer's Detective Bureau