Crime down, arrests up

A couple weeks ago, I had an interesting conversation with our County Attorney, Joe Kelly. We ran into each other before a meeting at the Malone Community Center, and chatted about his perception that felony prosecutions are up this year. I pulled up the most recent data on my smartphone, and indeed felony arrests by LPD are up about 10% so far in 2016. We speculated about what might be cause of this increase.

Afterwards, I put together a chart of the trend since the turn of the century, and compared it side-by-side with the crime trend. It's rather interesting.

Crime in Lincoln has been falling pretty significantly, whereas felony arrests have been increasing--especially in the last four years. This seems a bit counter-intuitive: I would expect that less crime would mean fewer arrests.

These charts begin in 2000, but the patterns for both crimes and felony arrests are more longstanding. These trends actually start back in in 1991. Interestingly, misdemeanor arrests do not show a similar pattern. They have declined slightly between 2000 and 2015, and are down by more than a third from their 2008 peak. I have a working theory on why felony arrests are increasing, but it's going to require some research to put my guess to the test.

Pace quickens

From time to time I've blogged about the population estimates that are released annually by the United States Census Bureau. Last week, the estimate for Lincoln's population as of July 1, 2014 was released. The estimates are always for the preceding year. I was surprised to see Lincoln's estimate at 272,996. That's over 1,000 more people than I had expected.

The pace of growth seems to have quickened between 2013 and 2014, to 1.5%. We added 4,041 souls to the City between those two July 1 estimates. To put that in perspective, that's about the size of Cozad or Fairbury--pretty substantial 'burgs by Nebraska standards.

Since we now have an authoritative 2014 population estimate, and it's higher than expected, it will affect the crime rate statistics in a positive way. When I plug the new population figure into the spreadsheet, the violent Part 1 crime rate for 2014 will be 3.4 offenses per thousand population, rather than 3.6, and the property Part 1 crime rate will be 33, rather than 33.2.

Clearance rates, 2014

I've had a number of questions about crime clearance rates lately, most seeking to compare Lincoln with other jurisdictions. Here's the problem: while I have Lincoln's clearance rates for 2014, the source for the rest of the country, the FBI's annual Uniform Crime Report (UCR), Crime in the United States, isn't published until the fall. Thus, the latest comparative data I have is from the 2013 UCR. Nonetheless, here's the comparison for Lincoln in 2014 vs. others in 2013.

Arson is reported separately, since it can be either a violent crime or a property crime, depending on the circumstances. As you can see, Lincoln fares well overall, topping the rate for all agencies and for similarly-sized cities on six of the eight Part 1 offenses. The glaring exception is rape, where our clearance rate is quite low. I have a theory on that, about which I expounded several years ago in this post--but you'll have to read the comments to get the details.

Anniversary of a memorable case

I interrupt my current blog series on suicide data for a moment, to reminisce about one of the most memorable days in a few 40 year careers policing Lincoln. Ten years ago today, on the morning of January 14, 2005, Officer Scott Arnold and Sgt. Ken Koziol nabbed a serial bank robber culminating a rather incredible (but very short) special project. I was in my office glued to the police radio that morning, having a hard time believing what I was hearing--and then smiling from ear to ear.

This was without doubt one of the most noteworthy cases during my tenure as police chief. Intuition, initiative, good planning, and determination were all involved, along with some top-notch crime analysis, and a healthy dose of just plain good luck. If you are a crime analyst, a detective, a street cop, or a even a deskbound chief, it just doesn't get much better than this.

Here is the contemporary Lincoln Journal Star news story by Margaret Reist from the day of the arrest. A more detailed account, including a description of the analysis that supported "Rolling the Dice," appears in Crime Mapping Case Studies: Practice and Research, 2008, edited by Spencer Chainey and Lisa Thompson.

Don't be a victim

I blogged last week about the police department's efforts to reduce residential burglary by notifying people when their garage door is standing open. There is another type of garage burglary, however, that is even more concerning. This one applies only to people who have an attached garage.

A good example happened yesterday morning (B4-038801), in far south Lincoln. At about 4:45 AM, a couple sleeping in their upstairs bedroom heard a familiar sound: a creaking noise they recognized as the door between their attached garage and the house.  Upon investigating, they discovered that someone had apparently entered their garage through the unlocked walk-in door, gone from the garage into the house through the unlocked connecting door, then took the wife's purse off a shelf right inside.

