Burglary Vs Robbery: What’s the Difference You Should Know?

Imagine, a woman returns home after a night out with her friends. As she walks inside, she discovers the jewels and money in the safety vault missing. What is she going to report, a robbery or a Burglary? 

People indeed use both the terms interchangeably, but they both differ! Burglary involves a person illegally entering to commit a crime but robbery is someone taking a valuable item from another. Here is everything that will solve burglary vs robbery queries that you have in mind.  

Let’s have a deeper look at Robbery, Burglary and larceny as well 

The Crime of Robbery

Also said as a violent crime, robbery is property theft from a person using force to threaten and force to seek possession of any item. Property is taken by the person as a robbery; however, violence or injury isn't required.

• Taking money/property
• From someone without permission
• Keeping the property possession in hand permanently
• With the use of force, power, or intimidation

Apart from Robbery & Burglary, people often question larceny and robbery being the same! We will have a further look at that too. 

The Crime of Burglary

Burglary involves breaking into, entering a structure to commit a crime like theft. The structure can be something like a house, a commercial property, vehicle, etc.

• Illegal entering
• A building, property (usually workplace, business space, home)
• The intent is to steal something or commit something serious while inside. 

The Crime of Larceny: 

It is largely the same as theft crime and defined to be an unlawful taking of someone's property to deprive them of it. If a person takes personal belongings from another individual, it is larceny, and they convert items for their use like selling them for cash.

1. Unlawfully taking away/ carrying away
2. Someone’s property, items
3. Not having their consent for the same
4. Only with the intent to permanently deprive the owner of their property

 Distinguish Between Burglary and Robbery

Robbery occurs when someone takes an item from another person with the use of force or threats. It involves a person-to-person interaction, and the example includes taking money from the bank, threatening the store clerk to give up all the money. 

While Burglary is different, it is when a person enters a building (home or commercial) that doesn’t belong to them with an intent to perform a crime, it can be theft or anything else. Larceny vs burglary is also two different things. Whereas, not to forget, each jurisdiction has a different type of larceny, keeping a basic element of this as a theft crime.

Theft happens when someone comes intending to take away, conceals, and retain any movable property of others without their consent. The sole intent is to deprive the owner completely of the possession of the property. In all these cases, 

Theft happens to be a broader category since it doesn’t involve unlawful entering or breaking into a place unlawfully and projecting threat to seek possessions of any item. Burglary might occur to steal and robbery happens as the key feature of keeping 'force' to the stealing.

The Differences Between These Crimes

• Theft or larceny, being interchangeably used, involves taking any property, item without using force, threat, or breaking into a structure to perform the crime. 
• Therefore, larceny vs Robbery is two different things, since robbery is taking the property through threat, force, and pressure. 
• Though all the crimes have a similar element, each has its distinct feature, range, method, requirement, and not to forget penalties too. 
• For petty larceny, the penalty ranges from fine or incarceration for less than one year. While high-level crimes like grand burglary, robbery may involve a jail sentence for more than a year along with fines.