THE JOB.

As banks go, the HSBC at 265 Broadway, across the street from City Hall Park, is fairly inviting. A sign--"Welcome to the City Hall Branch”--greets you as you walk in, and a TV hangs from the ceiling, broadcasting CNBC. Four red chairs face the screen. If market analysis isn't your thing, you can always just sit and chat on a cell phone while you wait, as one woman was doing the other day. There wasn't anyone at HSBC to receive her; nor was there anyone sitting at the Customer Service station, or at the Investment Services desk. But then if you were a bank robber this, too, might seem welcoming.

Bank robbers are surprisingly abundant in the city these days. Through the first four months of this year, New York has averaged more than one and a half bank heists a day--a threefold increase over last year. The threat to our cash deposits hasn't yet reached the peak levels of the nineteen-seventies, when there were well over a thousand armed bank robberies a year, but banking and security officials have described the current situation as "epidemic"and "systemic.”

A few weeks ago, Mayor Bloomberg held a morning press conference in which he effectively declared war on bank robbers. The police commissioner, he explained, would be meeting with bank executives that afternoon to address the branches' apparent negligence in defending themselves. Before the Mayor was through, thieves had slipped out of a Ridgewood Savings Bank in Queens with a quick four hundred dollars. Shortly after lunchtime, a man without a savings or checking account at HSBC walked into the City Hall branch and passed the teller a handwritten note requesting cash. He walked out with ninety-five bucks.

"This is a new or unique element,"Michael Smith, the president of the New York Bankers Association, said last week. "It is not what you or I would view as the typical bank robbery."(Among other things, it's not very lucrative.) Instead of carefully targeting a building and then seizing control of it, with masks on and guns drawn, like Sonny Wortzik or the Dead Presidents, these bandits work quickly and quietly. They wield pieces of paper more often than guns (although one recent culprit did employ a banana reinforced with tape), and tend to emerge only with what was in the teller's tray. Sometimes other customers don't even know that a robbery has taken place.

Here's how it works: "I'd just go in and grab a deposit slip, and I'd write the note right there on the deposit slip--demanding the twenties, fifties, and hundreds, no dye packs, no bait money--and slide it in front of the teller,"Troy Evans said the other day. "It was like taking candy from a baby."Evans, speaking by phone from Arizona, ...