This is a modus operandi that we have experienced before. It is very disconcerting to know that you've not only been the victim of a burglary, but that the criminal was actually right inside your house while the family slept. This type of burglary takes advantage of this common habit: men almost always deposit their wallet on the nightstand or on top of the dresser in the bedroom. Women, however, usually stow their purse very near the back door; on an entry table, for example, or on the kitchen counter.

So, in addition to making sure your garage door is closed, also check the walk-in doors, and give some thought to installing a good sturdy deadbolt with at least a one-inch throw on that exterior door into the garage--which is usually the most vulnerable point of all.

More eyeballs

My Monday night effort to use crowdsourcing to identify the make and model of the vehicle involved in tossing four Molotov cocktails last week paid off. Several readers definitively pinpointed this as a first generation Neon (1995-1999)--including an FBI agent in another state who reads the Director's Desk.

Wednesday morning around 7:00 AM, a Crimestoppers tip was received from a person who had spotted a vehicle parked on the street in the vicinity of S. 50th and South Streets, with a pretty poor attempt at a car cover. The source mentioned two of the specific descriptors contained in my Monday night post, and knew that these matched the arson vehicle. Looks like he or she is a reader of my blog.

Dagnabbit, every time I think about calling it off and recapturing a few hours of my personal life, something like this happens that makes me rethink the value of blogging. In any event, the car has been seized, the suspect has been identified, and his surrender for arrest is presently being negotiated. These offenses will be cleared, and social media provided the key information.

It is the golden age of criminal investigations, suspects are leaving trails of evidence our predecessors could hardly imagine. No way a camera would have captured such images during the first 35 years of my career. We are still trying to figure out the best thing to do with these relatively new information streams. In some circumstances, keeping the cards close to the vest is the best police strategy. In most, however, engaging thousands of more eyeballs in the search is vastly preferable.

Cash and carry

Nice arrest Saturday morning by Officer Cameron Cleland, who spotted the suspect vehicle across town who earlier had been involved in the robbery of the Subway sandwich shop in the Piedmont Shopping Center, right across the street from Fire Station 7.

Does holding up a fast food shop at 8:00 AM on a Saturday sound like a good idea? I think not. For that matter, stick-ups at retail businesses generally are a pretty poor plan for a person pondering professional pilfering. Why? There's just not much cash, anymore. To the the extent that retail holdups have always been high- risk, low-reward affairs, the declining use of cash has made the risk-reward ratio even less favorable.

Next time your in line at Subway, Starbucks, Sonic, Schlotsky's, or Samuri Sam's, note how many of your fellow customers are paying with cash, as compared to debit and credit cards. Not very many. Cash has gone the way of cursive. I took a four day trip to Vancouver, BC last fall with six bucks in my pocket--just in case I needed to tip a doorman. I came home with the same six bucks,  having taxied about town, enjoyed several nice meals, and engaged in a bit of shopping with my lovely wife. Plastic was perfectly convenient for everything, and I opened all the doors without assistance.

I calculated the average take in robberies in 2013 at about 1/4th the average ten years ago in 2004. Robbery was always a poor choice for the aspiring criminal. Now, with the demise of cash, it's even more stupid.

Bank robbery clearance rate

Last week's robbery of a Bank of the West branch in Lincoln was quickly cleared with the arrest of a 47 year-old woman--not your typical bank robbery suspect. It was nice work by an off-duty LPD sergeant, moonlighting at Bryan West hospital nearby. She was monitoring her portable radio, picked up on the description, and spotted the suspect on the hospital campus.

It was the fifth bank robbery of 2013, all of which have been cleared with arrests, mostly in a matter of minutes. I've blogged before about the poor prospects of bank robbers in Lincoln. Nationwide, bank robbery has a very high clearance rate--about 60%, but in Lincoln it is even higher.

Friday, Lincoln Journal Star reporter Lori Pilger sent me a tweet: "So how far back does LPD's 100 percent clearance rate for bank robberies go?", she asked. "Last unsolved bank robbery in Lincoln was 12-7-2007," I replied. If we make it through the rest of the day without an unsolved bank robbery, it will be our sixth year of a 100% clearance rate for bank robberies in Lincoln.

Gang-related incidents

As they prepare Incident Reports, Lincoln police officers are presented with a field to identify whether or not the incident was, in their opinion, gang-related. We have encouraged officers to select "Yes" if they suspect a gang tie, because these data are not for evidentiary purposes; rather they are to provide us with a barometer about the extent of gang-related crime in Lincoln.

