Mugging

Mugging, sometimes called personal robbery or street robbery, is a form of robbery and street crime that takes place in public, often in urban areas at night, confronting the victim with a threat of violence in order to steal money or personal property; because the proceeds are typically worth less than those of commercial robbery, it also involves comparatively little time and planning, and perpetrators may be motivated by money, cultural capital or the thrill of the act itself, with the resulting risk of property loss, injury or psychological trauma causing many people to fear becoming a victim. The concept took shape in the United States in the 1940s, when the blackouts of the Second World War made such crimes easier to commit under cover of darkness and the term gained currency in cities such as Baltimore, and it became associated with anti-Black racism as it spread; in the United Kingdom, media coverage of mugging emerged in the 1970s before the concept had been applied to British crime, police departments set up dedicated anti-mugging units, and the crime was widely and often unfairly attributed to West Indian youths through racial stereotyping, with some leftist criminologists, including Stuart Hall, arguing the media had exaggerated a moral panic around a genuine but overstated crime wave. Political debate over mugging peaked in the 1980s, and in the 1990s Brazilian media applied the term arrastao to mass mugging incidents, terminology later adopted in Portugal as well.