Obviously, but then again, there's also the no high-risk, low-reward rule in place—and these combined really limit the number of opportunities a criminal can perform the act of robbery.
Wouldn't this then mean that for a robbery to be considered valid, you'd have to hide in the woods or an alley way, and hope that somebody you've previously interacted with, and had gathered sufficient OOC evidence that he'd IC-ly "objectively" be "worth robbing", randomly comes and walks through that area alone?
I understand that the server had an unreasonable amount of robbery occurrences, to the point where players expected to be robbed the very instant they found themselves outside a NCZ, but I don't think this is the way to solve that problem... it's the opposite extreme and will only lead to further destroying and limiting the criminal roleplay.