The gang flag is imprecise, for several reasons. First, only incidents that come to the attention of the police result in an Incident Report. If a crime is never reported, it won't be reflected in the data. Gang crime is undoubtedly under-reported, and I suspect more so than crime generally. Second, even if the crime is reported to the police, we may not realize that there was a gang tie. The relationship may not be apparent, or we may have victims, witnesses, and perpetrators who are no forthcoming and cooperative. Finally, the choice of the gang flag is based on the officers' opinion, and can be somewhat subjective. The threshold for identifying an incident as gang-related can vary from one officer to another.

Despite these limitations, the flags provide a quantitative indicator of what's going on, without which we would have no basis other than anecdotes for assessing gang-related crime. We initiated this flag in our Incident Reports in 2007, so we now have data for 6 years and 11 months. Here it is (click the table to enlarge):

I suspect this will surprise some people. It surprised me a little bit. Three recent gang-related murders certainly have raised some eyebrows around Lincoln, but the data would show a declining trend in gang-related crime overall. Except for vandalism the numbers are small, and do not lend themselves to any meaningful trend analysis. The most significant thing I can tell you from these data is that reported gang-related vandalism (almost exclusively consisting of graffiti) is falling significantly and consistently. Since vandalism accounts for over two-thirds of the total, that decline is driving the overall trend.

Despite the data, you cannot ignore the fact that three gang-related murders have occurred in Lincoln this year. The anecdotal evidence suggests an uptick in gang-on-gang violence, as well. The  numbers may be small, but the warnings signs are clear in the intelligence information we collect. When I diced some of these data a bit more finely, I found that we had 14 gang-related incidents in 2011 that involved firearms, 26 in 2012, and 10 so far in 2013. That spike in 2012 was quite obvious to police officers, and resulted in some targeted strategies this year that have probably interrupted some (but not all) of this violence. No lack of effort by the bad guys, though (including this past weekend) : poor marksmanship has saved our bacon.

How recent is recent?

Over the past decade, maps have become a common addition to news media websites.  As a GIS geek, I always appreciate a well-executed map.  Maps help me visualize data that would be, well, flat in a mere table.  I especially like interactive maps, the kind that allow you to zoom in and out, change the view, manipulate the data, drill into more detail and so forth.

For several years now, the Omaha World Herald has been using Google Maps, and more recently Leaflet, to produce several kinds of maps (and some other interesting data) on their website. Among these is a map of homicides.  This is what the map looked like Saturday morning.

The online version is interactive: you can click on an icon and get some details, including a link to a relevant World Herald story. The map is titled "2013 Omaha homicides," but there is no indication of its currency. One might assume that it presents the data as of the date of publication, but that is not the case. There is (understandably) a lag of several days before a new murder hits the map. The tabular data is presented below the map, so you can scroll down to see the most recent mapped murder and then add on any more that have occurred in the interim. The most recent murder on the map was on August 4th, so I added five more that are reported in the news since August 4th, but not yet mapped.

The Lincoln Journal Star also publishes many interesting maps, including a map of murders which appears in the sidebar of the "911 News" page.  This is what it looked like Saturday morning.

The map is labeled "Recent Lincoln Murders." There is no description of the date range, other than the term "recent." Like the World Herald map, there is also no description of the ending date, leading one to wonder, just how current is the map? You can click the icons on the LJS map and get the details and links, just like to OWH map, but unlike the Omaha map, you can't scroll down to take a look at the data presented in a table. So if you want to know the date range, you'd really have to click on each individual icon and keep track of the dates on a scratch pad.

I did just that, and determined that "recent" in the title of this map apparently means within the previous 12 full years, because none of the 2013 murders appears on the map, and the earliest murders mapped were in 2001. To be fair, if you took the link to "Large map," the title on that page would indicate "Lincoln murders, 2001- present." This is still not quite accurate, since the 2013 murders do not appear) but at least an indication that the map of "recent murders" starts in 2001. That's the same year that Apple introduced that fancy new-fangled device known as the iPod, which soon made your Walkman obsolete.

If you're a data hound interested in such things, it's hard to beat the Lincoln Police Department's online tool for generating your own statistical tables.

Have a little faith

Tuesday's robbery at the Great Western Bank in downtown Lincoln was the latest example of something I've blogged about on past occasions: bank robbery is really, really bad choice for your criminal exploits. Bank robberies enjoy an exceptionally high clearance rate. Your chances of making a clean getaway are very slim. In the latest example of this, Tuesday's robbery suspect was in custody about four minutes after the alarm was received.

