Reasonable Suspicion

Alex Jones is looking more and more sane every day.

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2012/06/police-stop-handcuff-every-adult-at-intersection-in-search-for-bank-robber/

It’s hard to piece together the story, partly probably because the police are on the defensive.

On Saturday at about 3:50 pm , a man entered the Wells Fargo Bank in Aurora Colorado at the intersection of East Hampden Avenue and South Chambers Road.- wearing a beekeeper(!) mask

Google Street View

(In the Google Street View, it shows as a Wachovia bank, but Wells Fargo owns Wachovia and has been converting the branches to be Wells-Fargo motif)

“We didn’t have a description, didn’t know race or gender or anything, so a split-second decision was made to stop all the cars at that intersection, and search for the armed robber,” Aurora police Officer Frank Fania told ABC News.

But they did have a reliable “Tip!” and detained 19 cars and and handcuffed the adults.    The people weren’t released for 2 hours until they “found” their suspect and arrested him.

So you might be thinking “No suspect description”…. and thinking….

http://www.aurorasentinel.com/news/accused-bank-robber-is-former-music-teacher/

It turns out the man they arrested is a former (very white) music teacher and violin instructor.   He had a beekeeper mask in his car along with two guns.

Robbing a bank is a Federal Crime, (why you might ask?) so local police were probably very limited in what they could do other than hold everyone until the FBI showed up.

http://www.aurorasentinel.com/news/chief-defends-detaining-40-during-bank-robber-hunt/

Half an hour later and two miles away, the police were “certain” that the bank robber was in a line of cars waiting at a red light, despite having no physical description of him.  While the stories mention they found a beekeeper mask in the car along with two guns, no account that I’ve read mentions that a successful bank robbery actually happened or that any money was recovered.

So with no description, how do the police with certainly know the location of the suspect?

The logical inference I draw is the suspect was carrying something that was broadcasting his location.   Perhaps in the course of what he did, he demanded someone give him their cell phone?   Or do banks have equipment that records your cell phone when you walk inside a bank?

“Back in the day” when I used to work for a bank (the late 1970s) it was a well known “secret” that banks had fake packets of currency that contained an exploding purple dye pack – if the special pack was removed from the cash drawer, after a suitably reasonable time, it would explode spraying indelible purple ink over the money and hopefully the suspect, making it possible to state a “probable cause” even without a description.   “Excuse me sir, you appear to be covered in purple ink from an exploding money packet.  Can you explain how that happened?”

Perhaps that purple die concept has been updated with a GPS tracking device and that’s why everyone is being so coy about the nature of the “reliable tip”.   The two hour wait might have been due to the suspect (and others) not agreeing to a search of his vehicle without a warrant.

You be the judge