I generally don't put much stock in the comments posted on the Lincoln Journal Star's website, but  this one, from someone using the moniker RealityCheck, caught my eye:

RealityCheck 

It's nice when the police show up and apprehend their suspect. However, good thing the guy didn't run back into the bank when he saw the police waiting for him. Although the guy ended up not having any weapons, that was not know at the time. Let this be a training lesson in the future.

Apparently this reader concluded (perhaps from the after-action photo accompanying the article) that the police just pulled up to the bank and stood there in front of the plate glass in full view of the robber awaiting his exit.

Thanks for the tactical advice, RealityCheck, but you've jumped to false conclusion. Have a little faith.

Rock lifted

I subscribe to Crime Alerts, part of the Omega Group's public crime mapping application, crimemapping.com.   Everyone who lives, works, or has an immediate family member in a City that contributes its data to crimemapping.com should do likewise.  For example, I subscribe to my daughter's address in Omaha, and my son's address across town in Lincoln.

I subscribe to Crime Alerts even though I have full access to the immense information resources at the Lincoln Police Department.  Its just a very easy way to keep informed about petty crime in my own neighborhood that I might miss due to the sheer volume of activity in the City otherwise. Sign up for a crime alert, and when a police incident report on most common kinds of crimes (like theft, burglary, vandalism, assault) hits the database, you'll get an automatic email with a short blurb about the case. Last time I checked, we had around 12,000 people subscribed to Crime Alerts in Lincoln.

In selecting the area for which you wish to receive alerts, you can pick from several distances ranging from two miles to 500 feet. I picked a distance of half a mile from my residence. This gives me the information I want, but prevents my email from getting flooded with alerts about crimes at businesses on the arterial streets bordering my subdivision. The choice of distance is really determined on what's in the neighborhood, and how many alerts you are willing to tolerate. I probably average 2-3 per month. If I was closer to a busy retail area, or in a more densely populated neighborhood, I would throttle the distance back to two-tenths of a mile or even 500 ft., which is about a block and a half.

A Crime Alert concerning a larceny was in my inbox yesterday morning. The blurb in the email, reporting the theft of a rock, was enough to pique my curiosity and look for more details in the police records.

Well, that explains it.  This is no ordinary rock, it's one of those laser-engraved monuments to Nebraska Football. I'll be on the lookout for the rock lifted from my own neighborhood. Don't think they come with a serial number, though.

Window peekers nabbed

Shortly after midnight yesterday morning, Lincoln police officers were summoned to an apartment building in the 800 block of S. 18th Street, where a resident had made a disturbing observation.  She saw a man standing outside below her window with his genitals exposed, engaging in some extrapanticular activity.

Upon arrival, the officers spotted the suspect and the foot pursuit was on, down the street, between the houses, through the alley.  Eventually the officers caught up to the suspect, who put up a bit of a  a struggle that required some force to bring him into custody.  He was jailed for indecent exposure, trespassing, failure to comply, resisting arrest, and disturbing the peace.

A little later, way across town in the Williamsburg neighborhood the story repeated itself. A women saw the same type of activity underway outside of her apartment, and called 911. The only difference is that this guy was shod only in a pair of shoes. When the first officer arrived, he took off across the lawn, jumped the creek, and was ultimately taken into custody on the nearby Tierra-Williamsburg trail, where he was attempting to retrieve the remainder of his wardrobe.

Although it is unusual to have two cases so similar unfold in such quick succession during the wee hours Monday morning, window peekers like these are more common than people realize. Nor are these incidents necessarily a one-time thing: many peekers and exposers are doing this regularly, although neither of these defendants had been caught doing so previously in Lincoln.  They are not all harmless, either. I have plenty of anecdotal evidence from specific cases, and I'm even a published author on the issue.

Nice work by the fleet-footed officers who won the night at the races. Oh, and I refuse to refer to window peekers as "peeping Toms".

Bike challenge

I've been back on my bikes pretty regularly in the past few years, and this year I am participating in the Lincoln Bike Challenge, part of the National Bike Challenge. Several other police officers and firefighters are doing likewise. There has been a thread on the Lincoln Bike Challenge site about cops-on-bikes-and-trails, and since I have a bit of an online presence, I figured I ought to weigh in. I imagine some of the readers are wondering if that is really me.

The thread concerned safety on the City's trail network, after a couple people saw uniformed police officers on the Mo-Pac (on a bicycle) and on the Antelope Valley (on a motorcycle) trails. I like the fact that an officer may occasionally dip onto a trail. It's part of the beat, and sees a lot of activity. I also noted that off-duty police officers are trail users too. This case from the weekend is a good example of how that helps protect citizens. This is probably the same officer that the person who commented on the Lincoln Bike Challenge saw on the Mo-Pac when she was on duty in uniform, but the arrest was made on her commute home at the end of her shift on Saturday.

In thousands of miles on foot and bike over four decades, I've never personally encountered any significant trouble on our trails. I can't say the same thing about the streets. Still, Lincoln's trails--though relatively safe--get lots of use, and anywhere you have human beings you will always have that tiny percentage....

Catalytic converter thefts

The Crime Analysis Unit spotted an emerging crime pattern consisting of 17 catalytic converter thefts since the series began on January 14. This compares with a total of 31 in Lincoln during the entire year of 2012. Just a few years ago, I was slightly alarmed by six in eight months.

This is a good example of the value of crime analysis. I was unaware of this trend, and I imagine few if any officers knew about it. Even if you investigated one personally, you would be unlikely to know about other cases reported to other officers on other beats, other shifts, and other days off. Alerting officers to a crime series like this is very good police work.

Catalytic converters contain small amounts of precious metals, such as rhodium and platinum. As a result, they command a hefty price at scrap yards, around $100-$200. That is small potatoes, though, compared to the typical cost of a tow, repairing the damage, and replacing the converter, which runs in the range of $500 to $1,500.

These converters are being sawed off with a hacksaw, or possibly a battery-powered reciprocating saw. Either way, it takes some time and makes a little noise. Some have occurred at an indeterminate time over a period of a few days, but others were cut off in broad daylight. We could really benefit from a little more public awareness. If you happen to see a pair of feet sticking out from beneath a car in a parking lot, we'd like to get a a call.

About half of these recent thefts have occurred in the rectangle bordered by 48th and 84th, A and O Streets.   In late breaking news, an arrest was made Thursday that may clear up some or all of these cases.  Nonethless, with the value of these converters, this won't be the last spree, and vigilance will be good.

Scam interrupted

This week is national consumer protection week, and a good time to relate a recent story about a scam interrupted. A young man who lives around the corner in my neighborhood received a telephone message from someone claiming to be Lt. Goblet of the Lincoln Police Department.  The message said that it was vital that he return the call, regarding an unspecified urgent issue. The teenager, however, is the son of a deputy sheriff and recognized that the call was fishy.  There is nobody named Goblet or anything remotely similar in area law enforcement, and LPD hasn't had any lieutenants since the rank was eliminated 15 years ago.

After reading the initial Incident Report, I subscribed to the case number, so I would stay informed about the case. This is a very nice feature in our police records management system.  You can subscribe to a case number, and whenever a fresh report is created you automatically receive an email including a hyperlink to the new report.  You can also subscribe to a name or to an address.  Over the ensuing couple of weeks, the investigating officer submitted three additional reports concerning his follow up efforts to track down the owner of the phone from which the call originated.

"Lt. Goblet" called from a 402 area code number.  When the records were subpoenaed, however, the number proved to be a burner cell phone with the billing address listed as a post office box in Irvine, CA.  It will be impossible to trace this down. In this case, our caller was a con artist looking for a mark in Lincoln, using a number with a local area code in order to build confidence in the call's legitimacy.  The "urgent issue" was undoubtedly going to be some attempt to convince our victim that he should send money to avoid some embarrassing revelation, or something along these lines.

You might make a thousand calls like this before you eventually hit one victim who falls for the scam.  Cons like this are not uncommon, and every year we will have a few victims who are taken in.  On a few past occasions, the con artists have used my name, working on the angle that the victim would recognize the name of their local police chief.  At any rate, nice job by the deputy's son in recognizing the scamn and contacting the police.  Officer Tu Tran actually returned the call to the number captured on the victim's caller ID, and got a rather colorful earful from the make believe lieutenant.

Give that man a hand

Ever watched some high school basketball player throw up an ill-advised shot, while the coach mouths the word "No!", only to have the shot fall, and the coach shout "Nice shot!"?

Generally, I do not encourage citizens to physically intervene in crimes in progress. The standard advice is, "be a good witness." Nonetheless, there are many cases every year where a citizen or group of citizens steps into the breach and interrupt a crime in progress. Every time that happens I feel just a little like that coach: grimacing and grinning at the same time.

Such was the case on Saturday, when a customer in line at the Union Bank branch at 1300 N. 48th Street realized that the guy in the teller line was attempting to pull a robbery. The customer armed himself with a fire extinguisher opined to the robber that he worked for his money, and the fight was on. This was no little shoving match, but a genuine donnybrook.  The news coverage didn't really do it justice. Fortunately, our citizen prevailed, took the suspect to the floor, and with the help of another onlooker detained him until officers arrived and the arrest was made.

Intervening carries many risks. The suspect could have a gun, or a long blade up his sleeve. The intervention could go bad and people could be hurt rather than the suspect merely running away. It could trigger a hostage-taking. I don't think any of this was running through the mind of this citizen, watching the ill-conceived crime go down. Rather, he was thinking what he said out loud, "I work hard for my money!" While it may not always be the soundest tactical move, and I do not recommend it, I admire the courage of all those who step forward, and thank them for their willingness to do so. They are frequently honored at LPD's awards ceremonies, and give a new meaning to the phrase "community policing."

By the way: the last robbery to occur at this particular branch was in November, 1996. One of the tellers involved was a 20 year-old University of Nebraska junior in the bank's student program, Thomas J. Casady, who still works for Union Bank & Trust. Wish I would have been Glad I wasn't in line behind that suspect, eyeballing a fire extinguisher.

Criminal element

A hot topic recently on some of the research-oriented web forums I monitor has been an article published this month in Mother Jones. Author Kevin Drum posits a theory that the meteoric rise of violent crime in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as the precipitous fall in the 1990s and 2000s is the result of the effects of rising and falling levels of environmental lead.

Environmental lead, in turn, tracks the growing use of leaded gasoline in internal combustion engines, and the 1970s switchover to unleaded fuels. The bell-shaped curves of lead and crime look like mirror images, lagged by about 20 years. Could this indicate that a generation of children exposed to high levels of lead was more likely to produce individuals with violent propensities? And could the unexpected decline in violence in recent decades simply be the result of getting the lead out thirty years ago?

It is an intriguing thought, but as seasoned readers of my blog know, correlation does not necessarily mean causation. The author is a journalist, not a scientist, and Mother Jones isn't exactly a peer-reviewed professional journal. Nonetheless, the article was thought provoking, and might even stimulate more rigorous examination of the possible link.

iPhone found

Reading reports yesterday, I came across Case Number B2-089570, a theft report. The victim is a delivery driver, and had left his iPhone in a hidden spot on his motor scooter, while he made a quick ground floor delivery downtown at 14th and O Streets. In the few moments it was out of his sight, the phone was stolen. He went back into the business, logged onto iCloud, and used Find My iPhone to determine the location of his phone: at about 1st and O Street.

The victim enlisted help from a friend, and the two went on the hunt, tracking the iPhone further west, to a wooded area just north of the Westgate Industrial Park. There, they encountered a hobo camp, and summoned the police. The investigating officers contacted a transient returning to the camp, and found the iPhone's case in his knapsack. The victim subsequently found the iPhone discarded in the brush nearby. Find My iPhone put the victim and officers in the right neighborhood to make the recovery and arrest. This is a scenario that plays out every day in the USA.

For as long as I've been around, and probably sixty years before, the wooded areas near Salt Creek, Oak Creek, and Middle Creek west of downtown have been dotted with these camps. It's not Madison, though, so there's no electricity. You'd have to make your way to an outlet elsewhere when the battery poops out. I'm glad the victim got his phone back, and the thief got a night of stainless steel indoor plumbing.

By the way, this is the same area where a murder occurred several years ago.   Alfredo Estrada was found deceased on April 17, 1996.  Some excellent investigation led to two other transients who had been with Estrada around the time of his demise. As the investigation continued to unfold in the summer of 1998, more than two years after Estrada was killed, Vincent Janis was charged with manslaughter and a warrant was issued for his arrest.  Janis was located in South Dakota, but died of natural causes before he could be tried.

Felony lane

The "felony lane" is the lane at a bank drive-through furthest from the teller. In recent years, the modus operandi of thieves with forged checks has increasingly included the use of the felony lane to pass checks. Here's how it works: someone steals the victim's purse at a pool, golf course, trailhead, school, or similar location by busting into a parked car. Armed with the victim's ID and checks, an accomplice driving a stolen vehicle or one with stolen plates--often donning a disguise to resemble the victim--presents a forged check in the "felony lane", sending the genuine ID along in the pneumatic tube. An alert teller at a Union Bank branch, forewarned by Union's security staff, noted the vehicle description from an earlier case yesterday at another bank. The result was this pursuit, which ended in a dramatic collision. Thank God, no one was critically injured. As noted by a witness, however, it was a matter of inches.